Guest communication tools

We’ve spent the past few years testing guest communication tools. Ten of them. Across our hotels in Europe (from single independents to a fifteen-property group), with real guests who didn’t know they were part of an experiment and would have been annoyed if they’d found out.

What started as a practical exercise (which WhatsApp tool should we recommend?) turned into the kind of project that reveals just how differently six hoteliers think about technology. Marc, who runs a small group in Austria, refuses to install software from certain countries. Sophie won’t look at anything without a published price. Elena vetoes tools her seasonal staff can’t learn before lunch. Thomas, our resident technology director, takes apart every API like a child dismantling a clock. Anna reads the data processing agreement before she reads the features page. And I sit in the middle with my three small hotels wondering why none of these tools can just send a message without requiring a philosophy degree.

What follows isn’t a comparison table. You can find those on websites that make money when you click through. This is what we learned from running these tools in real hotels.

WhatsApp changed the conversation

When we first started looking at this category, email and SMS were still the primary channels. That’s shifted. WhatsApp has become the dominant way European hotel guests want to communicate, particularly in Southern Europe, the DACH region, and increasingly in the UK. Every tool we tested now offers WhatsApp integration. The differences aren’t in whether they support it, but in how well they do it: whether it’s a core part of the product or something bolted on to tick a feature box.

Pre-arrival messages via WhatsApp get open rates around 80-90%. The same message sent by email gets perhaps 40%. That gap alone justifies the category’s existence.

What we tested

HiJiffy: I tested this at our Cotswolds property first and it’s still the WhatsApp automation I’d start with. 2,500+ hotels in 60+ countries, Hotel Sacher reporting 96% automation, Leonardo Hotels at 93% across 281,000 queries. A European company (Lisbon) with responsive support. But the longer I’ve used it, the more the cracks show. The AI gets simple questions wrong, the dashboard is ugly and illogical, and WhatsApp message formatting is more limited than you’d expect. It feels more like well-packaged automation than properly implemented AI. Still a solid European option, but not the clear leader I once thought. Pricing isn’t published; we’re paying around €149/month per property. 7/10.

Bookboost: Anna put it through her usual privacy examination and it passed again. EU-hosted in Sweden, transparent data processing, unified inbox that handles WhatsApp alongside email and webchat. They raised EUR 3.6M in a Series A in March 2025, which suggests the company will be around for a while. Now running across 4,000+ properties in 25+ countries, with a guest CDP tracking 300+ data fields per guest (Anna liked that bit). One customer reported a 55% increase in direct bookings. Still the strongest privacy story in the category. The interface still won’t win design awards. 8/10.

Duve: Elena took it back into her Greek resort for a second season and warmed to it. They’ve raised $85M now ($60M Series B in December 2025), which makes them the best-funded in the category. Over 1,000 brands in 70+ countries. The WhatsApp integration improved, and her star staff member Katerina can now train new hires on it. Auto-translation remains brilliant. The upselling ROI is real: Sofitel reported 816% return. But talk to smaller hotels and you hear a different story: bugs, hidden fees, and a product that feels built for chains, not independents. Still too much for a brand-new seasonal hire on day one. 7/10.

LIKE MAGIC: Elena also tested this Swiss alternative and found what she’d been looking for after Duve. Spun out of the SV Group in 2023, so it has hotel DNA rather than tech-bro DNA. Her newest hire learned the basics in forty-five minutes. Clean design, good WhatsApp integration, sensible guest journey automation. Stay KooooK (SV Group’s own hotel brand) reports 95% self-check-in, though take that with a pinch of salt since they’re testing their parent company’s product. More convincing: Schani Hotels in Vienna saw a 900% rise in digital adoption. The catch is only four PMS integrations so far, which limits who can actually use it. Swiss-hosted on Google Cloud. Still young, but promising. 7/10.

