Three quarters of Expedia's guest replies go out untouched. Yours doesn't have to.
Expedia drafts a reply to your guest, customized to your property, and says more than three quarters are sent with no edits at all. The edit box is open. Almost no hotel is using it.
by Markus Busch
What the company says it built. At a travel conference in Queenstown last week, Darren Karshagen of Expedia was asked to name AI that is doing real work today rather than sitting in a roadmap. His answer was guest messaging. Expedia generates drafted replies to routine guest questions, customized to the property, which an accommodation partner approves and sends in a single click. More than 75 percent of those drafts, he said, go out exactly as written.
Nothing was taken away. The draft arrives, the edit box sits open underneath it, and one click is the whole interaction. Nobody decided to stop writing to their guests. The path of least resistance moved, and almost everybody followed it.
Look at what "routine" is holding. Early check-in. Parking. Whether the cot fits in the room. The dog.
The guest asking about the cot is usually traveling with a fourteen-month-old. That is the useful part. The question isn't. A correct, generic answer about cot availability costs one click. An answer that says the cot will be made up before she arrives, and there is a kettle in the room, costs one click and about eleven seconds. The guest reads both as coming from your property, because both do.
Only one of them is a reason to come back to you directly next spring.
The click transfers authorship, which cuts both ways. Your property name sits at the top of the message, your reputation is behind it, and if the reply promises a two o'clock check-in the guest arrives holding you to it. That is the risk in approving without reading it.
It is also the whole opportunity. The message goes out as yours either way. You are being credited with words you did not write. Write eleven seconds of them and the credit is deserved.
Meanwhile the inbox is being sorted for you. Expedia's own partner materials describe the rest of the layer. Property Message Center applies AI tagging and filtering to decide which messages reach a partner first. Property Answers handles traveler questions in real time. A Conversations API sits in pilot for partners building their own version across other platforms. So the company already shapes which questions arrive, and in what order. The reply is the last part of the exchange you still hold.
What the tool is genuinely good for. A ten-room property with one person covering the desk and the phone should not be typing the parking answer for the hundredth time. That is a good trade, and it is most of what the tool was built to do.
The cost is quieter. If nobody reads the fourth cot question this month, nobody puts the cot on the listing, and nobody mentions it at check-in. The question stops reaching anyone who could act on it.
Every hotel on Expedia has the same draft and the same open box. Almost none of them are typing in it.
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