An AI agent for hotels that knows your house rules
A WhatsApp AI agent for a hotel answers guests' repeated questions (rooms, availability, transfers, check-in times, restaurant, activities) from the hotel's own rules and documents, around the clock and in the guest's language. It is agentic, not only conversational: it books extras within the hotel's rules, collects pre-arrival details and hands the conversation to staff with the full history when a person should step in.
- Rm 04 · DELate check-in after midnight?Answered
- Rm 11 · FRSurf lesson tomorrow?Booked
- Rm 07 · ENCan we change rooms?To the team
Small hotels where the questions are more than FAQs
Hotels that answer guests themselves, usually from a handful of rooms up to around 50 per property, where one person on the desk also handles WhatsApp, email and the phone.
Independent and boutique hotels
The owner or a small team answers every message, and the house has a voice of its own that guests come back for.
Lifestyle and retreat properties
Rooms plus surf or yoga, a restaurant, transfers, rentals and retreats: rules that live in your documents and your head, not in the PMS.
Small groups
A few properties run by one team, each with its own rules, answering and handing over the same way.
NoteNot a PMS, not a booking engine. It works alongside the systems you already have and sends guests to your own booking engine to book.
Guests still book by conversation, and they write at all hours
-
1 in 3HOTREC · 2026
About a third of European hotel overnights in 2025 were booked by phone (14.1%), email (13.5%) or a website contact form (5.2%). The hotel's own real-time booking engine took 13.9%. Many direct bookings still start as a conversation someone has to answer.
HOTREC, European Hotel Distribution Study 2026 (2,713 hotels) -
63.4%Cloudbeds · 2026
of independent-hotel bookings came through online travel agencies in 2025, and OTA bookings were cancelled at a rate of 21.8%, against 10.6% for direct bookings. Every enquiry answered well on your own channel is a booking with a better chance of staying direct.
Cloudbeds, 2026 State of Independent Hotels report (March 2026) -
65%AHLA · 2025
of US hotels surveyed reported staffing shortages at the end of 2024, and the front desk was the second most-cited shortage (26%). The same questions land on fewer people.
American Hotel & Lodging Association (20 February 2025) -
96.8MINE · 2026
international tourists in 2025, in Spain alone, led by visitors from the UK (19.1 million), France (12.8 million) and Germany (12.0 million). Guests write in their own language, at their own hour, from wherever they are.
INE, Frontur statistics (3 February 2026)
From booking to checkout, one thread
What guests ask at each moment of the stay, what the agent does, and when it hands the conversation to your team. The questions are examples, in the languages guests write in.
| Moment | Guest asks | Agent does | Hands to staff when |
|---|---|---|---|
| No. 03 · 1Before booking | FRVous avez une chambre familiale pour quatre, mi-août ? | Answers from your room types, what each rate includes and your house rules, in French, and points to the dates and rooms that fit. | The request is outside your rules: a buy-out, a long stay, a group. |
| No. 03 · 2Booking | ENIs it cheaper than on Booking? | Gives your own answer and sends the link to your booking engine with your direct-booking code, so the booking stays direct. | The guest wants to pay, or to change a rate, by message. |
| No. 03 · 3Before arrival | DEWie kommen wir vom Flughafen zu euch? | Sends your directions and the road notes you wrote, offers the transfer on your terms, and collects the registration details your country requires, checking they are complete. | A flight lands after the last transfer, or the details do not add up. |
| No. 03 · 4Arrival and late check-in | ESLlegamos pasada la medianoche, ¿hay alguien en recepción? | Explains your late check-in exactly as you wrote it: where the key is, which door, who to call. | The guest cannot get in, or the plan needs someone on site. |
| No. 03 · 5During the stay | ITPossiamo prenotare il surf per domani mattina? | Takes the booking within your rules (the 5 pm cut-off the day before, the places you set, the deposit) for activities, spa, restaurant, rentals and delivery. Your team gets one list per activity instead of a chat thread. | A complaint, an exception or a payment: to your team, with the full history, translated. |
| No. 03 · 6After the stay | NLBedankt voor alles, we komen terug! | Thanks the guest in their language and asks for a review where you choose. | Anything that sounds unhappy goes to the manager first. |
Your rules, your voice, your number
Off-the-shelf hotel messaging tools answer the questions every hotel gets. This is our WhatsApp AI agent, built on the rules only your hotel has, and it acts on them: it books the surf lesson, takes down the transfer and hands the exception to you.
- 01
Your house rules. Cut-offs, capacity, deposits, transfer times, child and pet policies, what each rate includes: written once, answered every time. If something is not in your documents, it says it will ask the team instead of guessing.
- 02
Your voice. Boutique hotels sell personality. The agent writes the way you do, in the guest's language, and we test that before it answers a real guest.
- 03
Your number. It runs on your hotel's WhatsApp Business number through Meta's official API. Hand-off goes to the owner, manager or front desk you choose, with the conversation translated for them.
- 04
Yours to keep. You own the rules, the documents and the prompts, and your team can change the answers without us. No per-room or per-module fees.
- 05
Alongside your PMS, not instead of it. It does not replace your PMS, your channel manager or your booking engine. It answers, collects and hands over around them.
What else it can take off the desk
- Retreat and group quotesDraft · you approve
Turns a free-form request (dates, group size, rooms, meals, activities) into a structured brief and a first quote from your rate rules, for you to check and send.
- Agency booking emailsDraft · staff confirm
Reads booking emails from agencies and tour operators into drafts your team checks, and flags card numbers sent by email.
