Hostaway users have more choice than they used to. The platform includes its own Auto-Reply, and the Hostaway Marketplace lists a growing number of AI apps that promise to take guest messaging off your hands. Some are close cousins of Auto-Reply. A few are full autopilots for guest operations.
Working out which you need comes down to what your team actually spends its day on.
The AI already inside Hostaway
Auto-Reply is Hostaway's built-in answer to repeated guest questions. Once it's enabled, it replies to common messages from the information you've given it, inside the inbox your team already uses. It's available on request without an extra fee.
For a small portfolio with well-documented properties, that can take a fair bit of pressure off. Its limits show up as the work gets more varied. Customisation is limited, accuracy is a frequent complaint among operators, and once the reply is sent its job is done. Tasks, coordination with your cleaners and any upsell remain manual.
Where operators feel the gap
The gap tends to appear somewhere around the point where one person can no longer keep the whole portfolio in their head. Messages arrive in clusters (Friday afternoons, the evening before arrival, checkout morning). Many of them are simple to answer and fiddly to act on.
A guest asking for a cot needs an answer and a note to housekeeping. A guest reporting a leaking tap needs reassurance, a maintenance job and maybe a follow-up. A guest asking to arrive at noon needs someone to check the cleaning schedule before saying yes. An auto-reply can handle the first sentence of each of those. The rest is still your team's.
Auto-Reply or autopilot? A quick test
Run through a normal week of messages and sort them by what they needed.
| What the message needed | Auto-Reply | AI autopilot |
|---|---|---|
| A fact from the listing or house rules | Yes | Yes |
| An answer that depends on the reservation | Sometimes | Yes |
| A task for a cleaner or maintenance | No | Yes |
| A check against the calendar or turnover | No | Yes |
| An upsell (early check-in, extra night) | No | Yes |
| Judgement, empathy or a refund decision | No | Hands it to your team |
If most of your week sits in the first row, Auto-Reply is probably enough. If the lower rows are where your team's time goes, an autopilot is worth a look.
What switching on an autopilot looks like
Connecting a Marketplace app to Hostaway takes minutes. The work is in teaching it how you operate, and here vendors differ a lot. Some hand you a blank rule builder. Others read your listings, past conversations and saved replies, then come back with a playbook for you to check.
Start small either way. A few properties, or a few kinds of question, with your team watching what it does. Look at the conversations it handed over as closely as the ones it handled, because that's where you'll see whether it knows its limits. Then widen it.
Keeping guests and your team in the loop
Guests should be able to find out they're talking to AI, and in the EU that's expected under the AI Act. Most don't mind. What they notice is a quick, accurate answer at 11pm and a person who picks up straight away when something goes wrong.
Your team should be able to see everything the autopilot did, step in on any conversation and change how it behaves. If a vendor can't show you that, keep looking. Our list of questions to ask before choosing covers the rest, and agentic AI for short-term rental operations explains what separates an agent from an auto-reply.
Aeve is one Hostaway Marketplace autopilot built along these lines. It's set up for you, self-improving, and live within 24 hours of connecting Hostaway. Running Guesty as well? See our Guesty guide.