Always-on guest-messaging agent
The front-office seat itself: an agent that fields the routine guest questions on every channel and escalates only the exceptions. Still on the bench, and here is exactly why.
The front desk answers the same questions all day, across email, Booking, Expedia, SMS, and webchat. What time is check-in, do you have parking, can I get a late checkout. That is the guest-services seat, and most of it is routine. The goal is an always-on agent that handles the routine messages, grounded in the booking facts from the PMS, and escalates the genuine exceptions to a person.
Why it is still planned
I did the feasibility work before writing a line of code, and the walls are all in the plumbing, not the model. The channels a small operator can actually read programmatically are more limited than they look.
- Mews' unified inbox, at launch, covers WhatsApp, SMS, Booking, and webchat. Email and Expedia are explicitly deferred, with no confirmed API to read them.
- The Connector API messaging endpoints only return threads the integration itself created, not the guest messages already sitting in a manager's OTA or email inbox.
- The official WhatsApp Cloud API cannot join or read an existing group. The only route that can violates the terms of service and risks a permanent number ban, so Telegram's Bot API, which does it officially and free, is the fallback surface.
- Expedia's messaging API is gated to connectivity partners and Booking's is tied to the PMS machine account, so for now each channel is reached by scraping the extranet with a seeded browser profile.
So the honest near-term build is per-channel readers first. The groundwork already pulls shared property inboxes read-only through a Google Workspace domain-wide-delegation service account and scores tone and accuracy with Claude. The messaging agent rides on that read layer once it is solid, with every inbound message treated as untrusted input to guard against prompt injection, behind a disclosed-AI consent layer.
This is the last big seat to automate, and the one place where being a company of one is an advantage. No committee to convince, just a boundary to map and a channel to light up one at a time. When it lands, the front office becomes another exception queue that mostly stays empty.