The €2,200-a-month assistant
A short-term rental portfolio pays for the same hour over and over. A guest writes at 23:40 to ask whether the parking is covered. Another asks at 06:15 how the hob works. A third wants to know if they can check in two hours early, and the answer depends on who checked out that morning. None of these questions is hard. All of them arrive when the owner is asleep, in a car, or answering a different guest.
The usual fix is a virtual assistant. This portfolio had one, at €2,200 a month, working a shift. Guests outside the shift waited. Guests inside the shift got an answer that depended on which assistant was on and how many tabs they had open. Reviews were chased when someone remembered. Booking admin, the cleaning schedule, the deposit holds and the platform messages, lived in the assistant's head and a shared spreadsheet.
This is what we replaced, and what we did not.
What the owner wanted
Three things, in the order they said them. Every guest answered quickly, at any hour, in the guest's language. The booking admin done without a person retyping it. Anything delicate, a complaint, a damage claim, a refund, a guest who sounded upset, handed to a human before any reply went out.
They did not want a chatbot on the listing. They did not want to change platforms. They did not want to learn a new system. The messages already arrived in two inboxes and one app, and that is where the owner wanted them to stay.
What the system reads
It reads the same inboxes the assistant read. The booking platform messages, the direct email, the house manual for each property, the calendar, and the cleaning roster. Nothing was migrated. Access was granted to the mailboxes and the calendar, and it can be withdrawn by the owner at any time.
From those sources it knows, for each property, what the manual says about parking, heating, Wi-Fi, check-in and check-out, and what the calendar says about who is arriving and leaving today. That is most of what a guest ever asks.
What it does
A guest message arrives. Within a few minutes the guest has a reply, in their language, answering the question from that property's manual and that day's calendar. If the question is one the manual answers, the reply goes out. If it is a request that changes something, an early check-in, a late check-out, an extra guest, the reply proposes an answer and the owner approves it with one tap. If it is anything sensitive, the system does not reply at all. It writes a short note to the owner with the message, the booking, and a suggested reply, and waits.
Alongside the messages, it does the admin that used to fill the assistant's shift. It confirms bookings, sends the check-in instructions at the right time for each property, reminds the cleaner the day before a turnover, and asks the guest for a review a day after check-out, once, politely, with no second chase unless the owner says so.
Guests are answered in under five minutes, at any hour. That number is the one the owner watches.
What stayed human
Every reply that commits the owner to something, and every reply to a guest who is unhappy. The owner reads those in the morning, or on the phone when they land, with the draft already written. The decision is theirs. The typing is not.
We hold to this in every system we run. A reply a guest reads is a promise from the owner, and the owner should see it before it goes. The system's job is to make that take ten seconds instead of ten minutes, and to make sure the routine questions never reach the owner at all.
What it cost the portfolio
The assistant cost €2,200 a month, every month, for a shift. The system runs around the clock and the running cost sits well below that line. The owner's own time went down, because the questions that used to be forwarded at midnight are answered at midnight, and the ones that need a decision arrive in one place with the context attached.
We publish the process, not the invoice, for client work. Our process is the same for every install: a 15-minute audit to find the cost line, a 48-hour system design before anything is built, a 14-day installation on the tools the client already uses, and 30 days of optimisation on real traffic. The guarantee that covers it is written into every proposal, verbatim: Measurable ROI in 90 days — or 50% of your project fee back.
What we would tell another portfolio owner
Start with the inbox, not the listing. The guest already knows how to write to you. Give them an answer at the hour they write.
Keep the house manual honest. The system answers from it. If the manual says the parking is free and it is not, the system will say the parking is free. The first week of any install is usually the week the manual gets fixed.
Decide in advance what a person must see. Write the list down. Complaints, damage, refunds, anything about safety, anything about money beyond the booking itself. The system follows the list. It does not guess.
Count the hour. The assistant's invoice was easy to read. The owner's own midnight hour was not on any invoice, and it was the more expensive of the two.
The audit
If you run a portfolio and a person, or a shift of people, answers the same questions every night, a 15-minute audit will tell you what the system would take off that line and what it would hand back to you to decide.
Want that question answered for your own business?
Book a free 15-minute audit, or reply to get a one-page written audit within two working days.