As visa-free policies continue to expand, China's inbound tourism is accelerating. In 2025, national inbound tourist trips exceeded 150 million, a year-on-year increase of over 17%; among them, visa-free foreign entries reached 30.08 million, a year-on-year increase of 49.5%. The growing inbound visitor flow has also brought more frequent and multilingual reception demands for hotels, scenic spots, and cultural tourism service institutions. In 2026, the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and nine other departments proposed using artificial intelligence and digital technology to improve tourism service infrastructure, while enhancing foreign language service levels at hotels, attractions, and other institutions. Multilingual services are gradually becoming an important part of improving the inbound tourist reception experience for cultural tourism enterprises.
Compared with online consultations that can rely on text translation, phone communication emphasizes immediate response. Foreign tourists may call to inquire about bookings, check-in, transfers, tickets, routes, or emergencies. Once staff cannot understand in time, communication efficiency and service experience are affected; yet staffing multilingual employees around the clock is unrealistic for many cultural tourism enterprises. When foreign tourists call, how can cultural tourism enterprises understand and respond in time without massively increasing multilingual staff or tearing down and rebuilding their existing phone systems?
Based on real cross-language phone service needs in the cultural tourism industry, Vanttel officially launches an AI real-time telephone interpretation solution, integrating AI multilingual translation capabilities into the phone communication link, enabling existing phone systems to further possess cross-language communication capabilities.
Real-Time Interpretation on Calls: AI Translation Integrated into the Phone Link
Many traditional translation tools are independent of phone systems. When used, they require manual text input, voice upload, or repeated switching between calls and translation software, making it difficult to meet the instant communication requirements of phone services.
Vanttel integrates AI real-time streaming translation capabilities into the phone communication link. During a call, the system continuously receives speech from both parties and completes speech recognition, content translation, and target-language speech synthesis and playback by semantic segments, so that translation results are returned to the original call link along with the conversation. Both parties do not need to exit the current call, nor wait for the other party to finish a long expression or process recordings uniformly after the call ends. Translation changes from an additional step outside the call to a continuous capability within the phone communication process.
Through recognizing while speaking, segmented translation, and playback, the system can shorten the waiting time between one party's expression and the other party hearing the translation, making questions and answers, confirmations, follow-ups, and supplements closer to the rhythm of daily calls. For information that requires repeated verification, such as room types, check-in dates, transfer times, ticket prices, and tour routes, staff can respond promptly based on translation results, and tourists can continue to supplement or correct their needs, reducing communication interruptions caused by language barriers and translation delays.
From Tourist Calls to Proactive Outbound Calls: Covering Four Cultural Tourism Phone Scenarios
Once AI translation capabilities are connected to the phone link, they can be flexibly enabled according to call initiation methods, required languages, and service processes, covering scenarios such as fixed-language inbound calls, multilingual IVR, on-demand access during calls, and proactive outbound calls.
- Fixed-language inbound calls: When a hotel or scenic spot mainly receives tourists speaking a certain language, a fixed interpretation language pair can be preset for incoming calls, and tourists enter the corresponding interpretation process directly after calling.
- Multilingual IVR: For tourists from different countries and regions, multilingual IVR can play prompts in different languages, guide tourists to press keys to select service languages, and then enter the interpretation process for the corresponding language.
- On-demand access during calls: If a language barrier temporarily arises during a regular call, staff can transfer the current call to the interpretation process for the required language, without enabling translation by default for all incoming calls.
- Proactive outbound calls: When the front desk or customer service proactively contacts tourists, they can also select the required translation language before initiating the outbound call, so that the call enters the corresponding interpretation process directly after connection.
All four scenarios are based on existing phone service processes and access AI interpretation capabilities in different ways. Hotels and scenic spots do not need to adopt the same translation mode for all calls; they can expand multilingual communication capabilities according to actual needs, alleviate the pressure of multilingual reception staffing, and enable multilingual services to cover tourist calls, in-call assistance, and proactive contact.
Leveraging Existing Phone Systems with Lightweight Access to AI Interpretation
For hotels, scenic spots, and cultural tourism service institutions that have already deployed phone systems, adding AI interpretation capabilities does not mean rebuilding the entire communication system. Vanttel can select the appropriate access method based on the customer's existing numbers, lines, PBX, and terminals:
- Cloud Number / Cloud PBX: AI interpretation capabilities can be activated and configured remotely;
- IP PBX: AI interpretation capabilities can be accessed via SIP based on existing network protocols, system configurations, and compatibility;
- SIP Terminals: SIP-standard compatible IP phones, consoles, and other terminals can continue to be used for front desk and customer service staff to answer and make calls according to the access plan;
- Analog Lines: Analog program-controlled switches, ordinary direct telephone lines, and analog guest room phones can be adapted through EdgePBX based on existing network conditions, connecting original analog lines to cloud-based AI interpretation services.
Through lightweight access, AI interpretation can be applied not only to external inbound and outbound scenarios such as hotel bookings, scenic spot ticketing, check-in and tour inquiries, transfer coordination, complaint handling, and service follow-ups for overseas tourists, but also extended to guest room service calls after foreign guests check in. For example, when guests contact the front desk, concierge, or guest room service center via room phones, staff can use AI interpretation to handle cross-language communication needs such as food delivery, maintenance, extended stays, wake-up calls, and itinerary inquiries.
As a result, hotels and cultural tourism service institutions can expand multilingual service capabilities while retaining existing numbers, lines, PBX, and phone terminals as much as possible, reducing dependence on round-the-clock multilingual human agents, and lowering system renovation costs and deployment difficulty.
Making Every Cross-Language Call Answerable
For hotels, scenic spots, travel agencies, and other cultural tourism service institutions, cross-language phone calls are not an isolated translation need but a communication link throughout the entire tourist service journey: before the trip, calls affect whether inquiries can be converted into bookings; during the trip, they determine whether transfers, check-in, ticketing, guest room services, and itinerary issues can be handled in time; after the trip, order changes, complaints, and follow-ups also affect the final evaluation of the service. If any link cannot be responded to in time due to language barriers, a service that could have continued may be interrupted.
What AI real-time telephone interpretation fills is the multilingual phone reception capability of cultural tourism enterprises. Enterprises no longer need to make foreign guest services entirely dependent on whether a certain foreign-language employee is on duty, nor do they need to pre-configure complete staffing for unpredictable source languages. In overseas tourist calls, hotel guest room internal line services, and proactive after-sales communication, more frontline staff can continuously handle requests; employees with foreign language skills can devote more energy to complex negotiations, key receptions, and special issue handling.
AI interpretation does not replace staff in making business judgments; rather, it helps more frontline staff overcome the "cannot understand" step, so that cross-language calls can be answered, needs can be clarified, and follow-up services can be carried out.
Building the Voice Hub in the AI Agent Era
AI real-time telephone interpretation removes language barriers from cultural tourism phone services, helping hotels, scenic spots, and travel agencies more smoothly handle cross-language communication needs of overseas tourists. If you wish to experience AI telephone interpretation, or need to add AI interpretation capabilities based on existing numbers, lines, PBX, and phone terminals, please contact Vanttel. We will evaluate and plan an adapted AI telephone interpretation solution based on your existing phone system and actual usage scenarios.
About Vanttel
Vanttel works with ecosystem partners to drive product and application innovation and scenario implementation, improve hotel internal operational efficiency and guest check-in experience, and promote the voice digitalization process of the hotel industry. We invite you to join the digital transformation journey of the hotel industry and co-create a new smart hotel ecosystem.
- 15+ group partnerships
- 100+ ecosystem partners
- 5000+ stores covered
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