AI guest messaging autoresponder for Airbnb, Booking.com & Smoobu hosts.
The Smoobu autopilot that replies to your guests in 40+ languages, 24/7. An AI co-host for your short-term rental means you stop answering "What's the Wi-Fi password?" — and start getting weekends back. Guest chat runs natively through your Smoobu channel manager, which covers Airbnb, Booking.com, and direct bookings.
Written by Prabin Paudel · Vienna host running 12 apartments on this autopilot · last reviewed 13 May 2026
The AI co-host for short-term rental hosts is straightforward: our integration watches your Smoobu channel manager inbox, and when a guest writes in, we generate a reply using the apartment's guide as the source of truth. Automated guest messaging goes out in the guest's language — typically within 30 seconds.
Every 15 seconds, Virtual Host AI polls the Smoobu API for new guest messages across all connected apartments. When a new message arrives, we debounce for 30–60 seconds so rapid-fire messages combine into a single coherent thought rather than three half-answers.
The autopilot then reads the guest's message, checks the apartment guide for the answer, generates a reply using Google's Gemini, and posts it back to Smoobu. Smoobu delivers it to the guest on whatever channel they messaged from — Airbnb, Booking.com, or direct.
The result: the Airbnb message automation is invisible to your guests. They experience it as a fast, knowledgeable host. Meanwhile you're off-duty, because the AI autopilot for short-term rental properties has already handled their question.
Every AI co-host Smoobu platform makes trade-offs between speed and safety. Ours tips toward safety. If you reply to a guest from any device — Smoobu mobile app, web, anywhere — our vacation rental AI detects it within 30 seconds and pauses on that thread for an hour. Two voices never reach the guest. You stay in charge of any conversation you've already touched.
If the guest message is emotionally charged, urgent, or asks for information the apartment guide doesn't contain, the Smoobu autopilot escalates to you instantly via Telegram instead of guessing. Read the full safety model →
Paste your Smoobu API key and the Smoobu autopilot is ready to answer its first guest within minutes. No CSV exports, no manual data entry, no separate inbox to learn.
The key lives in your Smoobu account under Settings → API. We read messages and reservations through it — we don't get access to your billing, your rate plans, or any guest payment information. You can revoke the key from Smoobu at any time and we lose all access instantly.
Your apartments, your active and upcoming reservations, the last 90 days of guest message history (so the AI can learn your house style), and your existing Smoobu guest guides. Initial import takes 30–60 seconds for a typical 5-apartment portfolio. Nothing leaves the EU.
Each apartment has its own toggle. We recommend turning on one apartment for a week first, watching the Telegram escalations to make sure the tone matches your voice, then enabling the rest. There is no all-or-nothing commitment — you can run the autopilot on three apartments and stay manual on the others indefinitely.
We analysed 4,000 guest messages to figure out what the Smoobu autopilot can truly own and where it needs to step back.
See the full breakdown in our blog post on how AI message autopilot saves hosts 10 hours a week.
The Smoobu autopilot is not an island. It plugs into the tools you already use.
Guest messages, reservations, guides, apartments. The Smoobu API is our primary integration point — everything flows through it.
Two-way sync. Reservations appear in your calendar automatically, and personal blocks you add in Google Calendar propagate back to Smoobu.
Escalations arrive as rich cards with Pause, Solve, and Reply buttons. See the Telegram command center.
The AI autopilot for short-term rental messaging is one part of the platform. Hosts running multiple apartments typically pair it with:
Austrian hosts: we also handle online guest registration (§5 Meldegesetz) and the Wien Nächtigungsmeldung (VIETour / Statistik Austria) export — skip the paperwork. Wien Ortstaxe (§12 WTFG) is calculated per booking and exportable as a workpaper for your accountant.
The autopilot is a per-apartment subscription, billed monthly by Stripe in EUR. There is no annual commitment, no setup fee, and no per-message charge. Cancel any apartment any time from the dashboard and the bill stops on the next cycle.
If you decide within 14 days of signup that the autopilot isn't outperforming your current setup, one click in your dashboard issues a full refund — no support call, no forms, no proof of dissatisfaction required. This is the Austrian §11 FAGG right of withdrawal, and we built the refund button to make it actually usable instead of buried.
Your data, including message history and the apartment guide, stays available for 30 days after cancellation so you can export everything before it's deleted. After 30 days we permanently remove your account from EU-hosted infrastructure.
From €22.90 per apartment per month. First guest reply in under 10 minutes. 14-day full refund · cancel any time.