# askng.it review: proactive WhatsApp guest messaging, tested > askng.it is, for all practical purposes, a new product: the February 2026 rebuild of Lacoly, which I ran for a year and rated a 4. I tested the new one in March at my 80-room Amsterdam hotel. It is a different animal, and it earns an 8. **Source:** https://6hoteliers.com/guest-communication/askng-review/ **Author:** sophie (Six Hoteliers) **Published:** 2026-04-06 **Updated:** 2026-05-31 **Rating:** 8/10 **Licence:** CC BY-SA 4.0 — attribution required ## Tool - **Name:** askng.it - **Website:** https://askng.it - **HQ:** Netherlands - **Founded:** 2019 - **Pricing:** Free tier; Standard €4.50/room/month (min €80); Premium €7.50/room/month (min €120) - **Best for:** Small and mid-size hotels wanting WhatsApp-led guest messaging with named PMS and door-lock integrations ## Sub-scores (1–10) - **setup:** 8 - **daily:** 8 - **integrations:** 8 - **pricing:** 6 - **privacy:** 9 ## Body askng.it is, for all practical purposes, a new product, and I do not say that lightly, because I ran its predecessor. It is the February 2026 rebuild of Lacoly, which was the WhatsApp messaging at my 80-room hotel in Amsterdam for the better part of a year. The 4 I gave Lacoly matched how I felt about it day to day: fine, functional, unremarkable. It answered guests when they wrote in, it did not embarrass me, and it never once made me sit up. The free tier was really a website chat button, the paid tier cost more than better-equipped rivals, there was no upselling and no analytics worth the name, and the AI was keyword matching wearing a costume. I had started taking demo calls with the alternatives, chatlyn and a couple of others, because "fine" is not a reason to stay. Then on 1 February 2026 Lacoly became askng.it, and the founder, Dirk Taselaar, announced that the whole thing had been rebuilt. I had heard that kind of line before. So I tested the new product properly in March, spreadsheet open, fully expecting to confirm my decision to leave. I did not leave. This is a review of what I found. The Lacoly heritage matters here, so let me set it straight before anything else. It was founded in 2019, and took on its first hotels that same year. That date matters more than it looks. 2019 is before COVID and before the AI rush, which means this product learned hotel communication the slow way, in the years when getting a guest a straight answer fast was the whole job and there was no large language model to hide behind. That is a head start no competitor we have reviewed can claim. The credentials it built under the Lacoly name still stand: the case study with The Dylan Amsterdam, a five-star property, and Partnership of the Year at the Independent Hotel Show 2023, won with the De Ware Jacob boutique hotel. So the history is short and clean: founded 2019 as Lacoly, working with hotels from the start, rebuilt and renamed askng.it on 1 February 2026. One company, one product line, a new name. ## What made me sit up: it stopped waiting Here is what I did not expect, and the reason this review exists rather than a cancellation email. Every guest-messaging tool I have used or demoed works the same way underneath. They are reactive. A guest writes in, the tool routes it, a chatbot or a staff member answers. The cleverness is all in the response. The shape never changes: the guest asks, the system answers. Lacoly worked exactly like that, and so does most of the [guest communication category](/guest-communication/). askng.it is built the other way round. The spine of the product is no longer the inbox, it is a proactive flow structure that reaches the guest before the guest reaches you. It asks for the arrival time before the guest emails to ask whether they can check in early. It offers the late checkout before the guest starts worrying about it. It surfaces the breakfast question, the airport transfer, the room upgrade, at the point in the stay when each one is relevant, without anyone on my team touching it. The reactive layer is still there and it is fine. But it is the smaller half now. The product is organised around anticipation. That sounds like a conference-stage line until you watch it run against a real arrival list. But that is what hospitality is. A good host does not wait to be asked. They have already noticed you look tired, already know you have a late flight, already have the answer ready before you have formed the question. For a decade this category has been an efficient way of answering questions. This is the first tool I have run that gets ahead of them. Duve and HiJiffy do proactive pre-arrival too, so askng.it did not invent it, but they bolt it onto a reactive inbox. askng.it makes it the point, and at my front desk that was the difference. ## What actually changed A fair amount, and more than I expected. This is not a logo swap with the same thin product underneath. The site is now English-language and structured like a real platform rather than a single WhatsApp trick. The old lacoly.com is still live and still Dutch and still branded Lacoly, which is its own small mess, but the new product lives at askng.it and it is materially broader. The clearest upgrade, and the one I can actually point at, is AI. The Lacoly site mentioned AI precisely nowhere. Not on the home page, not on the hotels page, not on pricing. The askng.it product now ships AI auto-replies, available from the free tier upward, and AI auto-translate on the paid tiers. The founder describes it as an assistant layer that works with the team, helping staff