AI guest chat for your Octorate accommodation
TravelPal answers your Octorate guests in the chat thread Octorate already keeps for the booking, in the language the booker chose, at any hour. It reads your accommodation, your reservations and every line of the price breakdown, and it dates each stay by the accommodation's own calendar day rather than by the UTC timestamp the reservation carries. Octorate switches API access on for your account first, which is one call to your account manager.
One connection, running both ways. Every item on it is detailed below.
What TravelPal reads from Octorate
Octorate runs small accommodations in Italy and across Europe, mostly bed and breakfasts under twenty units, selling through the portals and through Octorate's own booking engine.
Your accommodation becomes the property
Name, address, coordinates, property category, bed count, time zone, the hour your check-in window opens and closes, and your check-out time all arrive from Octorate and become what the concierge answers from, beside whatever you add in the knowledge base. Your license code, your police-portal filing account and your tax numbers sit on that same Octorate record and are stripped before the concierge ever sees them: they are yours, not guest facts.
Stays dated by the accommodation's own calendar day
Octorate stamps a reservation's check-in as a UTC instant, and in an Italian summer that instant routinely lands at ten at night the day before. TravelPal takes the local dates Octorate carries on the guest rows first, converts in the accommodation's own time zone second, and refuses a reservation that can give neither rather than dating it a day out. The check-in day sets the greeting, the quiet hours and the cutoff on a late checkout offer, so it is worth getting right before anything else.
Confirmed, waiting, cancelled, and nothing else
An Octorate reservation record carries exactly those three states. TravelPal reads confirmed as a live stay, waiting as a request that has not become one, and cancelled as a stay to stand down from. The much longer list in Octorate's reservation search is a set of search filters rather than states a booking sits in, so nothing is read from it, and a value outside the three is flagged for your team instead of being treated as a guest who is coming.
Chat threads, with the guest proved
Octorate's chat carries owner and staff conversations beside guest ones. TravelPal answers only a thread with a guest actually in it, picks up the history already there, and leaves your internal conversations alone. A thread it cannot prove belongs to a guest is one it will not write into.
The booker's language, off the booker's own row
Octorate types every person on a reservation, so TravelPal takes the language from the row Octorate marks as the booker rather than from whoever happens to be listed first. A stay booked in Italian, Greek or Japanese opens in that language, and a house whose team works in Italian is not left answering a Japanese guest in English.
The price breakdown, and the portal behind the booking
Each priced line on an Octorate reservation carries Octorate's own flag for whether a person keyed it in by hand, so an extra your team added is told apart from the room rate and the city tax without anybody guessing from its wording. The reservation also names where it came from, whether that is Booking.com, Airbnb, Vrbo, Expedia, Hostelworld, Holidu, Agoda, Ctrip, Rakuten, Rentals United or HomeToGo, or Octorate's own booking engine, which is your direct business.
What TravelPal writes back
Every message goes out through Octorate, never around it, so your own inbox shows exactly what each guest was told.
Replies inside the conversation the guest already sees
A guest who booked on a portal is answered in the thread that portal shows them, so nothing arrives from an address they do not recognize. Every Octorate chat message has to name a sender, so your replies leave as the Octorate person you nominate and your own team sees a name in the thread rather than an anonymous integration.
Email for your direct guests
A booking through Octorate's own engine is answered by mail once TravelPal holds an address. Octorate says on the reservation that a guest has an email while withholding the address itself, which is a deliberate control on their side, so a direct guest can arrive with the note and not the address and read as unreachable by mail until that address reaches TravelPal another way. Octorate's chat has no SMS at all, and WhatsApp, which it does carry, stays with your team: it costs you money per contact and it reads to a guest as a different kind of approach.
The feed of new bookings and new messages
TravelPal asks Octorate to announce new and changed reservations and new chat messages, one request per kind of announcement, and cancels every one of them again when you disconnect, so nothing is left pointing at us. Octorate repeats an announcement for up to two days and promises no order, so TravelPal also re-reads changed reservations on a schedule rather than treating one arrival as the whole truth.
Connected in four steps
Octorate switches API access on for your account, and TravelPal does the rest itself.
Ask Octorate to enable API access
Octorate sells API access as a paid integration plan and certifies the connection for your account before switching it on, so the first move is one email or call to your Octorate account manager asking for it. They issue the client ID and the client secret. Octorate sets that fee, and it is separate from what TravelPal costs.
