Guest messaging and upsells for Booking Automation
TravelPal connects to Booking Automation with a refresh token you make in your own account, then answers each guest in the channel thread their booking came from: Airbnb, Booking.com or Vrbo. It reads your properties and the room types under them, every booking including the ones still marked new, the messages and team notes on those bookings, the invoice lines, the guest's language and your availability. A paid early check-in is written onto the booking itself, one field at a time, and nothing else on that booking is touched.
One connection, running both ways. Every item on it is detailed below.
What TravelPal reads from Booking Automation
Booking Automation is run by owner-managers and small property management companies who keep their inventory as room types under a property, usually with a single unit behind each room type.
A property and its room types become your units
A unit here is a pair. The property carries the address, the coordinates, the check-in window, the checkout time, the house rules and your directions; the room type carries its own description, how many people it sleeps and the minimum and maximum stay, and it is what a booking actually points at. TravelPal joins the two, and where one property holds several room types each unit is labeled with both names so your team can tell which one a guest is standing in. Booking Automation does not return property or room pictures through its API, so every image in your guidebook is one you supply.
A booking marked new is a live booking
Booking Automation files a booking under one of six statuses, and new is the one that catches people out: it means a real arriving guest the host has not opened yet, not a draft, so TravelPal provisions it exactly like a confirmed booking. A request or an inquiry is treated as still pending. The status called black is how a host blocks dates rather than books a guest, and those rows sit in the same booking list as the real ones, so TravelPal reads them for the owner block or maintenance hold they are and sends nothing.
The booking is the thread, and your notes are in it
There is no separate conversation record in this API: messages hang off the booking id, and the notes your team has left sit in the same list as the guest's own lines. TravelPal reads the whole list oldest first and keeps every line under the label Booking Automation gave it, so a guest message, your team's reply, a channel notification and an internal note stay apart. Each booking also carries a two-letter guest language, so the first answer is already in it.
Amounts on the booking, currency on the property
Invoice lines come across with their description and their total, typed the way Booking Automation types them, as a charge or a payment, and the ones a person keyed in by hand are marked as such. They arrive once your token carries the financial scope. The amount sits on the booking and the currency sits on the property, so TravelPal reads both and never quotes a euro-priced apartment in dollars.
What TravelPal writes back
Every message goes out through Booking Automation, never around it, so your own inbox shows exactly what each guest was told.
Replies in the channel's own inbox
This system has one outbound rail and it is the channel's inbox. An Airbnb, Booking.com or Vrbo guest is answered inside the thread they wrote in, which is the same thread your team reads and the channel can audit. Nothing is sent around it, and Booking Automation publishes no email or SMS send to go around it with.
Early check-in, on the booking's arrival time
A paid early check-in moves the arrival time on the Booking Automation booking, so your cleaning schedule reads the real time rather than a note somebody has to notice. What the guest bought can also be written into one of the booking's own custom fields, custom1 to custom10, whichever one you nominate, and TravelPal refuses any other field name because this API answers an unknown key with a warning rather than an error. TravelPal sells at your prices and takes no cut: how upsells work.
Only the field that changed
Booking Automation accepts a partial update, so TravelPal sends the booking id and the one thing the guest bought. Rates, notes and anything your team edited that morning are left exactly as they were, because they were never part of the write.
Extra nights on direct bookings, checked first
An added night is a real date change, and TravelPal makes one only on a booking Booking Automation marks as direct. This API applies its availability check when a booking is made and not when one is changed, so TravelPal reads your room's own availability for the added nights first and refuses the write on anything short of a clear yes for every night. A booking that came from a channel is left as it stands and the guest is pointed at the channel's own change flow. A booking with no channel on it is left alone too, because a blank channel is not proof of a direct booking.
Connected in four steps
The credentials are yours to create inside Booking Automation. TravelPal does the rest itself.
Make an invite code in your API settings
Booking Automation account, then API settings. Give the code read and write on bookings, bookings-personal and bookings-financial, plus read on properties and inventory, and pick all of them now: scopes are fixed the moment the code is made, so a missing one means a fresh code rather than an edit. The code itself is good for 24 hours. There is no partner application and no approval queue: it is your account and your code.
Trade it once for the token TravelPal keeps
The invite code is exchanged one time for a refresh token, and that refresh token is the credential TravelPal stores. Neither the invite code nor the 24-hour access token is. Onboarding does the exchange with you, and TravelPal checks the token against your account on the spot: if a scope is missing it names the scope rather than failing quietly a week later. The marketplace organization box on the connect screen is for Booking Automation's own integration partners and stays empty on a normal account.
