Guests ask at their hour, not yours.
Questions arrive from other timezones and other languages. Answer them in both, and hand over the ones that need a person.
Hotels, tour operators, travel agencies, and vacation rentals use business messaging across the whole guest journey: answering availability and price questions before booking, sending confirmation and pre-arrival details, handling requests during a stay, and following up afterwards. The channel matters because guests message from different timezones, in different languages, on the phone they already carry abroad.
What usually goes wrong.
- The question arrives at 4am your time
- Travel demand is global by definition. A booking question answered eight hours later has usually been answered by somebody else already.
- The same guest details are asked for three times
- Booking, pre-arrival, and check-in each collect the same information because none of them share a record.
- In-stay requests get lost between shifts
- A request made to one shift and forgotten by the next is the single most common source of a bad review.
What Otobiz does about it.
Availability and policy questions answered any hour
Rates, inclusions, cancellation terms, and directions come from your own documents and pages, with the sources shown. Bookings and anything with money attached go to a person.
- Grounded answers from your own rate sheets and policies
- Replies in the guest's own language
- Payment and booking changes escalated, never automated
One guest record across the journey
Pre-booking questions, confirmation, in-stay requests, and post-stay follow-up sit on one thread and one contact record, so the guest is not asked the same thing at every stage.
- One thread per guest across channels
- Stored guest facts reused by later conversations
- Notes and assignment so a shift change does not lose context
Pre-arrival and post-stay sequences
Timed sequences send arrival instructions before a stay and a review request afterwards, screening each contact for suppression, replies, and frequency at each step.
- Sequences triggered on a tag, a stage, or an event
- Quiet hours applied in the guest's own timezone
- Contacts exit the sequence on reply
A person on anything that matters
Campaigns, scheduled sends, and anything that writes to another system queue for approval. The approval is bound to the exact message you approved and re-checked at send time, so what the approver saw is what goes out.
- Approve, edit, or reject before anything leaves
- The message you approved is the message that sends
- Every send logged with who approved it
Ad clicks that arrive as booking conversations
A click-to-message ad opens a chat, and the click identifier is captured on the first message, so the campaign that produced a booking is knowable.
- Click identifier captured on the first inbound message
- Available as a segment condition afterwards
- Outcomes reportable back so the campaign optimises on bookings
Common questions
Can it answer in the guest's language?
- Replies are written in the language the guest wrote in. The interface your staff use is English.
Can it take a booking or a payment?
- No. Bookings and payments go to a person. Anything with money attached queues for approval.
How do we avoid messaging a guest in the middle of their night?
- Quiet hours are applied in the contact's own timezone, and scheduled sends wait.
Does context survive a shift change?
- Yes. The thread, the contact record, internal notes, and assignment are shared, so the next shift sees what the last one did.
Can we send a review request after checkout?
- Yes, as a sequence step, screened for consent and frequency like any other send.
Which channel do international guests use?
- It varies by market. WhatsApp is dominant in many, Telegram in others, and Instagram carries a lot of pre-booking interest. Connecting several and letting the guest choose is the safer answer.
Can we attribute a booking to the ad that produced it?
- For click-to-message ads, yes. The click identifier is captured on the first message, stored on the contact, and reportable back as a conversion.
What happens when a guest messages during their stay and the desk is busy?
- The message waits in the shared inbox with a draft written from your own information, and routine questions are answered automatically if you enabled that.