Approve TravelPal from your own Octorate admin
You grant the connection yourself: sign in to your Octorate admin and approve TravelPal. The one-time code that comes back has to be exchanged within three minutes, so finish it in one sitting. What the exchange returns does not expire, which is why you never repeat this step.
Paste the accommodation ID and the sender
The numeric accommodation id, a six-digit number in Octorate's own example, scopes every call: one token covers one accommodation, or the network your Octorate user can see. You also name the Octorate person your messages send as, because every Octorate chat message has to carry a sender and there is no way to ask which person an integration is, so that id is read off the people already in your chat threads and pasted once. TravelPal fetches a token on the spot, so a mistyped secret fails at the paste rather than a day later.
Reservations and threads start arriving
Your accommodation becomes one property, and past and upcoming reservations are backfilled by arrival date. Octorate reads the dates on that window in Rome time whatever zone your property sits in, so TravelPal widens it by a day at each end rather than clipping an arrival. Every stay from then on gets its own private guest link, and nothing else is configured inside Octorate.
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 Octorate connection will not do
Every property management system draws its own lines, and the ones Octorate draws are worth knowing before you switch anything on. TravelPal works inside them rather than around them.
TravelPal does not edit an Octorate booking
The arrival time on an Octorate reservation is read-only, the calendar is held per room product rather than per accommodation, and the rules for updating one field of a booking are not published, so TravelPal writes nothing onto the reservation. A sold late checkout is priced, taken and recorded on the stay, then handed to your team in your channel and by email with the new time on it, in time for the cleaner. See how upsells are sold.
One accommodation is one property
Octorate's hierarchy runs accommodation, then products, which are its room types and rates, and the chat, the reservation search and the access itself are all scoped to the accommodation. So a twelve-room guesthouse is one property here, with one set of check-in facts and one concierge. Where the rooms genuinely differ, the code for the annex and the code for the second floor, those belong in the knowledge base written room by room.
No team-only line inside the guest thread
Octorate's chat has a note type, and nothing published about it says a note is hidden from the guest. TravelPal reads one as internal and never writes one, because keeping a line out of the transcript is the safe mistake and putting a withheld line in front of a guest is not. A held question and the record of a sale reach your team in your own channel and by email, never as a line in the Octorate thread.
Octorate can park a message for authorization
A message Octorate accepts comes back with a state of its own, and two of those states mean it is waiting on somebody at your end to release it rather than on its way to the guest. TravelPal reports those rather than counting them as delivered. Check it in your first week: if your account parks messages, the guest is waiting on you, not on us.
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.
Octorate integration FAQ
Do I need Octorate to switch anything on before I connect?
Yes, and it is one conversation. Octorate sells API access as a paid integration plan and certifies the connection for your account before switching it on, so you email or call your Octorate account manager and ask for it. They issue the client ID and secret, you approve TravelPal inside your own Octorate admin, and because what that approval returns does not expire, you do it once and never again.
My property has several room types. Does each one become a listing?
No. Octorate scopes its chat, its reservations and its access to the accommodation, so TravelPal treats your accommodation as one property with one concierge. Facts that differ by room belong in the knowledge base, written room by room. Where a question turns on which room a guest is in and the answer is not clear, TravelPal holds the thread and asks your team rather than guessing.
Will TravelPal change a booking in Octorate?
No. The arrival time on an Octorate reservation is read-only and the rules for updating a single field of a booking are not published, so TravelPal writes nothing back onto the record. What a guest buys is priced, taken and recorded on the stay, and the new time reaches your team in your own channel and by email.
Which channels does the Octorate connection cover?
Whatever you sell through. Octorate names the portal on every reservation, among them Booking.com, Airbnb, Vrbo, Expedia, Hostelworld, Holidu, Agoda, Ctrip, Rakuten, Rentals United and HomeToGo, plus its own booking engine, which is your direct business. A portal guest is answered in the conversation that portal already shows them, and a direct guest by email.
Does connecting Octorate cost extra?
Not from us: the flat monthly price covers the connection. Octorate charges for its own integration plan, and that fee is theirs to quote.
Not the system you run?
TravelPal connects to 33 property management systems. These are the ones nearest Octorate in how widely they are used.
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