Runnr.ai: Thomas found the WhatsApp-first architecture he’d wanted after Quicktext, but the longer he looked, the more concerns surfaced. Founded in 2022 by ex-Booking.com people in Utrecht, small team, $2.2M raised. The API documentation is complete and the PMS integration is bidirectional, but the AI makes promises to guests the front desk never approved, notifications come by email instead of in-app, and the quality hasn’t improved at the pace you’d expect. Pricing starts at €100/month in platform fees before WhatsApp costs, which makes the “€3/room” marketing misleading for smaller hotels. Industry gossip about a growth-and-exit strategy doesn’t help. The technical foundation is there, but the signals add up to a company chasing scale over substance. 6/10.

chatlyn: Anna reviewed this Vienna-based platform and found solid privacy foundations in a young company. Founded late 2022, they’ve already raised EUR 8M in a Series A (June 2025) and serve 1,000+ properties. Austrian jurisdiction means real GDPR oversight. They won a World Travel Award in 2024, and they’re the only platform we found that integrates both Airbnb and Booking.com messaging into one inbox. Pricing is accessible at €3/room/month. One odd thing: despite all that, we couldn’t find a single hotelier willing to publicly recommend it, which tells you something about either their marketing priorities or their customer base. The basics are right. 7/10.

Quicktext: Thomas revisited the French AI chatbot. 3,500+ hotels in 76 countries, and they claim 85% automation. Velma still converts website visitors into direct bookings at a meaningful rate, and the WhatsApp channel works, though it feels added-on rather than native. The integration problem persists: what gets called “full integration” is still a one-way data read for most PMS connections. Pricing starts around $299/month, which isn’t cheap for what amounts to a chatbot with limited integrations. The Quinta rebrand added confusion without adding clarity. And we should mention: we heard a serious billing abuse allegation from Edgar Suites at a conference this year. We can’t verify the claim, but it’s worth asking about before signing a contract. 6/10.

Akia: Marc gave it another look and stands by his position. Built by ex-Facebook engineers, $12M raised, but no new funding since January 2023, which is a long time in this market. The AI is capable, but hoteliers we’ve spoken to say it works “half the time for nuanced questions,” which matches what we saw. WhatsApp setup was described to us as “very complicated” by two separate properties. It’s American-built, American-hosted, and your guests’ passport data sits under US jurisdiction. European alternatives have closed the gap enough that the sovereignty trade-off is harder to justify than it was a year ago. 5/10.

Canary Technologies: Marc reviewed the other major American player. Big is an understatement: $175M raised, roughly $600M valuation, 20,000+ hoteliers, and a wall of industry awards. American hoteliers love it. But the guest messaging feels like an afterthought next to their core tipping and upsell products. Other hoteliers tell us about blurry ID photos in digital check-in and a robotic AI tone, which doesn’t inspire confidence for guest-facing communication. The European market fit is poor. Digital tipping doesn’t translate to European hospitality culture. Same jurisdiction concerns as Akia, amplified by scale. 5/10.

askng.it: Sophie examined this Dutch startup’s free tier and found that free is a price, not a strategy. Nobody we spoke to had heard of it, and we couldn’t find a single independent reference from a hotelier. The website’s metadata claims a 2019 founding date, but the Independent Hotel Show profile points to 2022, which doesn’t inspire confidence. The free tier is a chat widget and not much else. Basic WhatsApp messaging works. They do have The Dylan Amsterdam as a real client, so it’s not vapourware. But the numbers don’t make sense once you calculate the upselling revenue you’re missing by using a tool without those capabilities. Might work for a ten-room guesthouse testing whether WhatsApp matters. Not a serious option beyond that. 4/10.

What we agree on (mostly)

After the testing and the video calls (one memorable session where Marc and Anna debated jurisdiction law for twenty minutes while the rest of us ate lunch) we landed on a few shared conclusions.

WhatsApp is now the primary channel, not a nice-to-have. The open rates compared to email make this self-evident. HiJiffy’s automation rates (96% at Hotel Sacher, 93% at Leonardo Hotels) show what’s possible when WhatsApp is the core channel rather than something bolted on. HiJiffy and Runnr.ai are the strongest here. Quicktext and Canary are the weakest.

