Wegosty: A HORECA and Gastro-Tourism Platform with an Integrated AI Receptionist

The gastro-tourism market in Russian regions faces a two-sided problem: guests can't quickly find and book a table or tour, while venue owners lose up to 30% of revenue from missed calls and lack of automation. This hits hardest at small restaurants, guesthouses, and wineries that have no dedicated reception staff.

The goal was not to build another fragmented tool, but a single ecosystem — from a venue card in the mobile app to automatic booking confirmation and payment. Multilingual support was critical: the platform had to work equally well for local guests and international tourists.

The product is built for small and mid-size HORECA: restaurants, cafes, bars, hotels and guesthouses, wineries, farms that host visitors, and gastro-route tour operators. What they share is the need for automation without hiring IT staff: building tour schedules, managing tables, accepting online payments, and handling bookings from multiple channels — all set up in minutes.

We started with an architecture that could scale across different HORECA formats: from a 30-seat cafe to a winery running tours and tastings. The foundation was an admin panel where venue owners create services, schedules, and slots, and manage bookings and pricing.

The key element is a booking form constructor. It lets venues place a reservation widget on their website or social media without any development — the owner just copies an HTML snippet from the admin panel. Alongside this, we integrated a payment gateway, a staff roles system, a Telegram bot for instant notifications, and a module for generating QR codes and e-tickets.

A separate workstream was integrating the AI receptionist developed by the client's team — a voice and text agent that runs on top of the same booking infrastructure. The AI agent handles calls and messages, checks table availability, suggests time slots, completes the booking, and pushes data to the shared admin panel. For the venue, this means a missed call during peak hours still converts into a reservation.

The platform automates bookings in the HoReCa and tourism sectors: from restaurant tables to excursions and workshops.

Inside the admin panel, venues create service cards: table reservations, tours, tastings, masterclasses. Each card includes price, duration, description, and additional parameters. Setup takes minutes and requires no technical knowledge.

A flexible schedule builder lets venues set working days, intervals, slot durations, and generation rules. The system is built around HORECA specifics: evening table reservations, add-on services — set menus, gift vouchers, scheduled tours, group farm visits. Overbooking protection is built in: the system tracks capacity and prevents double bookings.

All reservations appear in a single calendar: by day, week, or month. The owner sees payment status, guest count, booking source, and can make changes. No more tracking bookings in messengers and spreadsheets.

The AI agent is integrated directly with the booking form and admin panel. It works 24/7, handles calls and messages, answers questions about the menu and schedule, completes bookings, and notifies staff. This reduces the load on managers and improves conversion from inbound inquiries.

The system automatically generates tickets with QR codes for tours, masterclasses, and events. Tickets can be downloaded as PDFs, sent to guests, and used for access control. QR codes are unique and single-use — reusing a ticket is not possible.

The platform lets distributors — hotels, guesthouses, guides, and travel portals — embed booking forms for partner venues directly on their own websites. Each partner gets a unique form: their guests book a table or tour, and the commission is automatically charged as a service fee at the time of booking. The venue receives the full service price with no manual reconciliation. One live example: the booking form integrated into the Visit Kaliningrad website.

Alexander owns a winery in the region. Previously, bookings for tours and tastings were handled manually — through Instagram and phone, with calls frequently missed during peak season. After integrating Wegosty, he built a tour schedule, configured services, and embedded the booking form on his website.

Now guests pick a date, pay for the ticket online, and receive a QR code. During peak hours, when the phone is busy, the AI receptionist takes the call, walks through available slots, books two spots, sends the guest an SMS confirmation, and pushes a notification to the administrator's Telegram. Alexander sees all reservations in the calendar, and manual order processing has dropped threefold. On arrival, the door controller validates the guest's QR code with a regular phone. If a guest changes their mind, they cancel with one tap and the platform refunds automatically.

The main engineering challenge was building a universal booking engine that handles fundamentally different business logics correctly. A restaurant tracks dining room capacity, a museum validates QR codes at the entrance, a winery sells group tour tickets, a gastro-farm manages group visit schedules. Each provider type required its own logic, while the system had to stay unified.

A separate challenge was the payment integration with a major Russian payment partner — a type of integration we hadn't done before. It turned out to be multi-layered: a payment is automatically split between the venue, the distributor, and the platform at the moment of the transaction. Plus a fiscal register generating compliant receipts.

The iFrame constructor had to solve style isolation and cross-domain security: the form needs to embed correctly on any third-party website without breaking its layout or introducing vulnerabilities. The admin panel is built on Admiral — our own framework for building flexible admin interfaces — which accelerated development and ensured scalability.

Frontend: Next.js

Backend: Laravel

Database: PostgreSQL

CI/CD: Docker, Nginx

Integrations: Telegram Bot API, payment gateway, Imgproxy

Maps: Mapbox

Admin panel: Admiral (dev.family's own framework)

The system is ready to scale: adding new modules, integrations, and expanded AI functionality. The architecture supports fast onboarding of new regions and venue formats without additional development.