respond faster and translate instantly. That framing is honest. It is a copilot, not an autonomous agent that runs your front desk while you sleep. I will come back to whether it works, because naming a feature and shipping a good one are different things. The second change is channels. Last year this was WhatsApp and a fallback or two, and I marked it down hard for being a single-channel tool that fragments your communication rather than consolidating it. The new product runs WhatsApp, SMS, email, RCS and a web chat widget on the lower tiers, with Facebook, Instagram and the Booking.com and Airbnb OTA inboxes on Premium. The site is not consistent about which of the social channels are fully live: the channels page sells Facebook and Instagram as Premium features, while the integrations page still lists some as coming soon. That is the kind of thing a changelog would settle. But the core unified inbox is real in a way it simply was not before, and that addresses my single biggest complaint from the first review. And for the WhatsApp-first guest, which is most of mine, the whole transaction now happens inside the one thread they already use. They ask in WhatsApp, fill in a flow in WhatsApp, browse an upsell as a carousel in WhatsApp, and pay in WhatsApp, without being bounced to a web page, an app download, or an email they will not open. It even gathers the post-stay feedback in the same thread, instead of firing off a survey email nobody opens. That sounds like a small thing until you count how many guests drop off the moment you ask them to leave the conversation. Keeping it all in one place is the difference between a request completed and a request abandoned, and it is the clearest sign that someone here actually thought about what a guest wants rather than what is easy to build. The same clarity runs the other way, to my team: one thread, one guest, the context attached, nothing to reconcile across tabs. The third is the integration catalogue. Lacoly's old site waved vaguely at "multiple PMS" with status "pending" and named none. askng.it now publishes a proper integrations hub with named partners: PMS connectors including Mews, Apaleo, Opera Cloud, Protel, RoomRaccoon, Clock PMS, Guestline, StayNTouch and Lighthouse; payment processors Stripe, Mollie and Viva; and, the bit that caught my eye, door-lock and smart-access partners Omnitec, Hotek and FlexiPass, with SALTO KS listed as "coming soon" rather than live. Room access and digital keys did not exist on the old product at all. Online check-in with QR codes is new too. For a hotel my size, a named door-lock integration is the difference between a messaging toy and something that could sit in the operational stack. One caveat in the same breath. The named PMS connectors are marketing copy without technical depth, and the only ones I found external evidence for are Mews and RoomRaccoon, both of which still carry the old Lacoly name on their marketplaces. So "named" beats "vague", but it is not the same as "verified live under the new brand". For Mews I am reasonably confident it is two-way, from the older Lacoly documentation. For the rest, ask for a working demo against your specific PMS before signing. ## The pricing, with the spreadsheet open Pricing is where I live, so let me be precise. Last year there was effectively one flat rate, around €3.50 per room per month for the WhatsApp plan. Now there are three tiers, and they are published openly with a room-count calculator and no mandatory sales call. I will say plainly that I like this. Putting the numbers on the website is the single thing most hotel software vendors get wrong, and askng.it gets it right. If I need a demo call to see your pricing, I already know it is too expensive. Here I did not need one. The free tier is €0 with no card required. The honest catch, and it is easy to miss, is that the WhatsApp inbox on the free tier is view-only. You can watch, but you cannot reply through WhatsApp. So it is a trial and evaluation tier, not a working free WhatsApp channel. You do get the web chat widget, AI auto-replies, flows, a PMS integration and analytics, on one property with one user. That is more than the old "free" was, which really was just a chat button. But call it what it is: an eval, not a product you run a hotel on for nothing. Standard is €4.50 per room per month with an €80 monthly minimum. Premium is €7.50 per room per month with a €120 minimum. Yearly billing gets you the thirteenth month free. There is a 14-day trial on the paid plans, card required but not charged until it ends. Standard buys the multi-channel inbox, AI auto-translate, the flow builder, broadcasts, online check-in with QR codes, and the WhatsApp commerce primitives (forms, carousels, a shop). Premium adds Facebook and Instagram, the OTA inboxes, your own SMTP, flow analytics with CSV export, and the enterprise controls I actually care about at 80 rooms: custom roles and audit logs. On my 80 rooms, Standard is €360 a month, Premium €600, call it €4,320 and €7,200 a year on the annual deal. Not pocket money. And here is the part I had wrong in my head at first, so I will spell it out. Standard includes two WhatsApp "send moments" per reservation, Premium four. A send moment is a proactive template: the pre-arrival message, the checkout nudge, the upsell, the thing that fires on its own at the right point in the stay. Those are in the subscription. Replies inside the 24-hour window are free. You only pay more for extra automated touchpoints beyond your two or four (a flat €1 per room