Hotel Guest Messaging Workflows to Automate, Ranked
These are the six guest conversations a boutique hotel, guesthouse or serviced apartment should automate first, ranked by how much time or revenue each one recovers. The ranking assumes a property of 20 to 120 rooms, a small front office that also answers WhatsApp, and availability, rates and bookings kept in a property management system or channel manager. Each one links to a recipe page with a description you can paste into AeroChat, what to connect and what you still decide.
For the market data and plan sizing, see the hotels overview.
The ranking at a glance
| Rank | Workflow | What it recovers | Why it ranks here |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Room availability questions | Direct bookings that would otherwise go to an online travel agency or another property | It is the question that decides where the guest books, and it often arrives at night |
| 2 | Pre-arrival requests and paid extras | Revenue from early check-in, transfers and upgrades | Guests ask for these anyway, and each one can be paid for in the chat |
| 3 | Booking changes and cancellations | Front office time, and rooms released early enough to resell | Frequent, repetitive, and governed by a rate policy you already have |
| 4 | Facility and policy questions | Front office time on the same twenty answers | The highest volume, but each answer is worth less than a booking |
| 5 | Local recommendations | Guest experience, and sales of your own restaurant, tours and transfers | Guests ask the concierge desk the same questions every day |
| 6 | Complaint and safety handover | Reviews and repeat stays | Low volume, high stakes, and every setup needs it before going live |
The six workflows
1. Answer room availability and turn it into a direct booking
A guest writes “any room for 2 adults 12 to 14 dec, is breakfast included?”. AeroChat checks availability and rates in your property management system, quotes the room types and the direct rate with its cancellation terms, and either sends your booking engine link or takes a deposit by payment link and creates the booking in your system. This ranks first because the guest is comparing you with two other properties, and the one that answers first with a clear price usually wins.
2. Take pre-arrival requests and sell extras
“Can I check in early?”, “can you pick us up from the airport?”, “we need a baby cot”. AeroChat finds the booking, offers paid extras at your prices, sends a payment link, adds the request to the booking and tells the front office. Free requests are confirmed as requests, never as guarantees.
3. Change or cancel a booking within the rate policy
“Can I change to 13 to 15 dec?” AeroChat finds the booking in your property system, checks which rate it was made on and how far away the stay is, and tells the guest what the policy allows. Changes the policy allows, it makes in your system once the guest confirms, or passes to the front office if you prefer a person to approve. Bookings made through an online travel agency are sent back to that agency, because the change has to happen there.
4. Answer facility and policy questions
Check-in time, parking, pets, smoking, the pool, breakfast hours, the deposit at check-in, how far to the train station. AeroChat answers from your property fact sheet, in the guest’s language, at any hour. When the answer is not in the fact sheet, it says the front office will confirm.
Facility and policy questions recipe
5. Give local recommendations
“Where can we get good local food near here?”, “how do we get to the old town?”. AeroChat answers from a short list your team writes and keeps current: nearby food, transport, attractions and your own restaurant or tours. It does not invent places or opening hours.
6. Hand complaints and safety issues to the duty manager
A guest who complains during the stay can still be won back, but only by a person. AeroChat apologises, collects the room number and what happened, hands the conversation to the duty manager and tells the guest someone is coming. Safety, security and health messages skip every other step. It ranks last because the volume is low. Set it up before any other workflow goes live.
What they connect to
- Your property fact sheet in the knowledge base: room types, policies, facilities, extras and local tips. Used by every workflow.
- Your property management system or channel manager for availability, rates and bookings, used by workflows 1, 2 and 3. Cloudbeds, Mews or Oracle OPERA Cloud connect through their APIs: create an API key, approve the connection, or register an application, as each system asks, and paste the details in when AeroChat asks.
- Airwallex, built in, for deposits and paid extras. HitPay and Stripe connect through their APIs if you already use them.
- AeroChat’s own handover, tags and team notifications for workflow 6 and every exception.
Using a different system? If it has a public API, it connects to AeroChat the same way: describe what you want, paste in its key, and it runs.
Can’t find your tool? Message us in the chat on this page and we’ll tell you how it connects.
What stays with your team
- Complaints, safety, security, and any guest who is unwell.
- Refunds and exceptions to a non-refundable rate.
- Group bookings, weddings and events.
- Any rate or discount that is not on your published list.
- Changes to bookings made through an online travel agency.
Each recipe hands these over with the details collected, so your team picks up the conversation without asking the guest to repeat themselves.
How they fit together
The fact sheet and your property system are the base. Availability, pre-arrival, changes and recommendations all read from them, so keep the fact sheet current before you switch anything on. The availability workflow creates the booking in your system that the pre-arrival and change workflows later find. The complaint handover runs alongside all of them. When a guest raises a complaint in the middle of a booking change, the change pauses and the duty manager takes over.
You can paste the recipes one at a time. When you paste the second, AeroChat sees what you already have and adds to it rather than building a duplicate.
Build your first one
Start with facility questions and the complaint handover together. They need only your fact sheet, and they show you how AeroChat answers guests before you connect your property system or payments.
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