Four inboxes and nowhere to reply

Guest messages arrive across Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia and direct email, each in its own format with no common place to answer, so a question about parking sits unread while staff toggle between extranets. None of those platforms offer a usable API to a property of this size, and their relays reject mail sent from any address other than the one tied to the account.

That constraint decides the architecture. There is no integration to build, so the agent works the mailbox the hotel already has: it watches for new guest mail and replies through the hotel's own address, which is the only way the platforms thread the response back into the right conversation.

Each property is seeded with its own knowledge, tone and limits, kept separate from every other property, since a chain's phrasing and a twelve-room guesthouse's phrasing are not interchangeable and neither are their rules. The guardrails matter more than the answering does. The agent refuses to invent a price or a vacancy, and where it does not know it collects the dates and hands the thread to a person instead of producing something plausible that a guest will hold the hotel to later.

There is also a dry-run mode where every reply is drafted and nothing is sent, so a property can watch it work for a week before trusting it with a real guest. Asking a hotel to let software answer its guests on day one is asking for a leap nobody sensible takes.