Full disclosure: This is written by the booteek.ai team. We are biased. We have tried to be straight about the market and where we fit in it, but you should know who wrote this before you read it.
Why We Built booteek: The Review Problem Nobody Was Solving for UK Hospitality
We spent months talking to independent restaurant and bar owners across the UK. The same frustration kept coming up. This is what we found, and why we ended up building booteek.
The conversation that kicked this off
Late 2024, we were sat in a restaurant in Manchester after close. The owner had been on her feet for 14 hours. Before she could go home, she pulled out her phone to deal with six Google reviews that had landed that day. Two negative. One unfair. Three lovely, but they still needed a reply.
“I know I should respond to every single one,” she said. “But by the time I get to them, I am too knackered to write anything that sounds like me. So I copy-paste the same three sentences or just don't reply.”
We kept hearing this. Dozens of conversations with independent restaurant and bar owners across the UK, and the same thing over and over: they knew reviews mattered, they didn't have the energy to do them properly, and the tools out there were not built for people like them.
The tools that already existed (and why they didn't fit)
We were not the first people to think about review management software. Obviously. Reputation.com, Birdeye, Podium, ReviewTrackers, Yext. They all handle reviews. Some of them are good at it.
But when we showed these tools to UK restaurant and bar owners, the reaction was always the same:
“That costs more than my monthly wine bill”
Most enterprise platforms charge $250-500/month. When your venue is turning over maybe £8,000 a week, that is a lot of money to spend on something that helps you reply to reviews.
“This was clearly built for American dentists”
So many of these tools are US-built. They push Yelp (nobody uses Yelp in the UK), barely understand TripAdvisor, and have no idea how UK hospitality works.
“The AI responses sound nothing like me”
The AI templates spit out responses that sound like they were written by a hotel chain's PR department. A cocktail bar in the Northern Quarter does not talk the same way as a family Italian in Didsbury. But the software doesn't know that.
“I need a degree to use this dashboard”
These tools are built for marketing teams with a dedicated reputation manager on staff. Most independent owners are doing everything themselves. Front of house, stock ordering, staff scheduling, and now reviews on top of all that.
None of these are bad products. Reputation.com is good for hotel chains. Birdeye works for multi-location US businesses. Podium is solid if text messaging is your thing. They just weren't built for a pub owner in Ancoats who has 20 minutes before service starts.
What people actually asked for
This is what we kept hearing:
Give me something that costs less than my margin from selling one fizzy drink a day, works on Google and TripAdvisor, writes responses that sound like me, and doesn't need a training manual.
That didn't exist. You had enterprise tools for big chains at one end and free ChatGPT at the other. Nothing in between for UK independent hospitality.
We actually tried the ChatGPT approach ourselves for a while. Copy a review, paste it into a chat window, ask for a response. It kind of works. But it falls apart fast:
- ChatGPT doesn't know your venue, your menu, your team, or your regulars
- Every response starts from scratch. No memory of anything you've said before
- You still have to log into each platform and paste the response manually
- No way to track whether your review responses are getting better or worse over time
If money is tight, ChatGPT is a reasonable workaround. We are not going to pretend otherwise. But it is a workaround.
So we built it
booteek started with one question: what if an AI could learn how a specific owner talks, and then actually write review responses in that voice?
We didn't want templates. We wanted something that picks up on the fact that you always mention your team by name, that you thank people for coming on a Tuesday, that you sign off a certain way. Then writes responses that read like you sat down and typed them yourself.
Voice learning
The AI reads your past responses and picks up how you actually write. Your words, your phrasing. Not a template that sounds like everyone else.
UK hospitality first
Google and TripAdvisor, because that is where UK customers actually leave reviews. We are not pretending Yelp matters here.
Priced for independents
We wanted independent restaurant and bar owners to see the price and think “yeah, I can do that.” So we priced it at less than your margin from selling one fizzy drink a day.
There is a Chrome Extension you can start using now for free. It sits on top of the review platforms you already use, no separate dashboard, no new tab. You get 5 AI-written responses to try it out. After that, it is £75/quarter to keep going.
Where we are right now
We soft-launched in late 2025. We are early, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
We are small. No brand recognition compared to Reputation.com, no sales team like Birdeye. If you need something that has been around for a decade and serves Fortune 500 companies, we are the wrong choice. We know that.
We only serve UK independent restaurants and bars right now. Deliberately. If you run 200 dental practices across the country, there are better options and we will happily point you toward them.
We looked at every reputation management platform we could find. All of them are built for landscape screens, laptops, PCs. That is where owners actually sit down to deal with reviews and look at their numbers. So we built booteek for that. Desktop first, your data on a proper screen. We have plans for mobile down the line, but right now we are 100% focused on being where you are when you are doing the work. And as more AI tools come along that can help independent venues, booteek is how you will plug into them without having to figure each one out yourself.
One thing we feel strongly about: the AI should sound like you, not like a robot. And independent venues should not have to pay enterprise prices just to manage their reputation properly.
If that sounds like something you want, try us. If not, no hard feelings. Reputation.com, Birdeye, and the others are solid depending on your situation. Even ChatGPT with a decent prompt beats ignoring reviews altogether.
Worth a look?
The Chrome Extension is free to try, 5 AI responses, no credit card. If it works for you, great. If not, you have lost nothing but a few minutes.