HelloHosty – AI Guest Communication Assistant
How It Started
The project came from a familiar problem in the short-term rental space: property managers were juggling too many tools. Airbnb for one set of bookings, Booking.com for another, spreadsheets for pricing, email threads for guest communication – and no single place to see it all.
HelloHosty set out to fix that. The goal was a centralised property management platform where hosts could manage their entire portfolio, communicate with guests across every channel, and control pricing – all from one place.
The initial build focused on the fundamentals: a property dashboard, a reservation calendar, and the foundations of a guest inbox. From there, the product has grown incrementally based on what operators actually need day to day.
The Challenge
Three areas stood out as the most technically and operationally complex – each requiring careful design work before a line of code was written.
Channex integration was the first major hurdle. Channex is a channel manager that acts as a bridge between property management systems and major OTAs like Booking.com. Syncing properties, rates, and availability through Channex meant working with a complex third-party API that had its own data model, authentication flow, and sync timing. Getting that integration stable – with the right per-property API key management, iframe-based property mapping, and polling logic to track sync progress – required careful design to avoid data conflicts and failed syncs going unnoticed.
The calendar presented a different kind of challenge. A reservation calendar sounds simple until you have dozens of properties, overlapping bookings from multiple channels, date-range selection, and guest details all competing for the same screen. The calendar needed to work intuitively for a manager glancing at a week’s bookings, while also supporting the detailed workflows of creating and editing reservations – including guest contact information, pricing breakdowns, and channel attribution. Getting the interaction model right, and keeping it performant across large date ranges, was a sustained piece of work.
Rates and policies was the most operationally complex area. Property managers don’t set a single nightly rate – they manage seasonal pricing, minimum stay requirements, and exceptions for specific date ranges, often across an entire portfolio at once. The platform needed a system flexible enough to handle bulk rate changes across multiple properties and date ranges, while remaining understandable to non-technical users. Designing the right data model for pricing rules, and building a UI that made bulk operations feel manageable rather than overwhelming, was one of the core product design challenges.
What We Built
HelloHosty is now a full-featured property management platform covering the complete operational workflow for short-term rental managers.
Calendar & Reservations
A multi-property reservation calendar with month, week, and year views. Managers can see bookings across their entire portfolio at a glance, with colour-coding by platform (Airbnb, Booking.com, direct, etc.) to make the source of each reservation immediately clear. Creating and editing reservations is handled through a side drawer without navigating away from the calendar view.
Rates & Policies
A flexible pricing management system that supports date-based rate rules, minimum stay requirements, and bulk operations across multiple properties and date ranges simultaneously. Pricing rules are displayed in a structured table with clear indicators for each rule’s scope and duration, giving managers a readable overview of their pricing strategy.
Guest Inbox
A unified inbox that consolidates guest communications from every channel – email, WhatsApp (via Twilio), SMS, Booking.com (via Channex), and the platform’s own messaging – into a single threaded view. Managers can reply on any channel without leaving the inbox, schedule automated messages, and configure AI-assisted auto-replies per conversation.
Channex Integration
A channel manager integration that connects the platform to Booking.com and other OTAs via Channex. Properties are mapped through an embedded Channex interface, with per-property API key management and automated polling to track and surface sync status. Once connected, availability and rates stay in sync across channels without manual intervention.
How We Worked
Development has been iterative, shipping in priority order based on operator feedback. The product has grown from a simple property and calendar tool into a platform that covers the full management workflow. Communication runs through Slack and regular calls, with one lead developer acting as the main technical point of contact to keep decision-making fast.
Technology
The platform is a modern single-page application built with React 18 and TypeScript, bundled with Vite. Material-UI provides the component system and design language, Zustand handles client-side state, and TanStack React Query manages server state with intelligent caching. API clients are auto-generated from the backend’s OpenAPI specification, keeping types consistent across the stack. The Rates & Policies system is built around a flexible pricing rules model that supports bulk operations across properties and date ranges; real-time inbox polling and Channex sync tracking use targeted refetch strategies to keep data current without unnecessary load.
Results
What started as a basic calendar and property dashboard is now the central tool for HelloHosty’s day-to-day operations:
The calendar gives managers clear, real-time visibility across their full portfolio, with booking source attribution that makes it immediately obvious where each reservation originated.
Property managers can manage reservations, pricing, and guest communications from a single platform, replacing a fragmented mix of OTA dashboards, spreadsheets, and email threads.
The Channex integration keeps availability and rates in sync across Booking.com and other connected OTAs automatically, eliminating manual updates across platforms.
Bulk rate operations allow managers to update pricing across their entire portfolio in one action, reducing the time to implement seasonal or promotional pricing changes from hours to minutes.
The unified inbox consolidates guest messages from all channels – including WhatsApp, SMS, email, and Booking.com – into a single threaded view, cutting response times and reducing the risk of missed messages.