Choose a guest messaging tool by deciding first who answers and when. Check that it unifies the channels your guests already use, that handover from automation to a person is one action and keeps the full history, and that unanswered messages escalate rather than sitting in a queue. Run a two week pilot on one channel before rolling it out.
A messaging channel creates an expectation of a fast reply. If reception is already stretched at check in, adding an inbox without adding capacity makes the guest experience worse, not better. Decide who watches it, in which hours, and what the target response time is, then buy a tool that fits that answer.
Automation changes the maths but does not remove it. Something has to handle the questions the bot cannot, and those are usually the ones that matter, like a late arrival or a complaint that is about to become a review.
Guests message from wherever they already are: the website widget, the messaging app that dominates in their country, sometimes SMS, sometimes the OTA's own thread. A tool that unifies these into one queue with one guest history is worth more than a beautiful widget that only covers your homepage.
Check the OTA threads specifically. If your team has to answer inside each extranet, half the conversations stay outside the system and your response time reporting is fiction.
Skip the research, talk to someone who has done it 45 minutes with an independent specialist. Free for hotels, no pitch, no commissions. Book a free session →Test the handover in the demo. A guest talking to an automated assistant should reach a person in one action, and that person should see everything already said. Making the guest repeat themselves is the single fastest way to turn a small question into a complaint.
Then ask what happens when nobody answers. A message that sits unread for six hours needs to escalate somewhere, whether that is a phone alert, an email to a manager or an automatic reply that sets an honest expectation.
Run two weeks on a single channel and record four numbers: messages received, median first response time, share resolved without a human, and how many turned into a phone call anyway. Those numbers tell you whether to expand, and they give you a baseline for the next vendor conversation.
Watch what the tool does to your other channels too. If phone calls to reception drop while messaging rises, the tool is shifting work rather than adding it, and that is the outcome worth paying for. Integration with your PMS is what allows the reply to know which room the guest is in.
Automation handles the repetitive share well: wifi passwords, check in times, parking, directions. Anything involving money, a complaint or a change to the reservation should reach a person quickly. The right split is discovered in the pilot, not decided in advance.
It depends entirely on your source markets, because messaging app dominance is regional. Look at your booking mix by country and pick the channel that covers the largest share, then add the second one only once the first is running well.
Usually yes for informational questions, which is where most of the volume sits. It rarely reduces calls about urgent problems, because a guest with a real issue still reaches for the phone. Measure both before and after so you know which effect you got.
It mainly helps by catching problems during the stay rather than after it. A guest whose issue was solved on Tuesday rarely writes about it on Friday. That only works if the messages are actually read and acted on, which returns to the staffing question.
No. Keep both visible. A guest with an urgent problem reaches for the phone, and removing it to push people into a chat channel is the kind of efficiency that shows up later in reviews rather than in the support dashboard.
Set published response hours, use an honest automatic reply outside them, and automate the repetitive informational questions first. The volume that arrives is largely a function of how many channels you open, so add them one at a time.