per month each) or for ad-hoc broadcasts, which run off a small prepaid credit balance. So the everyday proactive messaging, the part that does the actual work, is bundled and predictable. It matters more when you hold it against the tool I was about to switch to. [chatlyn](/guest-communication/chatlyn-review/), which I rated a 7, looks cheaper on the sticker: flat monthly tiers, no per-room maths, topping out around €311 a month. But chatlyn will not show you those numbers without a demo, and the flat fee is only half the bill. Every WhatsApp message sits on top, charged at Meta's per-message rate plus chatlyn's operational fee, from the first message. askng.it absorbs your first two or four. chatlyn meters all of them. So I did the sum on my own hotel. Two touchpoints per reservation, roughly 780 reservations a month at my occupancy, is about 1,500 outbound template messages. At Dutch WhatsApp rates, among the dearest in Europe, that is anywhere from €70 a month if they all count as utility to nearer €270 if they are marketing. Add that to chatlyn's flat tier and the "cheaper" option lands somewhere between €330 and €480 all in. askng.it Standard, with the touchpoints included, sits at €360. The tool with the higher per-room price ends up the same money or less, because it is not billing me by the message. I will not pretend that is the whole picture. The figure swings on whether Meta classes a message as utility or marketing, and on how many reservations you run. The honest summary is that the sticker price tells you almost nothing in this category, and once you do the maths askng.it is not the expensive option I had assumed. I set out the full reasoning, and the Meta rates behind it, in a separate piece on [what these tools really cost](/insights/what-hotel-whatsapp-tools-really-cost/). ## Testing askng.it in March I set it up properly, not just the widget. Front desk here runs three shifts, and my reception team speaks Dutch and English with a fair amount of German and the occasional Italian guest who has decided English is optional. So translation and pre-arrival messaging are the two things that would earn this tool a place. Setup was quick, same as last year. The web chat widget was live on a test page in under ten minutes. Connecting WhatsApp and pulling reservation data through took longer but was not painful. The dashboard is cleaner than the old Lacoly one, which the founder says was rebuilt with front-office teams. I cannot independently verify the "completely rebuilt" claim against the old UI from screenshots, but it does look like something a receptionist could use without a training session, and that counts for something. The pre-arrival flow is the part I would actually use. I built a flow that fires a couple of days before arrival, asks for an estimated arrival time and a breakfast preference, and offers a late checkout. This is the same kind of pre-arrival data collection that won Lacoly its Independent Hotel Show 2023 Partnership of the Year award with the De Ware Jacob boutique hotel, and the mechanics hold up. Reservation data came through from the PMS, the flow triggered, and replies landed in the inbox where a receptionist could pick them up. Online check-in with QR codes worked in the test, which is a real addition over the old product. The AI is the headline, so I leaned on it. The auto-translate is the better half. A test message in Italian came back translated for my receptionist, and her reply went out translated. For a three-language team that is practical, and it is the thing I would point a colleague to first. The auto-replies are weaker. I threw the same awkward question I used last year: "we're leaving tomorrow, is there anything we should sort out before we go?" Last year that got silence from a lookup table. This year it got a reasonable, if generic, reply about checkout time and luggage storage. So it has moved from keyword matching toward something that handles open phrasing. It is not deep. It is a competent assistive layer, exactly as the founder frames it, not an agent that resolves a complicated request on its own. But it is no longer a costume. And here is the part I did not expect to admire. Every vendor in this category spent the past year racing to put a chatbot on the front and let it answer guests unsupervised, because that is what the AI moment rewards. askng.it did the opposite. It used AI to help my staff respond faster and to translate instantly, and it left the judgement with the human. In an industry that sells human hospitality, refusing to automate the human out of the conversation while everyone else sprints the other way is not timidity. It is a position, and a brave one. The restraint is the point, not a limitation. I should still name what nags me, because the rating went up and I do not want that to read as a soft pass. The prepaid credit balance for broadcasts is the one corner of the pricing that is not a clean monthly number. The per-reservation touchpoints are included and predictable, which I did not expect, but the moment I want to fire a one-off promotion to past guests I am topping up a balance and watching it tick down. I would rather a flat per-message rate I can drop in a cell and forget. It is a niggle, not a dealbreaker. But across a budget year, I notice. ## Analytics and the revenue question Last year I marked this down hard for having no way to measure its own impact. Revenue attribution is a dealbreaker for me. If a tool cannot tell me whether it is making more money than it costs, I cannot defend it