Voicemail is the cheapest option at nothing a month, and it is also the most expensive choice a busy venue can make. Skai Solutions compares all five real options here, from A$0 to the A$40 to A$60 a user a month advertised for advanced Australian phone tiers in August 2026.
There are only five, and every product sold into this market is a version of one of them. Listing them as categories rather than brands is the only way to compare them honestly, because the price of a category is stable and the price of a brand is a negotiation.
Skai Solutions is the fifth of those. That is worth saying up front, because the rest of this page argues that three of the other four are the right buy for somebody, and you should know where the argument is coming from.
Voicemail is free and a staff member is already paid, so both look like nothing. Neither is. The staff option has a real hourly price and it is published, because hospitality in Australia is award covered.
The Restaurant Industry Award MA000119 puts a Level 2 food and beverage attendant on A$27.08 an ordinary hour, from the Fair Work Ombudsman pay guide published 24 June 2026 and applying from the first full pay period starting on or after 1 July 2026. A casual at the same level is that rate plus the 25% casual loading, which is A$33.85 an hour.
Here is Skai Solutions' own arithmetic on those published rates, with the inputs shown so you can put your own in. Say the phone pulls one person away for 40 minutes across a lunch and a dinner service. At the casual Level 2 rate that is A$22.57 of labour a day, A$158 a week, and about A$687 a month at seven days trading. That is more than the top advertised tier of a full business phone system, and it buys you the worst version of phone answering there is, because the person answering is also carrying plates.
The number that matters is not the hourly rate though. It is what the caller does while your staff member is finishing a table. Voicemail costs nothing and loses the booking. That is the whole trade.
| Approach | Typical monthly cost | Answers at 7pm Saturday | Can take a booking | Knows your menu |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Voicemail | Included with the line | Takes a message only | No | No |
| A staff member | About A$687 at 40 minutes a day, casual Level 2 | Sometimes | Yes | Yes |
| Message-taking plan | Low, usually per call or per bundle of calls | Yes | No | No |
| Shared human receptionist | Mid, priced per call or per minute | Yes | Sometimes | Partly |
| AI phone agent | Flat monthly fee | Yes, every call at once | Yes | Yes |
The column that decides most venues is the second last one. A message-taking plan is cheap because it does one thing: it writes down a name and a number. If your phone mostly carries enquiries, that is genuinely all you need and you should buy it. If your phone carries bookings and orders, a message is a booking you still have to make, at the time of night you are least able to make it.
Answering is a separate question from the line itself, and the line has published market rates. An independent Australian business communications guide, Need to Know Comms, last updated its business phone system cost guide on 22 August 2026. These are advertised Australian market ranges in AUD including GST at that date, not one provider's price list and not ours.
| Item | Advertised AU range, August 2026 |
|---|---|
| Basic tier per user per month | A$8 to A$20 |
| Standard tier, adds auto attendant and ring groups | A$20 to A$35 |
| Advanced tier, adds recording and analytics | A$40 to A$60 and up |
| Entry desk handset, one off | A$80 to A$150 |
| Handset rental instead of buying | A$5 to A$15 per phone per month |
| A 1300 number | A$10 to A$20 a month plus per minute inbound |
| Simple local number port | Free or A$25 to A$50, 8 to 15 business days |
Read those alongside the staffing number above. A standard tier line for three users is A$60 to A$105 a month. The staff time spent answering it, on the award rate, is several times that. Venues almost always negotiate the line and never price the answering, which is the wrong way round. Our page on the cost of a restaurant phone system in Australia takes the line side further, and phone answering service cost in Australia takes the answering side.
This is the part the industry gets wrong, loudly. The best evidence on hold and abandonment is not a vendor blog. It is Brown, Gans, Mandelbaum and colleagues in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2005, a full year census of more than 1,200,000 calls to a real call centre. Not a survey. Every call.
They found about 20% of callers who asked for service hung up before they got it, and that mean caller patience was 446 seconds, close to seven and a half minutes. The useful finding is the shape rather than the average: hang ups cluster in two spikes, one in the opening seconds as a recording starts, and a second at about 60 seconds when that recording repeats. People are patient. They are not patient with being told the same thing twice.
For a sense of how often the phone fails in hospitality specifically, the Marchex Institute analysed 5.8 million calls to 13 hotel brands and reported a 14% failed call rate, with 5% never answered at all. That is hotels, and the data is from 2017, so treat it as an order of magnitude for accommodation rather than a restaurant number. No equivalent Australian restaurant measurement exists that we have been able to verify, and we are not going to invent one.
By category, and being blunt about it.
If you are still deciding what the category even is, what a telephone answering service is defines the older product, and AI receptionist is the category page for the newer one. How to answer the phone at a restaurant covers the part no software fixes, which is what your team says when they do pick up.
A venue taking fewer than about five calls a day will not notice it. A venue whose calls are almost all suppliers and staff will not notice it either, because those calls do not convert into anything. And a venue whose problem is that the food is late, not that the phone rings, should fix the kitchen first. Setup takes five days, so it is not an emergency purchase.
The honest test is a boring one. Count the calls you miss between 6pm and 8pm on your busiest night for one week. If the answer is nought, none of this is your problem. If it is fifteen, no phone plan in the table above fixes it, because the issue is not the line and not the price. It is that every person who could answer is holding something.
Skai Solutions answers every call at once for a flat monthly fee, takes the booking while the caller is still on the phone, and does not need anybody to put down a plate.
Book a Free DemoVoicemail, because it is included with the line. It is also the only option on the list that cannot complete a booking, so for a venue whose calls are bookings it is the most expensive thing you can install. A message-taking plan is the cheapest option that puts a voice on the line.
More than most operators think. A casual Level 2 food and beverage attendant is A$33.85 an hour under the Restaurant Industry Award MA000119, being the A$27.08 ordinary rate plus the 25% casual loading, on Fair Work Ombudsman rates applying from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026. Skai Solutions' own arithmetic puts 40 minutes a day of phone time at about A$687 a month at seven days trading.
Advertised Australian ranges as at 22 August 2026, from the Need to Know Comms guide, run A$8 to A$20 per user per month for a basic tier, A$20 to A$35 for a standard tier with an auto attendant, and A$40 to A$60 and up for an advanced tier with recording and analytics. Handsets are A$80 to A$150 to buy or A$5 to A$15 a month to rent.
If your phone mostly carries enquiries, yes, and it is the right buy. A message-taking plan writes down a name and a number, which is all an enquiry needs. It becomes the wrong buy the moment the calls are bookings or orders, because a message is a booking you still have to make later.
About 20% of callers who requested service abandoned before being served in the largest rigorous study available, Brown, Gans, Mandelbaum and colleagues in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2005, a full year census of over 1,200,000 calls. Mean caller patience was 446 seconds. Hang ups cluster in two spikes, one in the opening seconds and one at about 60 seconds when a recording repeats.
Five days with Skai Solutions. That covers the menu, the booking rules, the hours, the transfer conditions and a test period on a diverted number before it takes live calls.