Point the booking alert at TravelPal
Booking Automation sends its booking webhook to a URL you set in the control panel, so paste in the address TravelPal gives you, exactly as it is given. New bookings and significant changes such as date changes and cancellations then arrive as they happen. Message activity can ride along on one of those deliveries and TravelPal acts on it when it does, but it also looks for new guest messages on a paced schedule rather than counting on being told.
Properties import, then your time zones
Your properties and room types come in, and every booking from then on gets its own private guest link. Set each property's time zone with us while you are there: Booking Automation keeps one zone for the whole account and none on a property, and every scheduled message, quiet-hours rule and checkout offer runs off it. The import is paced, because Booking Automation meters API use in credits over a five minute window and that budget belongs to the whole account rather than to one connection.
The dashboard shows the connection the whole way: connected, last sync, and any error in plain words. The rest of going live is covered in what onboarding involves.
What the Booking Automation connection will not do
Every property management system draws its own lines, and the ones Booking Automation draws are worth knowing before you switch anything on. TravelPal works inside them rather than around them.
Inside Booking Automation, only channel guests can be reached
Booking Automation's send is documented for bookings that came from a channel, and the channels its own reference names for delivery are Airbnb, Booking.com and Vrbo. A booking taken on your own booking page has no inbox in there for anyone to write into, and neither does one that arrived as a calendar feed, which brings dates without a channel connection behind them. TravelPal does not message those guests through Booking Automation. They keep the private guest link their booking comes with, and that is where they talk to the concierge. An Expedia guest is in the same position: Booking Automation's reference does not name Expedia among the channels a message is delivered to, so TravelPal answers that guest on the link rather than sending into a thread that is not documented to arrive.
Notes on the booking are read here, not written
Booking Automation carries four kinds of line on a booking, and one of them is a note from the host the guest never sees. TravelPal reads those, so what your team has already written is in view before it answers. Writing one is a different question: this API does not publish that a send honors the note setting, and the cost of guessing wrong is a private note landing in a guest's Airbnb thread. TravelPal writes none here at all. Anything it holds for a person reaches your team in your own channel and by email instead of inside the guest's thread.
A late checkout does not become a departure time
A Booking Automation booking has a field for the arrival time and none for the departure. So a paid early check-in updates the booking itself and a paid late checkout does not: the booking keeps the checkout time it was made with, while the sale reaches your team through TravelPal and through the custom field you nominate.
A room type is not always one door
Inventory is organized by room type, and a room type can cover several identical units. TravelPal knows which room type a guest booked but not which of those doors they are standing at, so one set of access instructions is shared across them, and an account built that way wants a person's eye on it before it goes live. It is also why TravelPal holds no nights on your calendar here: the only way to close a date closes the whole room type, and reopening it puts that room type's full inventory back on sale, including units you had closed for your own reasons.
Where the AI is not sure, it stops and asks your team rather than guessing. That is the same on every system: see the guardrails.
Booking Automation integration FAQ
What exactly do I paste into TravelPal to connect Booking Automation?
A refresh token. In your own account's API settings you generate an invite code with read and write on bookings, bookings-personal and bookings-financial plus read on properties and inventory, that code is exchanged once for a refresh token, and the refresh token is what goes into TravelPal. The invite code and the access token both expire after 24 hours, which is why neither is the credential. The marketplace organization box is for Booking Automation's own integration partners and stays blank on a normal account, and nobody at Booking Automation has to approve anything first.
Can TravelPal answer my direct bookings?
Not inside Booking Automation. Its message send is documented for bookings that came from a channel, and its reference publishes no email or SMS send, so a guest who booked on your own booking page cannot be written to in there. That guest gets the private TravelPal guest link with their booking and talks to the concierge on it, and TravelPal can still act on the booking from there, including adding a night once those nights are confirmed free.
My control panel says Beds24. Is this the right connection?
Yes. Booking Automation runs on the Beds24 platform under its own brand, and its own published API reference points at the Beds24 documentation, which is why some screens and field names in your control panel carry Beds24 wording. TravelPal connects to Booking Automation's own host with a token from your own account. If your subscription is with Beds24 directly rather than with Booking Automation, use the Beds24 connection instead.
Will TravelPal use up my Booking Automation API credits?
It draws from them, and it is built not to use them up. Booking Automation meters API use in credits over a five minute window, and that budget belongs to the account, so every tool you have connected to it draws from the same pool. TravelPal paces its reads against that, holds one access token for its full 24 hours rather than minting a new one per call, and waits to be told about a booking instead of re-reading your whole portfolio to find out.
Not the system you run?
TravelPal connects to 33 property management systems. These are the ones nearest Booking Automation in how widely they are used.
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