Mews guest messaging vs HiJiffy: do you still need the WhatsApp tool?

One thing to be straight about before anything else: I have run HiJiffy’s category but not Mews’s version of it, because nobody has yet. Mews announced Mews Guest Messaging at Unfold 2026, it comes with the advanced plan, and the full rollout is promised for August. So this isn’t two tools I ran side by side. It’s what Mews has announced, weighed against what HiJiffy actually does once it’s live, which James tested across his boutique hotels in England. Where the Mews side is a claim rather than a tested fact, I’ll say so.

I run technology for about fifteen hotels in France, on Apaleo with a messaging tool on top, so I spend my time thinking about exactly this question: what a native inbox does to the bolt-on tools we’ve spent years testing.

Where they overlap

Almost entirely, on paper, which is the whole problem for HiJiffy.

Both are a WhatsApp-first inbox with an AI sitting on top that answers the recurring guest questions from the property’s own knowledge. HiJiffy gathers WhatsApp and web chat, ties messages to a booking, and its Aplysia AI handles parking, check-in times, restaurant hours and the rest. The Mews Agent does the same job description. The difference isn’t the feature list, it’s where the data sits. HiJiffy reads the reservation, the guest profile and the folio back through a connector before it can answer well. The Mews Agent starts with all of it, because the guest, the stay and the bill are already in the system. On the two jobs this category is built around, organising the messages and answering them, a native inbox has the deepest integration there is, which is none required. That’s the structural reason a Mews hotel should expect the native option to start in front.

Where HiJiffy still earns its place

Three things, and they’re real, not consolation prizes.

It works regardless of your PMS. This is the big one and it’s easy to miss. Mews Guest Messaging only helps you if you run Mews. James runs Guestline. My group runs Apaleo. For any hotel not on Mews, the native inbox isn’t on the table at all, and HiJiffy stands entirely on its own merits, which James rated a 7. If you’re reading this and you’re not a Mews customer, you can mostly stop here: the comparison is moot, and the HiJiffy review is the page you want.

The European model question. Mews hasn’t said which AI writes its guests’ replies, and the signs point to an American one. HiJiffy runs Aplysia across multiple providers including Mixtral, the open-source model from French company Mistral, so it can at least offer a European option for the model that sees every guest name, contact detail and booking context. Anna, who audited Mews on privacy, would not put guests in front of an AI whose model the vendor won’t name. Until Mews names theirs, that’s a card HiJiffy holds and the native inbox doesn’t.

Pre-arrival open rates, if they hold up. James measured pre-arrival WhatsApp messages opening at around 85%, against 40% for the emails they replaced. That’s HiJiffy’s strongest tested number. Whether the Mews Agent matches it is unknown, because it isn’t live, so this is HiJiffy’s to lose rather than Mews’s to claim.

Where the native option is weaker, for now

I want to be fair to HiJiffy here, because the launch is not the finished article.

Mews launches its inbox without email or Airbnb, both promised later. HiJiffy and the rest pull more channels together today. And a brand-new AI agent will have its own teething: James found HiJiffy’s AI fell apart on compound messages and got simple questions wrong for the first month, and there’s no reason to expect the Mews Agent ships flawless. The honest read is that on launch day the native tool is narrower than the mature specialist. The less comfortable read is that a unified inbox is precisely the kind of feature a PMS absorbs and improves over a couple of releases, and Mews can see data HiJiffy never will.

I’ll also be honest about HiJiffy’s own faults, since this isn’t a defence of it. James found the dashboard a chore to move around, the rich-media support inside WhatsApp thin, and Meta’s verification a two-week ordeal before the first message. None of that gets better because Mews turned up. It just means the bar HiJiffy has to clear to justify a separate bill, on top of your PMS, is now higher.

What I’d actually do

If you’re a Mews hotel: don’t rip anything out on a press release. Turn Mews Guest Messaging on when it ships in August, run HiJiffy alongside it for a quiet month, and keep HiJiffy only if it earns its separate cost on something the native one cannot do. Right now that shortlist is short: the European-model option for the privacy-minded, and the pre-arrival open rate if it clearly beats the Mews Agent in your own numbers. The inbox itself, and answering routine questions, is now a free and native feature for you. Paying twice for it doesn’t last.

If you’re not a Mews hotel, none of the above applies. HiJiffy is a capable WhatsApp tool that doesn’t care what PMS you run, and it’s judged on its own in our guest communication reviews and in James’s writeup. The model question I raised is a privacy one as much as a competitive one, and we went into where this category’s AI actually runs separately. Native or bolt-on, it’s the same question, and worth asking whoever you buy from.

• Thomas