A guest asks to arrive early. Before approving a reply, your team needs the booking details, your arrival policy and confirmation that the unit will be ready. Here is how to check the information available to InboxAI before sending its suggestion.
A draft is only as good as what it can read, and some of what matters may not be in any of its sources. This article draws on Hostfully's help center, gives you steps to improve the drafts without any extra tool, then separates two jobs people lump together: drafting a reply, and running the routine that follows each booking.
What InboxAI reads
According to Hostfully's InboxAI article, the Unified Inbox draws on:
- Connected Guidebooks: the recommendation and house manual data you provide.
- Past conversations from your property management platform.
- Property data: settings, amenities and descriptions.
- Booking data: check-in and check-out times, payment status and special instructions.
- Public information on the web, when the topic is not found in the sources above.
The article also names a prerequisite: your guidebook has to be connected to your property management platform.
How you use it
Per the same article, you switch it on in Agency Settings by checking "Activate Artificial Intelligence (AI) Services". On web, a "Suggest an answer" button appears in the Unified Inbox; on mobile, a sparkle icon. You review and edit the draft before sending it.
One behavior is easy to miss: the button only appears when the last message in the thread is from the guest. InboxAI does not start a conversation. A check-in instruction that should go out before the guest writes is a different job. The same help article describes booking confirmations and reminders as separate, automatic messages, not as InboxAI drafts.
Steps to get better drafts
1. Fill the house manual thoroughly. Hostfully's guidance is to include arrival instructions, house specifics, checkout procedures and local recommendations, because that improves the quality of drafts.
2. Use invisible house manual cards for reference facts. Per this help article, a house manual card can be marked as an "invisible section". Guests do not see it in the guidebook, and InboxAI uses it. Use this for guest-safe reference information you want available to InboxAI without displaying it in the guidebook. Invisible does not mean confidential: InboxAI can use the content in a guest reply, so add only what is safe to say to a guest. Recommendation cards cannot be made invisible.
3. Check the connection. If the guidebook is not connected to the property, InboxAI has no guidebook to read.
4. Treat web-sourced answers as suggestions to verify. Hostfully says InboxAI searches public web information when it finds nothing in your data. That helps with a question like local events. For anything that touches your policies, read the draft against your own sources before you send.
A short checklist before you judge the drafts
Pick five questions your team answers every week: check-in time, parking, Wi-Fi, early arrival, late checkout. For each question, find a booking conversation whose latest message is the guest asking that question. Select "Suggest an answer" and compare the draft with the booking details and your policies. Sort each miss into one of three causes: the fact is missing from the guidebook (add it, using an invisible card only if the information is safe to include in a guest reply), the fact is in the booking but the draft ignored it (edit the draft and note the pattern), or the answer depends on something no source holds (that is the routine, covered next).
Two jobs, not one
Drafting a reply to a guest message is one job. The second job is everything the booking sets in motion: the cleaning that must be confirmed before arrival, the document the guest has not sent, the early check-in decision that depends on who is in the unit the day before.
Hostfully's help article describes InboxAI's inputs as guidebooks, conversations, property data and booking data. It does not list the state of your team's cleaning or check-in routine among them. That is a statement about what the documentation lists, not a criticism: Hostfully is built around reservations, channels and guidebooks.
An illustrative example
This scenario is illustrative, not a customer story. A guest writes the morning of arrival: "Can we drop our bags at 11?"
The booking data says check-in is at 4 p.m. A draft built from that can restate the policy. The right answer depends on whether the previous guest has left and the cleaner has started, and on whether you are comfortable with bags in the entry. Someone on your team knows. The draft does not, unless that state is somewhere the reply can read, and a person still decides the exception.
How InnSync does it
InnSync is the operations layer around the PMS. Carmen, InnSync's AI agent, writes replies from the booking, the unit and your house rules, and brings questions requiring an operational decision to your team. InnSync also supports cleaning, check-in and exception routines around each reservation. You decide, per channel, whether she replies on her own or drafts for review.
The two are not either-or. Keep InboxAI if its drafts work for your team, and fill the guidebook well. Add the operations layer when the questions that cost you time are the ones that depend on what is happening around the stay.
If you use Hostfully
Keep Hostfully. InnSync runs the operation around it — the connection is set up with you during onboarding.
Your guidebooks and InboxAI stay as they are. Next step: see InnSync for Hostfully. For the scheduled messages side, see Hostfully automated messages.