High season in Mallorca has an arithmetic every business owner on the island knows: between May and October the work doubles or triples, and the usual way of absorbing it is to hire seasonal staff, train them in two weeks and say goodbye to them in October, then repeat the cycle the following year. Part of that work is unavoidable and requires people: serving tables, cleaning rooms, seeing patients, handing over boats. But a considerable part is office work that grows with volume and can be absorbed with automations and agents, without adding to the payroll. This article explains how to separate one from the other and what we have seen work in different sectors.
What a seasonal hire really costs
Before deciding whether to automate, it is worth putting on the table what the alternative costs. A seasonal administrative or customer service position in Mallorca costs considerably more than six months' salary. You have to add:
- Recruitment time, in a market where in April everyone is looking for the same people.
- Training: for the first two or three weeks the new person produces little and consumes the time of whoever trains them, which is usually the person with the heaviest load.
- Learning errors: bookings entered wrongly, messages left unanswered, quotes with last year's prices.
- The cost of starting again every spring, because the knowledge leaves in October.
Against that, an automation is built once and works the same on 15 August as on 15 January. An automation costs between €3,000 and €6,000 and is paid for once; a managed agent costs from €500 per month and can be switched on and off by season.
Which tasks grow with volume (and which do not)
The key is to identify which work scales linearly with the number of customers. These are the tasks that, in our experience, multiply in season and are candidates for automation:
- Answering the same questions by WhatsApp, email and phone: opening hours, availability, prices, how to get there, cancellation policy.
- Confirming bookings and appointments, and sending reminders the day before.
- Recording what comes in: supplier invoices, delivery notes, check-in documents, signed contracts.
- Moving data from one system to another: from the booking channel to the management software, from the web form to the CRM, from the till to the control spreadsheet.
- Preparing quotes from rates and availability.
- Following up on quotes sent and payments outstanding.
- Gathering the day's figures to know how the business is doing.
And these are tasks that do not scale the same way or that should not be automated: face-to-face service, resolving complicated complaints, pricing decisions, managing people and anything that requires commercial judgement or a human touch at a delicate moment.
Hotels and holiday rentals
A 40-room hotel or a company managing 25 holiday apartments receives, every day in July, dozens of messages with the same questions and dozens of arrivals that require access instructions, guest registration and coordination with cleaning.
What we usually automate:
- An agent connected to the WhatsApp Business API and to email that answers questions about availability, prices and conditions in several languages, using the information in the booking system, and passes to a person the cases it cannot resolve.
- The automatic sending, three days before arrival, of access instructions and the guest registration link, and the collection of that data into the system.
- The daily generation of the cleaning plan from the day's departures and arrivals.
A seasonal receptionist is still needed to welcome people. What is saved is the second receptionist who handled the phone and the email.
Restaurants and clinics
A restaurant in Palma with 80 covers receives bookings in season by phone, through Google, by WhatsApp and through the website, and someone has to bring them together, confirm them and manage cancellations while running service.
What tends to deliver results:
- A WhatsApp agent that handles bookings, confirms them, sends a reminder a few hours before and asks whether they are still coming, which reduces tables left empty by no-shows.
- Automatic recording of supplier delivery notes and invoices, which in July arrive every day.
- An automatic closing report with sales, average ticket and best-selling items, sent to the owner every night.
Clinics in Palma and in the tourist areas see both their resident and their visitor diaries grow in summer. The task that multiplies most is appointment management: confirming, reminding, rescheduling when someone cancels.
An appointment reminder workflow by WhatsApp or SMS, with one-tap confirmation and a notification to reception when a patient cancels, absorbs that work without expanding the reception team. Adding an automatic waiting list (when a slot opens up, it is offered to the next person) makes the most of the diary in the months when it is needed most.
Shops, marine businesses and other seasonal trades
In a shop with online and physical sales, the work that grows is orders, delivery problems and stock enquiries. An agent that answers availability enquiries with real inventory data and gives notice when an order is delayed takes a good part of those conversations off your hands.
In a charter company or a boatyard, what shoots up in spring is quotes and contracts. Automating the generation of the quote from rates, dates and extras, and the sending of the contract for electronic signature, makes it possible to reply the same day to requests that previously waited until someone had a moment.
In every case we build on the tools the business already uses (Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, Holded, whichever booking software or till it has) with a bespoke automation as the connecting layer, and the data stays on servers in the European Union.
How to plan the calendar
The time to do this work is winter. Between November and March there is time to measure, build and test at low volume, and by April the system is already bedded in when seasonal staff arrive, who in turn learn faster because the repetitive work is no longer on their desk. Starting in June is possible, but you are building with the team at full stretch.
Frequently asked questions
Can I switch an agent on only during the season?
Yes. The managed agent is contracted by the month and can be paused in low season or left running with a lighter load. The initial build and configuration are done once and kept from one year to the next.
Does this replace seasonal staff?
It replaces part of the administrative work and the customer service through digital channels, and lets seasonal staff focus on what only a person on site can do. In practice, many businesses keep their seasonal team and stop hiring the extra position that covered phone, email and paperwork.
How long does it take to be ready before the season?
A specific automation is usually up and running in three or four weeks from the start of the project. A conversational agent with several channels and languages needs between one and two months, including the tuning period with real conversations. That is why we recommend starting between January and March.
If you want to know what part of your season's workload can be absorbed without hiring and what it would cost you, we measure it in our initial assessment (€1,500), which is deducted from the first project. Request an assessment
We implement it for you
We work at the leading edge of artificial intelligence and agents: we build on the most advanced agent platforms of the moment and we do it at your business, in Mallorca, with published prices and a person from your team approving anything that goes out. We start with an initial assessment and a written plan.