Staff adoption still determines everything. Elena and I see this identically. If your team doesn’t use the tool properly because it’s confusing, slow, or requires too many clicks, none of the AI features matter. LIKE MAGIC and Bookboost are the simplest to learn. Duve remains the hardest, though it’s improved.

Where the data lives isn’t a detail. Anna and Marc approach this from different angles (she thinks about GDPR enforcement, he thinks about European tech independence across his hotel group) but they land in the same place. European hotels should know which jurisdiction governs their guest data. Bookboost and chatlyn are the clearest on this. Akia and Canary are the most concerning.

Nearly every AI feature runs through OpenAI in the US. This one surprised us. Anna dug into the sub-processor lists and privacy policies across all ten tools and found the same name over and over: OpenAI LLC, San Francisco. Runnr.ai lists it in their sub-processor documentation. Duve lists it as a sub-processor for generative AI. chatlyn says it openly in their marketing. Bookboost’s “hospitality GPT” is built on it. Quicktext’s privacy policy mentions a US-based LLC without naming it. Even tools that lead with European credentials still route guest conversations through American AI servers the moment any “smart” feature kicks in. The only exception we found was askng.it, whose founder has publicly committed to using Mistral, a French AI provider. HiJiffy uses multiple providers including Mixtral (Mistral’s open-source model) alongside OpenAI and others. We wrote a separate piece about this because we think it matters more than most hoteliers realise.

Integration quality varies wildly. Thomas tested the API depth of every tool and came away with strong opinions. What gets called an “integration” in this space ranges from genuine bidirectional data exchange (Runnr.ai, from a team of about ten ex-Booking.com engineers) to a read-only connection dressed up with marketing language (Quicktext, Canary). LIKE MAGIC has only four PMS integrations, which is honest but limiting. Ask for the API documentation before you buy. If they won’t show it, that’s your answer.

Pre-arrival automation is where the money is. Sophie tracked where the time savings and revenue come from. Automated pre-arrival messages via WhatsApp that answer the questions guests would otherwise ask at check-in, plus upsell offers sent at the right moment. Duve’s upselling ROI figures (Sofitel reported 816%) and Runnr.ai’s operational savings (Center Parcs saved 540 hours per month) tell the story from different angles. Duve and HiJiffy are strongest here. askng.it barely scratches the surface.

Where we’d point you

If you want the best WhatsApp automation with European credentials: HiJiffy. My pick. The setup requires patience (Meta’s verification process is a headache) but the result is worth it.

If data privacy is your primary concern: Bookboost. Anna’s pick, unchanged. Nobody does EU data sovereignty better in this category.

If you want a full guest platform and have the team for it: Duve. Elena raised her score this year. If your staff are stable and tech-comfortable, the depth is unmatched.

If you want simplicity without sacrifice: LIKE MAGIC. Elena’s other pick, for hotels that found Duve too much. Clean, modern, learnable in under an hour.

If integration quality matters most to you: Runnr.ai. Thomas’s pick. WhatsApp-first with the API depth to back it up.

If you want a European alternative at a fair price: chatlyn. Anna’s second recommendation. Young but built on the right foundations, at the right price.

If you want a European AI chatbot for direct bookings: Quicktext. Thomas wishes the integrations were better, but the chatbot earns its keep.

If you want American AI and don’t mind US hosting: Akia. Marc will have opinions about your decision. The AI is good when it works, but users report inconsistency on nuanced questions, and there’s been no new funding since January 2023.

If you’re testing whether WhatsApp matters at all: askng.it. Sophie wouldn’t spend more than a month on it. Zero reviews on any platform and a conflicting founding date, but the free widget lets you prove the concept before spending real money elsewhere.

If you’re an American hotel chain: Canary Technologies. $175M in funding and 20,000+ customers. It’s not built for the European market, but it’s dominant in its home one.

There’s no perfect tool. There’s only the right set of trade-offs for your hotel, your staff, your guests, and your conscience about where their data ends up.