AI that answers your Hostex conversations
TravelPal connects to Hostex with one access token you create in your own Host Portal, then answers guests inside the conversation their booking already has, whichever of the twenty channels Hostex sells through it arrived on. It reads your properties, your stays, the whole message history and your availability calendar, quotes upgrades at your prices, and writes a paid late checkout onto the stay itself. Hostex gives a booking one thread and publishes no second way out, so everything a guest is told sits in the record your team already reads.
One connection, running both ways. Every item on it is detailed below.
What TravelPal reads from Hostex
Hostex is run by short-term rental companies whose bookings arrive from Asia-Pacific channels such as Agoda, Trip.com, Tujia and Xiaozhu as much as from Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com.
Properties, with the channels each unit sells on
A Hostex property carries a name, an address, coordinates, your own groups and tags, and the list of channels that unit is listed on. Each stay then names the channel it came in through, so an Agoda guest and a guest who booked on your own site are handled differently from the first message. What the property record does not carry is your house rules, your check-in times and your photos, and that gap is the one piece of real setup work this connection asks of you.
A multi-room booking arrives as one stay per room
Hostex gives every room in a booking its own stay code under one shared reservation code, and TravelPal follows the stay. Room two of a three-room group booking gets its own guest link, its own dates and its own answers, rather than disappearing behind room one.
Six reservation statuses, and one means the guest is coming
Hostex marks a stay accepted, waiting on acceptance, waiting on payment, canceled, denied or timed out. Accepted is the only one of the six that means the guest is coming: a booking still waiting on the channel or on the guest's payment is carried as a hold rather than greeted as settled, and denied and timed out are closed requests that never become a stay. A booking Hostex has not yet allocated to a unit is left alone until it has one.
Conversations come in whole, with HostGPT messages marked
A Hostex conversation arrives with its full history, oldest message first. Hostex tells us a conversation changed without saying who spoke in it, so TravelPal opens the thread and checks the sender on each message before it answers anything. Hostex labels the messages its own HostGPT wrote and lists the knowledge sources it cited, so those are never read as something one of your people typed.
Past stays, and what each one earned
A Hostex reservation query reaches back 180 days from checkout unless it is told otherwise, so the backfill says how far back to look and your older stays arrive alongside the live bookings. Each stay carries its rate as separate lines, with the room rent kept apart from cleaning and the other fees, which is what makes the before and after on an upsell a real comparison instead of a guess.
What TravelPal writes back
Every message goes out through Hostex, never around it, so your own inbox shows exactly what each guest was told.
Replies go out on the conversation the booking already has
Hostex delivers a message through whichever channel the conversation belongs to, and it publishes no separate email, SMS or WhatsApp send, so there is one way out and it is the guest's own thread. An Airbnb guest stays inside Airbnb, a Trip.com guest stays inside Trip.com, and your Hostex inbox shows your team exactly what each guest was told. A stay with no conversation on it is left for a person rather than contacted some other way.
Paid time changes, on the stay's check-in details
A late checkout or early check-in the guest bought is written onto the stay as an hour and a minute, and only the time that was sold is sent, so the rest of that record stays exactly as your team left it. The same Hostex record holds the door lock code and the guest's check-in guide link, and TravelPal writes neither: a code your guests key into a door is yours to set.
Extra nights on direct bookings only
Hostex counts two kinds of direct booking, the ones taken in the Host Portal and the ones from your own booking site, and on those an added night is written as a real date change carrying the two dates and nothing else. Hostex does not refuse a date change on a channel booking on your behalf, it only warns that dates can collide, so TravelPal refuses it and sends the guest to the channel's own change flow, where that booking lives.
Dates closed for a sale, never reopened
Where a sale needs a night held, TravelPal closes it on the Hostex property calendar and Hostex carries the change out to every channel that unit sells on, shortly after rather than instantly. It never reopens a closed date: Hostex records a date as open or closed without recording who closed it, so a date reopened by us could be somebody's maintenance hold coming off the board.
A custom field your own templates can read
Hostex lets a stay carry named custom fields and prints them into the message templates your team already sends. TravelPal writes the one field you nominate, a single key at a time, so the guest link or the upgrade that sold lands somewhere your templates and your other connected tools can pick it up, and whatever another tool wrote there is left intact.
Connected in four steps
The credentials are yours to create inside Hostex. TravelPal does the rest itself.