- Registration data checksChecked · your team sends
Checks the guest details collected before arrival for missing or malformed fields and lists the bookings that are not complete.
- Review repliesDraft · manager approves
Drafts a reply in the reviewer's language and your voice, which a manager approves before it goes out.
- Supplier invoicesExtracted · matched
Pulls the lines from supplier invoices and matches them to orders, so someone only reviews the exceptions.
It is the same work as our AI process automation and AI document review: the system prepares, a person decides.
Ways to automate guest messaging in a hotel
Four honest options. Prices are the vendors' own public figures, checked on 1 October 2026.
| Option | Best for | Channels | Uses live hotel data | Pricing model | What you own |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WhatsApp Business app and Meta's tools | Very small properties with few messages and one person who answers. | No. Quick replies you write, or Meta's AI agent where Meta offers it. | The app is free. Meta Business Agent is free to start; Meta says paid subscriptions will follow (Meta, 3 June 2026). | Your number and chats. Meta decides how its agent behaves. | |
| SaaS hotel messaging tools | Standard questions (Wi-Fi, breakfast, check-in times), live in days. | Website chat first; WhatsApp on some plans. | Through each vendor's own integrations. | Monthly fee by property, room or credits. Visito Starter $49 a month; HiJiffy Basic from €99 a month billed yearly (€105 monthly), depending on rooms, with WhatsApp from Premium at €319 billed yearly; Bookboost per room per month, AI Agent €3.00 plus Inbox €2.80 and the required data platform €2.20, minimum €399 a month.Sources: visitoai.com/pricing, hijiffy.com/plans-and-pricing, bookboost.io/pricing | Your content; the platform and its logic are the vendor's. |
| PMS built-in messaging | Hotels whose PMS already includes a guest inbox and automated messages. | Email, SMS, WhatsApp and OTA messages, depending on the PMS. | Yes: reservation data from the PMS itself. | Bundled with the PMS plan or sold as an add-on; check your provider. | Your data in the PMS; templates inside its tools. |
| A custom AI agent (Odysi) | Hotels where the questions are more than FAQs: activities, transfers, rentals, retreats, quotes. | Your WhatsApp number; web chat or email if you need them. | What your systems expose, scoped per project. | Per project, plus running costs (AI usage and Meta's message fees). See what decides the cost. | The rules, the documents and the prompts. |
A standard FAQ bot. If guests only ask about Wi-Fi, breakfast and check-in times, Visito or HiJiffy Basic is cheaper and live in days.
An inbox, OTA messaging, online check-in or door keys. Guest-experience suites such as Cloudbeds, Mews, Canary, Duve and Akia bundle these; OTA messaging needs PMS partnerships we do not have.
Chains buying through procurement. If you need SLAs and 24/7 vendor support, choose a larger vendor: we are a two-person studio.
Weighing Meta's own agent against a custom one? Read Meta Business Agent or a custom WhatsApp assistant, and is AI allowed on WhatsApp Business?
What it will not do. It knows when to ring the bell.
- ×Invent an answer. If it is not in your rules or documents, it tells the guest it will check with the team.
- ×Quote prices or policies you have not written. No improvised discounts, refunds or promises.
- ×Handle complaints, exceptions or payments alone. Those go to a person, with the full history.
- ×Pretend to be human. It tells guests it is an AI agent, and anyone who asks for a person gets one.
- ×Replace your PMS or booking engine. Bookings are made on your booking engine, and your systems stay the record.
- ×Take the personal moments. A special occasion, an unhappy guest, a regular: those stay with you.
Live at Fixlab: a vehicle certification lab, not a hotel; same mechanics.
We have no hotel case to show yet, so here is the agent we run in production. Fixlab's customers ask the same questions on WhatsApp at all hours, need documents collected and checked, and sometimes need a person. The agent answers from Fixlab's own rules, collects what each case needs and hands over with the full history: the same mechanics a hotel needs.
- 279conversations in the first three months
- 218people wrote in
- 16 smedian first reply
- 55%outside office hours
“We recommended you for your work, but above all for the kind of people you are.”
Translated from Spanish
“We know Fixlab’s system because we work with them. Congratulations on the work: the way it handles WhatsApp enquiries is impressive.”
Translated from Spanish
From your house rules to a live number, in weeks
- Rules and documents
Room types, what each rate includes, house rules, cut-offs, transfers, activities and the questions guests really send. We write the knowledge base with you.
- An acceptance test
A written set of real guest messages in the languages you receive, with a pass bar agreed before anything goes live.
- A test number
Your team writes as guests on a separate number, and we tune until it clears the test.
- Live on your number
It starts answering guests. Hand-off goes to the people and the hours you choose.
- Tuning
We read the first weeks of conversations with you and adjust the rules wherever guests surprised us.
It is priced per project, from what the agent is allowed to do and which of your systems it touches. After a short call you get a written proposal with the price and the assumptions behind it. What decides the cost of a WhatsApp AI assistant explains the drivers; WhatsApp's own message fees come on top (what changed on 1 October 2026).
Be found by guests and by AI search
Travellers are moving from search engines to AI answers. The share of US travellers using traditional search to plan trips fell from 51% to 36% in a year, and OTAs account for more than half of the citations in AI-generated hotel recommendations (Cloudbeds research, via Hospitality Net, 30 April 2026).
We also build direct-booking websites and do GEO (generative engine optimization), so ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini can cite your hotel directly, not only its OTA listing.