BONNIE IS NOW AVAILABLE ON WHATSAPP
Restaurant Company Europe (RCE) operates 68 restaurants across brands including Loetje, Happy Italy, and Beers & Barrels, alongside several independent venues.
Reservations and guest questions for all of those restaurants are handled by a central guest care team. One team, serving every brand. At peak times, even with five people on calls at the same time, queues would form. Reservations took up most of the volume, and the calls that needed more attention had to wait.
"You want to give your guests a complete experience, and it begins the moment you pick up the phone. We weren't sure we could keep that if AI was the one answering."
Elisa Reitsma
Project Manager | RCE
The decision wasn't about cost.
Two-thirds of RCE’s calls were about reservations. If Bonnie could handle those properly, the team would have more time for the calls that needed real care, and every guest calling about a reservation would get a faster, more informed answer than a busy queue could give them.
Setting up across brands
Each brand got its own configuration, so the reservation flows, FAQs, and routing logic matched how that brand actually runs.
For Loetje, the highest-volume brand in the group, the team went further. A branded voice assistant called Jaap was built to match Loetje’s tone and knowledge. Guests calling a Loetje don’t speak to a generic assistant. They speak to Jaap. He knows the menu, books through Zenchef, and sounds like Loetje sounds.
The calls Bonnie handles
Across all 68 locations, Bonnie takes the calls that don’t need a person on the line. Reservations through Zenchef, new bookings, changes, cancellations. Brand- and location-specific FAQs. Group enquiries routed to the events team with the context already attached. WhatsApp follow-ups with confirmations, links, and directions. After-hours coverage, every day of the week.
When a call genuinely needs a human, Bonnie transfers it with context. When a location isn’t yet connected to Zenchef, she still helps the guest, by explaining where and how to make a reservation and sending the link directly via WhatsApp.
90 days in
In the first 90 days, Bonnie handled 4,427 reservations across the group. Around 1,500 a month, and already an understatement: Loetje was not yet connected to Zenchef, and Happy Italy only went live in February. The roll-out has now been completed.
Bonnie has handled 210K calls for RCE since launch.
That’s 213 days of conversation across 68 locations. 13,739 reservations made, 56,925 guests seated and 94% caller satisfaction throughout.
The weekends that used to be lost
"At weekends we regularly see calls coming in after 20:00. Guest care isn't there, but reservations are often still possible online. Bonnie catches those calls. We don't lose those guests and revenue anymore."
Elisa Reitsma
Project Manager | RCE
The moment it clicked
For Elisa, the shift didn’t happen in week one. It came later, when she stopped checking.
Guest adoption was higher than she’d expected. The fear that AI would feel impersonal didn’t play out the way she’d worried about. The bigger change, though, happened inside the team. Where they used to push through as many calls as possible at peak, they now have time to handle the complex ones properly. Group reservations. Events. The special requests they always wanted to handle directly between guest and team.
The contact didn’t disappear. It moved to where it actually mattered.
"When I saw guests being helped well and quickly, and I started to let go of looking over the system's shoulder, that's when I noticed it really worked."
Elisa Reitsma
Project Manager