Create the token in Host Portal
Host Portal, then OpenAPI Settings, then Add new. Pick the writable scope while you are creating it: the scope is fixed at that moment, so a read-only token cannot be upgraded later, only replaced. The token does not expire. There is no partner form and no approval queue: the token is yours to make.
Paste it into TravelPal
A token Hostex does not recognize is refused as you save, and a wrong paste costs nothing but a retry. A read-only one is not refused, because reading your account is exactly what it is allowed to do, so the scope is the thing to get right at creation. One account-side note: OpenAPI access rides on your Hostex plan, so if the subscription lapses or the edition does not include it, Hostex says so plainly and it is put right in your own portal. The connection itself is covered by the flat price, see what it costs.
Add the webhook secret token
Hostex puts a secret token in a header on every delivery it makes to the address TravelPal gives you, and it does not hand that token back when the connection is made, so it is read once from the portal or off the first delivery and pasted into TravelPal. Until it is in, TravelPal turns those deliveries away rather than act on anything it cannot prove came from Hostex, so it is the last thing to paste before your first guest.
Properties import, then the content gets written
Your Hostex properties become the units TravelPal answers for, your past stays backfill, and every stay from then on gets its own private guest link, which on a three-room booking means three. Because Hostex keeps house rules, check-in times and photos outside the property record, that content is written once with you during onboarding. It is the one part of this connection that is typing rather than pasting.
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 Hostex connection will not do
Every property management system draws its own lines, and the ones Hostex draws are worth knowing before you switch anything on. TravelPal works inside them rather than around them.
Hostex keeps your property content off the property record
A Hostex property record is a name, an address, coordinates, groups, tags and channels. House rules, check-in and checkout times, parking instructions and photos are not on it, so there is nothing there to import. The concierge answers from the knowledge base your team fills at onboarding, and the check-in time you give there is also what an early check-in is priced against.
No property carries a time zone
Nothing in Hostex states which zone a unit sits in, not on the property and not on the booking, so the clock that quiet hours, scheduled messages, upsell cutoffs and deposit deadlines run on is set with you at onboarding rather than read from your account. It is the first thing to confirm before anything timed is switched on, and a portfolio spread across countries is confirmed unit by unit.
The note on a Hostex conversation is one shared box
Hostex gives a conversation a single note that everyone on your team shares, and saving it replaces what was there, so a line written by us would wipe whatever your staff last typed and be wiped again by the next one. TravelPal does not write to it, and it never puts a team note in the guest's thread instead. Sale notes and anything held for a person reach your team channel and your email.
A message that does not come back clean is not sent twice
Hostex states that this send cannot be made safe to repeat and returns no id for a message it accepted, so a request that times out has an outcome nobody can look up afterward. Hostex suggests sending again, on the view that a duplicate beats silence, which fits a greeting. Ours quote prices and confirm paid upgrades, so TravelPal makes one attempt, hands the thread to your team, and lets a person decide.
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.
Hostex integration FAQ
Do I need Hostex to enable anything before I connect?
No. You create the access token yourself in Host Portal, under OpenAPI Settings and then Add new, and paste it into TravelPal. Pick the writable scope while you create it, because the scope is fixed at that moment and a read-only token is refused on every send. The one account-side requirement is that your Hostex plan includes OpenAPI access: if the subscription lapses, Hostex stops answering until you restore it in your own portal.
Which booking channels does the Hostex connection cover?
Every channel you sell on in Hostex. Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo and Expedia, the Asia-Pacific channels including Agoda, Trip.com, Ctrip, Tujia, Xiaozhu, Meituan, Muniao and Fliggy, social channels such as TikTok and Xiaohongshu, Houfy, and direct bookings taken in the Host Portal or through your own booking site. Each guest is answered in the conversation Hostex keeps for that booking, so the reply goes back out over the channel they used.
We already use HostGPT. Can both run?
Yes, but decide per property which one answers first, because two assistants in one thread will both reply to the same guest. Hostex marks the messages HostGPT sent and lists the sources it used, so TravelPal can tell a HostGPT message apart from one your team typed and reads the conversation correctly either way.
We take multi-room bookings. What does each guest get?
Each room gets its own private guest link, its own check-in and checkout, and its own answers. A booking of three rooms arrives in Hostex as three stays sharing one reservation code, and TravelPal follows the stay rather than the reservation code, so the second and third rooms are not folded into the first.
Not the system you run?
TravelPal connects to 33 property management systems. These are the ones nearest Hostex in how widely they are used.
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