in a budget meeting. This is better, but not fixed. There is now flow analytics with CSV export on the Premium tier, plus service tracking and real-time staff alerts. The product names upselling as a module and claims a 22% conversion rate, but that figure, like the "65% reduced workload", the "98% open rate" and the "3M+ monthly interactions", is a self-reported vendor claim I could not corroborate anywhere, so I will not build a business case on it. What I can say is that the upselling capability now exists as a named feature where last year it was absent, and that the analytics let me export flow data and do my own attribution in a spreadsheet rather than guessing. It is not the closed-loop reporting that [Duve](/guest-communication/duve-review/) can show, where I have seen upselling ROI figures that hold up. But it is no longer a black box, and the machinery to chase ancillary revenue (€3–8 per occupied room-night, on my old model) is now there. Whether it captures that at my property I will only know after a full season with my own CSV exports checked by hand. I never trust a vendor's dashboard until I have. ## The Mistral angle, still the real differentiator There is one thing about this company I rated last year and rate higher now. Dirk Taselaar has been open about building on Mistral, the French AI provider, rather than routing guest data through OpenAI. In a category where nearly every competitor quietly sends guest conversations to servers in San Francisco, choosing a European model is a real position, not a marketing line. [HiJiffy](/guest-communication/hijiffy-review/) uses Mixtral, Mistral's open-source model, but alongside OpenAI among multiple providers. askng.it is the only tool in this category I have tested that is committed to the European option. Last year I dismissed this as not mattering much for a tool whose AI barely functioned. The AI now functions. So the data-residency argument has teeth it did not have before. If you care where guest conversations are processed, and at an Amsterdam hotel with European guests I do, this is worth real weight. We wrote about why this matters in our piece on the [AI providers' privacy problem](/insights/ai-providers-privacy-problem/), and askng.it sits on the right side of it. ## What is still thin Honesty cuts both ways, so here is what an upgraded product still has not got past me. Beyond my own use, there are no independent reviews. None. I am the only hotelier in my network running it, and nobody I spoke to at the Independent Hotel Show had it in their stack. The named customers on the new site (a couple of Dutch properties and one in London) are vendor-supplied. The "1,500+ hoteliers" and "28 countries" claims are self-reported and I could not corroborate them anywhere. A year on from my first look, the complete absence of anyone willing to vouch for it publicly still bothers me. An upgraded product with no independent voices is still a product taken largely on trust. There is no public API documentation, developer portal or webhooks reference. For a hotel my size that connects things, that is a gap; [Runnr.ai](/guest-communication/runnr-review/) at least exposes a bidirectional API you can reason about. Here you lean on the partner connectors, and on those being live under the new brand, which I cannot confirm. And the shipped-versus-coming-soon line is blurry, sometimes inside the same site. The channels page sells Facebook and Instagram as Premium features, while the integrations page lists some social channels as coming soon. SALTO KS is coming soon, TikTok is in the founder's announcement but not on the live pages, and there is no changelog to settle any of it. I do not do faith with software budgets. ## Who this is for now, and where I land Last year I said exactly one type of property should touch this: a sub-15-room place wanting to test WhatsApp for free, treating the widget as a proof of concept. That advice has changed. For a small or mid-size hotel that wants WhatsApp-led messaging as the core, with real multi-channel behind it, AI translation that works for a multilingual front desk, and named PMS and door-lock integrations, askng.it is now a credible option to shortlist. Run the free tier to learn the interface, then take the 14-day trial on Standard and put a real pre-arrival flow and the translation through a busy fortnight. Do the credits maths before you commit, and ask for a live demo against your exact PMS. For larger properties that need closed-loop revenue attribution and an API you can build against, it is not all the way there. But it is close, and the gaps are early-stage gaps, not design flaws. The pioneer who started European WhatsApp-for-hotels has built the platform the head start always promised, and it is built on the right instincts: anticipate the guest, keep the human in charge of the AI, keep the whole conversation in one place. Lacoly was a 4. askng.it is a different product, and it earns an 8. I do not hand those out, but it earns it on merit: the proactive structure, the disciplined use of AI, the WhatsApp-native experience, and a European data position no competitor matches. The one thing keeping it off the very top of my list is not the product. It is the track record. The broadcast credits are a small niggle and the revenue reporting is half-built, but the real cap is that a year on I am still the only hotelier I know running it, and a tool this good should have a queue of people willing to say so on the record. When that queue exists, this is a 9. *Sophie, for all six of us*