Podcast | Why Hotel Room Phones Still Matter in the Age of AI
Published on:
December 10, 2025
Hospitality is undergoing a major shift as AI and cloud telephony reshape guest interactions. In this podcast, Christian Stredicke discusses which changes genuinely improve hotel operations and guest experience, why room phones still matter, and how modern PBXs can balance automation with the human touch that defines real hospitality. He also examines on-prem versus cloud deployments, renovation timing, emergency calling, and the ways the right system can reduce costs while raising service quality.
Vodia is one of the industry’s leading providers of the most feature-rich, robust, scalable, and secure communication platform for hotels. Our VoIP PBX gives hospitality organizations AI capabilities and call center functionality, and it integrates with the world’s best PMS solutions. We are a core component of guest communications at boutique and international hotels worldwide.
Vodia CEO Christian Stredicke, PhD, loves travel, and he is enthusiastic and excited about the changes VoIP telephony and AI are bringing to the hospitality industry. He recently sat down with Doug Green, publisher of Technology Reseller News, for a podcast to discuss the ongoing digital transformation of hospitality communications.
Vodia has always taken a widescreen view of hospitality communications. “At the end of the day, you can see the hotel as a call center,” says Dr. Stredicke. “You’re not calling a specific person, you’re calling a department, so we’re talking about call distribution, wait times, redirects…”
As the podcast begins, Mr. Green points out how “the role of the guest phone has been reduced,” and he wonders if we still need phones in hotel rooms. According to Dr. Stredicke, there's no reason to go without them.
“Many hotels still use analog phones, which is very easy, obviously. Many rooms have the 2-wire in the wall, and it would be a lot of work to replace that. And we’ve recently seen that many manufacturers come up with beautiful hospitality devices, hotel phones, they are really designed for hotel rooms.”
Vodia has added substantial AI capability to its PBX, and this can now manage the simple calls usually made through the front desk or a switchboard operator, such as room-to-room calls, bell service, housekeeping…even room service. But Dr. Stredicke believes the best hotels will never abandon the person-to-person interactions underpinning real hospitality.
“Especially for really good hotels, I think that’s what makes up a good hotel, this kind of service, the human factor. That’s still not possible with AI. The human factor is still totally necessary.” Dr. Stredicke avers it’s best to look for the best ways to deploy AI in hotel phone systems, but to resist the urge to make its use comprehensive.
Mr. Green and Dr. Stredicke also discuss the differences between on-prem and cloud for hotels, emergency calls, how the best time to upgrade a hospitality phone system is during renovations, and how the right phone system can improve guest satisfaction, reduce costs, and make an in-house IT team unnecessary. “In most cases,” says Dr. Stredicke, “a good phone system pays for itself.”
“At Vodia, we are seeing what we can do to make the guest experience better, to make the phone system work better in a hotel environment,” Dr. Stredicke says.
Vodia Networks, Inc. provides B2B cloud communications solutions for enterprises, contact centers, and service providers. Its PBX software offers a broad range of business telephony features for on-premise and cloud deployments on Windows, Linux, and Mac. Fully SIP-compliant, Vodia integrates with numerous SIP devices and trunking providers for flexible telephony. Its multi-tenant platforms support desk phones, softphones, APIs, and third-party CRM integrations. Vodia empowers partners and users with world-class cloud PBX and personalized support to ensure success. The company operates globally, with offices in Boston, USA, and Berlin, Germany. Visit Vodia on LinkedIn, X and YouTube.
A streamlined integration connects the Vodia PBX with the ElevenLabs Voice AI Platform using a lightweight IVR JavaScript script and native SIP REFER for call transfers. Audio and call control are handled entirely through standard SIP signaling, while all conversational logic, prompts, voice selection, and routing rules are configured in the ElevenLabs dashboard. This approach removes the need for webhooks or WebSocket connections and keeps the PBX side intentionally minimal, making the deployment clean and production-ready.
Multi-tenant architecture allows MSPs to manage multiple customers efficiently on a single, secure PBX while maintaining strict tenant isolation. By sharing infrastructure, MSPs can reduce operational costs, apply updates and security patches centrally, scale customers on demand, and onboard faster without increasing complexity. As cloud and SaaS models continue to dominate, a well-designed multi-tenant phone system provides the control, flexibility, and reliability MSPs need to support growth, evolving requirements, and modern communications workloads.
A flexible, cloud-neutral PBX built for real-world deployments in 2026, Vodia supports MSPs, enterprises, and service providers with an open, SIP-compliant platform designed for scale. With Vodia PBX version 70 arriving in Q1 2026, the platform brings multi-tenant hosting, reuse of existing IP phones through centralized provisioning, built-in WebRTC softphones, transparent licensing, and partner-driven support, giving organizations full control over modern business telephony without lock-in or hidden costs.
.svg)
