How to set up an AI to answer your guests in one afternoon

Setting up AI guest messaging is less about the software and more about writing down what you already know. Most hosts carry the wifi password, the aircon quirks and the Grab pickup point in their head and in old chat threads. The afternoon is spent getting it out of your head. Here is the order that works, whatever tool you choose.

Before you start: one hour of collecting

Open your last 30 guest conversations and copy out every question. You will find the same ones over and over. We did this on our own apartments in Bangkok and the list came to about 20 questions: check-in and checkout times, the wifi, the door or key card, parking, luggage, the aircon remote, hot water, the pool and gym hours, where the nearest 7-Eleven and pharmacy are, how to call a Grab, early check-in, late checkout, extra guests, the building's rules on noise and visitors, the lift key card, the trash, and what to do if something breaks.

Write the answers down once per apartment and you have most of your knowledge base before you have opened any software.

Two tips from doing this many times:

• Write the answer the way you would say it to a guest, not the way you would write a manual. "The hot water switch is the red button behind the bathroom door, flick it up and wait two minutes" beats "Water heater: bathroom".
• Separate what is true for the whole building from what is true for one unit. Pool hours, lift cards and juristic office rules belong to the building. Wifi password and aircon remote belong to the unit.

Hour one: write your rules in plain sentences

Facts are what the AI tells guests. Rules are what it is allowed to do. Write these as sentences a new assistant could follow on their first day.

Examples that work:

• "Early check-in is free if the apartment is ready. If there is a checkout that morning, say we will confirm by noon."
• "Late checkout until 1 PM is free if nobody arrives that day. After 1 PM we charge 500 baht, until 4 PM at most."
• "One extra guest is fine for a night. Two or more, ask me."
• "Never share the door code or the exact floor before the booking is confirmed."
• "Never discuss refunds. Pass those to me."
• "Minimum price for any manual quote is 1,800 baht a night."

Examples that do not work: "be reasonable", "use judgement", "depends". If you cannot write it as a sentence, the AI should not be deciding it, and it should come to you.

Keep legal matters simple. If your building has a position on short stays, write what you tell guests about the juristic office and visitor rules, and check the details with the building management or a local lawyer rather than asking the AI to interpret them.

Hour two: connect and load

Connect your listings. With a direct tool this is a login to Airbnb, Booking.com or Vrbo and a few clicks; with a PMS add-on you connect through the PMS. Tokay connects in about ten minutes with nothing to install.

Load the facts and rules. Most tools have a form or a knowledge base page. Some let you do it on a call: you say your rules in plain sentences and the tool writes them down. Either way, read what it stored. A wrong fact in the knowledge base is a wrong answer to every guest from now on.

Set the language behaviour. If guests write in Chinese, Japanese or Russian, confirm the tool answers in their language rather than in English with a translation note.

Turn off anything else that sends messages. If your PMS has scheduled templates and the AI also greets guests, Lukas gets two welcomes. Choose one sender per message type.

Weeks one and two: supervise everything

Do not let anything send on its own yet, even if the tool allows it. For two weeks, every reply should come to you as a draft with approve, edit and deny.

This is not wasted time. You are doing three things:

1. Finding the gaps. Every time the AI says "I do not have that information" or asks you, that is a fact you forgot. Add it. By the end of two weeks the gaps are rare.
2. Fixing the tone. Edit drafts that sound stiff. Most tools learn from edits; at minimum, you learn what rules to add.
3. Building trust in yourself. You will see that the wifi answers are always right and the refund questions always come to you. That is what lets you let go.

If you run more than one apartment, start with one. Get it right, then copy the building-level facts to the others.

Week three onward: let go, one question type at a time

Now switch on auto-send, but narrowly. A sensible order:

1. Wifi, check-in and checkout times, house basics.
2. Directions, local recommendations, building amenities.
3. Early check-in and late checkout, if your rule is clear and the tool checks the calendar.
4. Maintenance first steps (aircon, hot water), since a quick "try the red switch" often fixes it.

Never: refunds, discounts, complaints, anything about a dispute or a review.

Check the daily summary for a week after each step. If nothing surprising happened, widen again.

Keeping it good

• Once a month, read ten random conversations end to end. Look for repeated greetings, answers that went stale (a closed restaurant, a new pool schedule), and questions that keep coming to you that could be a rule.
• When something changes in the building, change it once at the building level.
• When you give a guest an exception, do not let it become a rule by accident.

How this looks with Tokay

Tokay follows this exact sequence because it is how we set it up for our own apartments. Connect listings in about ten minutes. One short call where you say your rules in plain sentences. Two weeks where every reply comes to you to approve, edit or deny with a tap. Then you switch on what Pam may send on her own, one kind of question at a time. Knowledge is held at three levels, general, building and apartment, so the pool hours are written once per building. If a fact is missing, Pam asks you instead of guessing. Leo, the manager agent, sends one message each morning with what happened overnight. Prices are at /#pricing, and there is a 30 minute demo call if you would rather see it before setting anything up.

Questions hosts ask