AI guest messaging for Host Tools
TravelPal connects to Host Tools with the Auth Token you generate on your own Settings page, then answers each guest in the reservation thread, which on Host Tools is where the whole conversation lives. It reads your listings, reservations, and calendar, sells late checkout and early check-in at your prices, and writes the new hour onto the reservation itself. Host Tools also reports the messages your own team sends, so when a colleague answers in the inbox the concierge steps back off that thread.
One connection, running both ways. Every item on it is detailed below.
What TravelPal reads from Host Tools
Host Tools is run by owner-managers and small teams who list on Airbnb, VRBO, Booking.com and Houfy and want the automation without a full property management suite under it.
The whole portfolio in one read
Host Tools hands back every listing on a single call: name, address, photos, amenities with their counts, house rules, and your check-in and check-out hours. It also publishes a real IANA time zone per listing, so a departure reminder lands in the property's local time rather than yours. All of it becomes the knowledge base the concierge answers from, with one deliberate exception: the key collection field is left out, because that is where lockbox codes get typed.
Accepted is the word that means a booking
Host Tools publishes four reservation statuses and confirmed is not one of them: a booking that is really happening says accepted. Only accepted is treated as a stay, so an inquiry or a pending request never gets a guest link and nobody who has not actually booked is handed one.
Every channel Host Tools carries
Airbnb, VRBO, Booking.com, Houfy, and bookings you create inside Host Tools itself all arrive with their reservations, and each guest is handled by where they came from. A reservation pulled in from an iCal feed names the feed's domain where a channel would be, so TravelPal records that channel as unknown rather than filing it under direct.
The reservation is the thread
Host Tools keeps the conversation on the reservation rather than in a separate inbox record, so the full history arrives with the stay, oldest message first. The concierge picks up mid-stay already knowing what your team told that guest last week.
When your own team answers, TravelPal hears it
Host Tools files your team's posts and the guest's posts on the same reservation, and it reports both. So when one of your people answers in the Host Tools inbox, that post reaches TravelPal and the concierge stands down on that stay instead of answering over a colleague.
What TravelPal writes back
Every message goes out through Host Tools, never around it, so your own inbox shows exactly what each guest was told.
One route, the guest's own channel thread
Host Tools has a single send and it posts into the reservation's thread, so an Airbnb guest is answered inside Airbnb and a Booking.com guest inside Booking.com. The API publishes no email and no SMS send, and TravelPal does not invent one: a guest with no channel thread is left to your team rather than quoted something they would never see.
Sold hours land on the reservation
A late checkout or early check-in the guest paid for is written onto the Host Tools reservation as the new check-out or check-in hour, so the hour your cleaners work to is the hour the guest bought. Host Tools accepts a single-field update, so TravelPal changes the hour it sold and touches nothing else on the record. What gets offered, and at what price, is yours to set in upsells.
Held questions go to your team, not into the thread
Every message Host Tools can send is one the guest sees, and the reservation's notes box is a single free-text field your own staff type into, overwritten wholesale by whatever writes it last. TravelPal puts a team note in neither place. When it is unsure it holds the reply and asks your team in your own channel and by email, and the posts on the Host Tools reservation stay guest conversation and nothing else.
Connected in four steps
Host Tools switches API access on for your account, and TravelPal does the rest itself.
Generate the Auth Token
Host Tools, then Settings, at the bottom of the page: Generate an Auth Token. It is per user and it does not expire, so this is a one-time step you do yourself with nobody in the way.
Ask Host Tools to clear your account for sending
Sending a guest message is partner access on Host Tools, so one email to support@hosttools.com puts your account on the list and gets you the partner API key, which also raises your rate ceiling. Reading your portfolio does not need it; answering guests does.
Paste the token and the key into TravelPal
Both are checked against your account on the spot with one read that mints nothing and spends nothing, so a wrong paste costs a retype. There is no token budget here, unlike Guesty, where a handful of bad pastes locks the account out for a day.
The event feed sets itself up, then listings import
Host Tools notifies one address for the whole account, so if you already send Host Tools events into your own automation, move that first. Then your listings import in one pass, because Host Tools returns the whole portfolio at once, every accepted reservation from then on gets its own private guest link, and the flat $25 per unit per month starts covering all of it.
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 Host Tools connection will not do
Every property management system draws its own lines, and the ones Host Tools draws are worth knowing before you switch anything on. TravelPal works inside them rather than around them.
A booking with no channel thread cannot be answered
Reservations you create inside Host Tools have no channel thread behind them, and there is no email or SMS route on this API to fall back to, so those guests are unreachable and TravelPal says so rather than scheduling messages into nothing. The same applies to anything arriving through an iCal feed, which names a domain rather than a channel. Airbnb, VRBO, Booking.com and Houfy guests all have a thread and are answered in it.
Host Tools can notify one address, account-wide
There is a single slot for it and the newest thing written there takes it, so another tool you connect later displaces TravelPal, and Host Tools reports that to nobody. TravelPal reads what is in the slot before it writes, and on disconnect removes only its own address, never one that is not. Catching up afterwards means walking the portfolio, because Host Tools filters reservations by the stay's own dates rather than by when the booking last changed.
Nights cannot be added or held
The Host Tools reservation update carries no dates, and its calendar write can set a price and a minimum stay but cannot take a night off the market. So an extra night is not sellable here: TravelPal reads your calendar night by night, and hands an extra-night request to your team instead of booking it in the background. Where two channels price the same night differently, no figure is quoted at all, because Host Tools prices per channel and names none of them canonical.
Check-in and check-out move in whole hours
Host Tools stores those times as an hour of the day, 0 to 23, with no minutes. A 1pm late checkout writes cleanly. A 12:30 one is refused rather than rounded down to noon, because rounding would tell your cleaners a time the guest did not buy and send somebody to the door half an hour early.
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.
Host Tools integration FAQ
Do I need Host Tools to turn anything on before TravelPal can answer guests?
Yes, one thing, and it is one email. You generate the Auth Token yourself at the bottom of the Host Tools Settings page and it never expires. Sending a guest message is partner access on Host Tools, so support@hosttools.com clears your account and issues the partner API key, which you paste beside the token. It also raises your rate ceiling.
Can TravelPal answer a guest who booked direct?
Not through Host Tools. A reservation created inside Host Tools has no channel thread, and the Host Tools API publishes no email or SMS send, so there is nowhere for a reply to go. Airbnb, VRBO, Booking.com and Houfy guests all have a thread and are answered in it. TravelPal will not quote an upsell to a guest it cannot reach.
What happens when one of my team replies in the Host Tools inbox?
TravelPal sees it and stands down on that stay. Host Tools reports your team's posts on a reservation as well as the guest's, so a colleague stepping into a thread is something the concierge notices rather than talks over. Everything TravelPal sends goes out through Host Tools as well, so the posts on the reservation are the whole record of what that guest was told.
Can TravelPal sell an extra night on Host Tools?
No. The Host Tools reservation update carries no dates and its calendar write cannot take a night off the market, so an added night cannot be recorded there. Late checkout and early check-in can: they are written onto the reservation as the new hour, on the hour. An extra-night request is handed to your team.
Not the system you run?
TravelPal connects to 33 property management systems. These are the ones nearest Host Tools in how widely they are used.
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