Treatwell Put an AI Receptionist on 75,000 Salon Phone Lines

On 7 September, Treatwell — the booking platform behind more than 75,000 European salons and around 2.5 million bookings a month — launched an AI Receptionist that answers salon phones during opening hours, overnight, or any time the team is mid-treatment. It starts at £69 a month across three tiers. The company also created a Chief AI Officer role and gave it to Massimo Chieruzzi.

That is a marketplace deciding the unanswered phone call is now its problem too. Before you either sign up or ignore it, it is worth knowing precisely what it covers and where it stops.

What it does, and where it stops

According to the product detail published at launch, the agent answers using your treatment menu, staff profiles, opening hours and FAQs. It checks live availability, suggests alternative times or a different stylist, books straight into the Treatwell calendar, sends a text confirmation, keeps searchable call transcripts with analytics, and passes complaints and complicated requests to a person. Forwarding can be permanent or conditional — only when the line is busy, only at weekends, only after hours.

The limits are as informative as the features. It cannot take a payment over the phone; clients still pay in the salon. Inbound WhatsApp from clients is announced as next, not shipped. And it works because your diary lives in Treatwell.

The problem it targets is real. Treatwell puts routine admin at roughly four hours of a salon professional’s day. Amanda Huynh, who owns Beauty by Amanda Huynh, said in the announcement that it “gives me confidence that calls are still being answered even when my team and I are busy with clients.”

The question is no longer whether an agent answers

Platform-owned agents are landing in booking software across every service vertical this year. For an operator that changes the decision. It is not “should something answer my phone” — the market has settled that. It is which agent answers, and how much of your business it can actually see.

Because for a salon, clinic or barbershop, the phone is only part of the leak. The 9pm Instagram message asking whether you do keratin. The web chat asking about parking and patch tests. The client who wants to move Thursday to Saturday and gives up when nobody replies. The walk-in enquiry in Spanish. A phone-only agent tied to one calendar catches a genuine slice of that, and none of the rest.

What to check before your next fully booked week

Measure the leak for one week before you buy anything. Your phone provider’s call log will show missed and abandoned calls with timestamps — note how many land between 10am and 4pm, and how many after close. Then count unanswered DMs, web chats and emails over the same seven days, and put an average ticket value against the total. That number is what doing nothing costs you every week.

Then match the tool to the leak. If you are already on Treatwell and your bookings arrive almost entirely by phone into that one diary, £69 a month is a cheap experiment and you should run it. If clients reach you across several channels, across more than one location, or in more than one language, the phone-only version solves the smallest part of the problem — and it is worth seeing how one agent handles calls, chat and messages against the same availability, including reminders and aftercare follow-ups, before your next fully booked month.

Either way, decide this quarter. The clients who cannot reach you are not waiting; they are booking down the street.