Stop losing bookings to
faster competitors
at 11pm on a Sunday.

Case Study

How a small villa rental business stopped losing late-night bookings — and captured 184 customer conversations in a month

By Dean Liddle, owner of DalyanVillas.com — running independent villa rentals since 2009

The 11pm problem every holiday business owner knows

It's 11pm on a Sunday. A family in Manchester is sitting on the sofa with a glass of wine, scrolling for a holiday. They land on one of your properties, fall in love with the photos, and fill in your enquiry form. You're asleep.

They keep scrolling.

By the time you read their message on Monday morning, they've already booked through Booking.com. You'll never know that lead existed. You'll never know how close you came.

If you run an independent holiday business, you've lived this story dozens of times. I've lived it for 17 years.

What it actually costs

I run DalyanVillas.com — we've been letting villas in Turkey since 2009. With average villa bookings sitting at £1,500–£3,000+ a week, even one lost enquiry a month to slow response is tens of thousands of pounds walking out the door every year. Most independent operators I know are losing closer to one a week.

What we tried first — and why none of it worked

• Autoresponders — made us look corporate and frustrated guests who wanted real answers, not "we'll be in touch within 48 hours."
• Evening cover — financially impossible for a small operation. Paying someone £15–20 an hour to sit waiting for enquiries that may or may not come in just doesn't pencil out.
• "We'll get to it in the morning" — by morning, the lead was cold or already booked elsewhere.

None of it worked because none of it solved the actual problem: guests don't enquire on your timetable. They enquire on theirs. And they've got fifteen other tabs open.

The solution I built

I come from a tech background, so eventually I stopped complaining and built something. I called it Client Catcher.

It sits on your website as a chat widget. When a guest lands on your page, it engages them naturally — asks which property caught their eye, the dates they're looking at, how many guests, any special requirements. It answers the questions guests always ask: WiFi, distance to the beach, whether there's a cot available, what the parking's like, anything you've told it about your business.

By the time the conversation ends, you've got the guest's name, email, phone, dates, party size, and the specific property they want — already qualified, already in your inbox, ready for you to action. It works at 11pm on a Sunday when you're asleep.

And it doesn't just work overnight. During business hours, Client Catcher's Live Inbox means your team sees every conversation in real time. If a guest asks something the AI can't answer, or simply wants to speak to a person, it alerts your staff instantly and hands the conversation over — seamlessly, mid-chat, without the guest knowing anything changed. Your team picks it up and closes the booking. No dropped balls. No awkward "I'll need to check and get back to you."

The numbers from one month on DalyanVillas.com

That's 162 guest interactions we didn't have to handle ourselves, and 22 qualified leads we'd otherwise have lost overnight. The AI answered questions about specific villas, distances, amenities, availability windows — all without us touching a keyboard.

What it costs — and what it replaces

Is this you?

• Do you get website enquiries outside business hours?
• Have you ever replied to an enquiry next morning and got "thanks, we've booked elsewhere"?
• Do you find yourself answering the same questions ten times a week?
• Are you competing with Booking.com on responsiveness and feeling like you're losing?

If you said yes to two or more of those, scroll down. This was built for you.