Keep nut-allergy guests away from the roasting station: an AI seating check for hotels

The situation

It is autumn. Every evening, your restaurant roasts almonds and chestnuts at a live station on the terrace. Guests love it. For a guest with a severe nut allergy, though, a table right next to the roasting station is the wrong place to sit, even if the kitchen prepares their meal perfectly.

The information you need to prevent this already exists. Reception or the guest has recorded the allergy in the reservation’s kitchen notes in ASA HOTEL. The restaurant team assigns tables in ASA, and everyone knows which tables are on the terrace. What is missing is someone who connects these facts every day, before service, when the restaurant manager is busiest.

This article shows how Steward does that check and prepares the fix for a person to approve.

Step 1: Teach Steward your restaurant layout once

ASA knows table numbers, but it does not know where your roasting station is. That is local knowledge, and it belongs in the restaurant project’s shared instructions:

Restaurant layout: Tables 1–24 are in the inner dining room. Tables 30–38 are on the terrace. Tables 30, 31 and 32 are directly beside the nut-roasting station from 1 October to 15 November. Tables 1–8 are furthest from the terrace.

Allergies: Treat any kitchen or dining note mentioning nuts, peanuts, almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts or chestnuts as a nut allergy. When in doubt, flag it rather than ignore it.

Everyone in the project shares these instructions. When the season ends, a project manager updates one paragraph.

Step 2: Ask the question

In the restaurant project, open a chat in Read only mode and ask:

Show tonight’s in-house guests whose kitchen or dining notes mention a nut allergy. For each one, show the room, table and note, and flag anyone seated at a table near the roasting station.

Steward reads the in-house reservations with their dining information from ASA. It applies your layout rules and answers with a short table:

Room	Table	Note	Flag
214	31	“Severe peanut and tree-nut allergy”	⚠️ Beside roasting station
305	6	“No hazelnuts”	OK, inner room
118	34	“Nut allergy, carries EpiPen”	Terrace, not beside the station. Check with the guest.

The data above is a fictional example.

Step 3: Let Steward prepare the move, and approve it

Switch the chat to Ask for approval and continue:

Move room 214 to a free table in the inner dining room, preferably table 2, 3 or 4. Add “Nut allergy, seated away from roasting station” to the dining room note. Leave the kitchen note unchanged.

Steward prepares a proposal for ASA’s dining update: room 214, new table 3 and the updated dining-room note. Fields you did not mention stay as they are. The restaurant manager, who has Approve rights for the connection, opens the proposal, checks the room and table and approves it. The change is then sent to ASA and the result is recorded in the conversation.

If the manager is not available, the proposal waits. Nothing changes in ASA until someone approves it.

Step 4: Make it a daily routine

Instead of remembering to ask, a project manager turns the question into a scheduled task:

• Name: Nut allergy seating check
• Repeat: Daily at 15:00, hotel time zone
• Connection: ASA HOTEL
• Permission mode: Read only

Every afternoon, the result is waiting in the restaurant project before the evening briefing. When something is flagged, the manager opens a chat and asks Steward to prepare the move, as in step 3.

Who can see and do what

Allergy information is health data, so access matters:

• Restaurant staff can be project Viewers or Contributors with Read access to the connection. They see the check and its results.
• The restaurant manager also has Write and Approve access and can approve table changes.
• Reception works in its own project and does not need to see the restaurant’s conversations.
• Seasonal staff join through a team and are removed when the season ends.

The ASA credentials are stored encrypted, are never shown and are never given to the AI. Steward also checks every request against both the person’s Steward permissions and the ASA account’s method permissions.

Processing allergy notes with AI involves health data. Before you start, confirm the legal basis and the necessary agreements with your data protection officer.

What this does not replace

Steward helps your team notice risks and act on them in time. It does not replace your allergen procedures, a conversation with the guest or the kitchen’s own checks. It can only see what has been recorded in ASA. If an allergy is not in the notes, Steward cannot find it. Steward can also miss or misread a note, so treat every flag as a prompt for staff to check, never as a guarantee. A good side effect is that the daily check shows when notes are missing or unclear.

The same pattern works elsewhere

The recipe is always the same: shared knowledge in project instructions, data from ASA, a reviewed change, a daily check. The same pattern can work for:

• Families with small children not seated next to the open fireplace.
• Guests with wheelchairs not seated on the raised terrace.
• Gluten-free guests flagged on the evening of the pasta buffet.
• VIP guests assigned their usual table.

Get started

Connect ASA HOTEL with our setup guide and read the hotel operations guide for what you need for dining updates. For more ideas, see AI for hotels: quick answers from ASA HOTEL.