Akia review: the AI keeps getting better, and it's still in the wrong country

I first reviewed Akia and gave it a 5. Good technology, wrong jurisdiction. Several people wrote to tell me I was being unfair, that the AI quality should count for more. I went back and tested it again recently. The AI is better in some areas. The score hasn’t changed, because the problem hasn’t changed either. I make these technology decisions for a small group of hotels across Austria, so the jurisdiction question isn’t academic for me. A wrong choice deploys everywhere.

Some background worth knowing: Akia was founded by Evan Chen, a former engineering lead at Facebook (now Meta). The team is ex-Facebook engineers. That tells you two things. First, they know how to build AI products. Second, the company’s DNA is pure Silicon Valley. Keep both in mind as you read this.

Let me explain both sides.

The AI is still ahead

Akia markets their AI as a “GPT Concierge,” which tells you what’s underneath. The founders are ex-Facebook engineers, the company is in San Francisco, and the AI runs on GPT models. No surprises there. But I’ll say it plainly: Akia’s chatbot handles routine guest queries better than most tools in this category. I tested it with 40 different questions across four languages (English, French, German, Spanish), covering everything from check-in procedures to restaurant bookings to complaints about noise. It answered accurately about 85% of the time in English, around 70% in French and German, and roughly 65% in Spanish. Those numbers are ahead of every European competitor I’ve tested.

But I need to qualify my earlier claim that this is the best AI in the category. Other hoteliers I’ve spoken to tell a more mixed story. One operations manager at a boutique group in California told me the AI is “accurate only about half the time for more nuanced questions.” My own testing confirms a version of this: the AI handles factual, straightforward queries well, but when a guest asks something that requires judgment or context, the accuracy drops sharply. The gap between “best in category” and “good enough” depends on what your guests actually ask.

The conversational tone is calibrated well for English. Responses don’t sound robotic or overly enthusiastic. They sound like a competent concierge who types quickly. For English-speaking guests asking simple questions, the experience is good.

Workflow automation has also improved. You can now build multi-step sequences where the AI checks PMS availability, offers upsells, processes confirmations, and updates the booking record without staff involvement. I built a late checkout flow as a test: guest requests late checkout, AI checks if the room is available that day, offers a price, guest confirms, booking updates automatically. It worked. The time this saves at a busy front desk is real.

WhatsApp and messaging: technically strong, strategically problematic

Akia’s WhatsApp integration is well built once it’s running. Message delivery is fast, template management is clean, and the automation layer plugs directly into WhatsApp conversations. A guest can request room service, ask about spa availability, or change their checkout time via WhatsApp, and the AI handles most of it without human intervention.

Getting there is another story. Multiple users describe WhatsApp setup as “very complicated.” And the SMS side has its own problem: the links Akia sends via text message “look sketchy like they’re from a scam,” according to more than one user review. If your guests hesitate to click a link because it looks like phishing, your contactless check-in workflow is dead on arrival.

There’s also a channel gap that matters for European hotels: Akia has no integration with Booking.com or Expedia guest messaging. Airbnb messages take several minutes to sync. If your distribution leans on European OTAs (and most European hotels rely on Booking.com), you’re missing a channel that chatlyn and others already support.

The template approval workflow (required by Meta for outbound messaging) is managed within Akia’s dashboard. It’s more polished than what I’ve seen from some European competitors, where WhatsApp template management feels bolted on.

But here’s my issue. Every WhatsApp message, every guest reply, every piece of data exchanged in those conversations flows through Akia’s US infrastructure. The WhatsApp integration being technically capable doesn’t change where the data ends up.

The sovereignty question in 2026

When I wrote my first review, I called the data residency situation a concern. In 2026, I’d call it a structural problem.

The CLOUD Act hasn’t been amended. US authorities can still compel American companies to hand over data stored anywhere, including data belonging to European citizens. If your hotel uses Akia’s digital check-in (which is admittedly well designed), your guests’ passport photographs sit on American servers. A French guest’s identity document, stored under American jurisdiction, accessible to American authorities without notification to you or your guest. That’s not a theoretical risk. It’s the law as written.

I asked Akia about EU data residency again. The response was similar to last year: they’re “evaluating options.” No timeline, no commitment, no specifics. I’ve been hearing this from American SaaS companies for three years now. At some point, “evaluating” starts to look like “not prioritising.”

The European Data Protection Board has been more active in 2026 than in any previous year. Enforcement actions against hotels using US-hosted tools haven’t landed yet, but the regulatory direction is clear. If you adopt Akia today, you’re betting that enforcement will stay slow enough for it not to matter during your contract term. Maybe that bet pays off. I wouldn’t take it.

European market fit

Beyond the jurisdiction question, there are practical friction points for European hotels.

The default message templates still read American. “Hey there!” and “We’re stoked to welcome you!” are fine for a beach resort in California. For a four-star hotel in Vienna or a boutique property in Lyon, they’re jarringly wrong. You can rewrite everything, of course, but the defaults reveal who the product is built for.

PMS integrations lean towards the American market. Cloudbeds, StayNTouch, and Mews are well supported. But if you’re running Protel, Hetras, or another system common in the DACH region, check the integration depth before committing. “We integrate with X” can mean a deep two-way sync or a basic data import. In my testing, the European PMS connections were noticeably thinner.

Pricing is in US dollars. Not a major issue, but it adds currency fluctuation to your operating costs. It’s another small reminder that you’re a secondary market.

A practical annoyance: Android push notifications are unreliable. Staff don’t receive alerts until they physically open their phone. For a front desk team relying on mobile notifications to respond to guest messages, that’s not a minor bug. It means messages sit unanswered.

The alternatives are catching up

This is what’s changed most since my last review. European competitors like HiJiffy and Bookboost have improved their AI capabilities noticeably over the past year. They’re not at Akia’s level yet, I’ll be honest about that. But the gap has narrowed. HiJiffy’s chatbot, which I found clumsy when I first tested it, now handles multi-turn conversations with reasonable accuracy. Bookboost’s WhatsApp integration is solid and runs entirely within EU infrastructure.

A year ago, choosing an EU alternative meant accepting a significant quality trade-off. Today, the trade-off is smaller, and it keeps shrinking. At some point (soon, I think), the AI gap won’t be large enough to justify the sovereignty cost. We may already be there for hotels that aren’t heavily dependent on AI-driven automation.

What I’d tell a colleague

If you’re an American hotelier, Akia is probably the best guest messaging tool you can buy. The AI is excellent, the automation saves real time, and the jurisdiction question doesn’t apply to you.

If you’re European, the calculation is different. You’d be choosing strong (if inconsistent) AI while accepting US jurisdiction over your guest data, American cultural defaults in your guest communications, and dependency on a VC-funded company that treats Europe as a secondary market. For a hotel group like mine, where one decision affects every property, the exposure is proportionally larger. On that funding point: Akia raised $12M total, with a $6M Series A in January 2023. There’s been no new funding since. Three years without a raise, for a company burning venture capital, is something to watch. And while plenty of hoteliers use it, the ones I’ve spoken to describe the support experience as inconsistent at best. That matches what I saw during testing.

That trade-off was defensible when European alternatives were far behind. It’s harder to defend in 2026.

Every subscription is a vote for the ecosystem you want to exist in five years. I haven’t changed my mind about that.