AI guest messaging for Octorate
TravelPal messages your Octorate guests in the booking's chat, in the language the booker chose. Your team answers their replies in Octorate.
One Octorate connection works in both directions. Each item is explained below.
What TravelPal reads from Octorate
Octorate serves small accommodations in Italy and across Europe, mostly bed and breakfasts with fewer than twenty units. They sell through the portals and through Octorate's own booking engine.
Your accommodation becomes the property
These facts come from Octorate. They are name, address, coordinates, property category, bed count and time zone. They also include the hours your check-in window opens and closes, and your check-out time. TravelPal answers from them, together with what you add in the knowledge base. Your license code, your police-portal filing account and your tax numbers sit on the same Octorate record. They are removed before the concierge ever sees them, because they are yours and not guest facts.
Stays dated by the accommodation's own calendar day
Octorate saves a check-in as a UTC time. In an Italian summer that time often lands at ten at night on the day before. TravelPal uses the local dates on the guest rows first. If they are missing, it converts the time in the accommodation's own time zone. If it can do neither, it refuses the booking and does not date it a day wrong. The check-in day sets the greeting and the quiet hours. It must be right.
Confirmed, waiting, cancelled, and nothing else
An Octorate reservation record has exactly three states. TravelPal reads confirmed as a live stay. It reads waiting as a request that is not yet a stay. It reads cancelled as a stay it must stop working on. The longer list in Octorate's reservation search is a set of search filters, not states. TravelPal reads nothing from it. Any value outside the three is flagged for your team. It is not treated as a guest who is coming.
Chat threads, with the guest proved
Octorate's chat holds owner and staff conversations as well as guest ones. TravelPal picks up the history already there and leaves your internal conversations alone. If it cannot prove that a thread belongs to a guest, it will not write into it.
The booker's language, off the booker's own row
Octorate labels every person on a reservation. TravelPal takes the language from the row Octorate marks as the booker. It does not use the first person listed. A stay booked in Italian, Greek or Japanese opens in that language. A team that works in Italian does not end up messaging a Japanese guest in English.
The price breakdown, and the portal behind the booking
Each priced line on an Octorate reservation has Octorate's own flag. The flag shows whether a person typed the line in by hand. So an extra your team added is told apart from the room rate and the city tax. Nobody has to guess from the wording. The reservation also names where it came from. That is Booking.com, Airbnb, Vrbo, Expedia, Hostelworld, Holidu, Agoda, Ctrip, Rakuten, Rentals United or HomeToGo. Or it is Octorate's own booking engine, which is your direct business.
What TravelPal writes back to Octorate
Here is what TravelPal sends through Octorate today, and what it leaves to your team.
Messages inside the conversation the guest already sees
A guest who booked on a portal is messaged in the thread that portal shows them. Nothing comes from an address they do not know. TravelPal's messages go out as the Octorate person you choose. Your team sees a name in the thread, not an unnamed integration. Octorate announces a guest's new message, but not your team's reply. So TravelPal emails your team, and a person replies in the Octorate thread.
Email for your direct guests
A booking made through Octorate's own engine is messaged by email once TravelPal has an address. Octorate states on the reservation that a guest has an email, but it does not give the address. That is a deliberate control on their side. So a direct guest can arrive with the note and no address. That guest looks unreachable by email until the address reaches TravelPal another way. Octorate's chat has no SMS at all. It does carry WhatsApp, but that stays with your team. It costs you money per contact, and a guest sees it 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. It makes one request for each kind. When you disconnect, TravelPal cancels every one of them, 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. It does not treat one arrival as the whole truth.
Connected in four steps
Octorate turns on API access for your account. TravelPal does the rest itself.
Ask Octorate to enable API access
Octorate sells API access as a paid integration plan. It certifies the connection for your account before it switches it on. So first send one email, or make one call, to your Octorate account manager and ask 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 give the permission yourself. Sign in to your Octorate admin and approve TravelPal. The one-time code that comes back must be exchanged within three minutes. Finish this step in one sitting. The refresh token from that exchange does not expire, so you never repeat this step.
Paste the accommodation ID and the sender
The numeric accommodation id is a six-digit number in Octorate's own example. It sets the scope of 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. Every Octorate chat message must carry a sender. There is no way to ask which person an integration is. So that id is read from the people already in your chat threads, and you paste it once. TravelPal fetches a token right away. A mistyped secret fails at the paste, not a day later.
Reservations and threads start arriving
Your accommodation becomes one property. Past and upcoming reservations are backfilled by arrival date. Octorate reads the dates in that window in Rome time, whatever zone your property is in. So TravelPal widens the window by a day at each end. It does this so that it does not leave out an arrival. After that, every stay has its own private guest link. Nothing else is set up inside Octorate.
TravelPal shows the connection at every step: connected, last update, and any error in plain words. To see the other setup steps, read what onboarding involves.
What the Octorate connection will not do
Know the limits of Octorate before you turn anything on. Every property management system has its own limits. TravelPal works inside them, not around them.
TravelPal does not edit an Octorate booking
The arrival time on an Octorate reservation is read-only. The calendar is kept per room product, not per accommodation. The rules for updating one field of a booking are not published. So TravelPal writes nothing onto the reservation. See how upsells are sold.
One accommodation is one property
Octorate's order runs from accommodation to products, which are its room types and rates. The chat, the reservation search and the access 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. Some rooms may truly differ. The code for the annex and the code for the second floor are two cases. Write those in the knowledge base room by room.
No team-only line inside the guest thread
Octorate's chat has a note type. Nothing published about it says a note is hidden from the guest. TravelPal reads a note as internal and never writes one. Keeping a line out of the transcript is the safe mistake. Showing a withheld line to a guest is not. A held question goes to your team in your own channel and by email. So does the record of a sale. They never appear as a line in the Octorate thread.
Octorate can park a message for authorization
A message that Octorate accepts comes back with a state of its own. Two of those states mean the message is waiting for somebody on your side to release it. It is not on its way to the guest. TravelPal does not report those states to you yet. Check this in your first week. If your account parks messages, the guest is waiting on you, not on us.
When TravelPal's AI is not sure, it stops and asks your team instead of guessing. This rule is the same on every system: see the safety guardrails.
Octorate integration FAQ
Do I need Octorate to switch anything on before I connect?
Yes, and it takes one conversation. Octorate sells API access as a paid integration plan. It certifies the connection for your account before it switches 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. The refresh token that approval returns does not expire, so 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. Sometimes a question depends on which room a guest is in, and the answer is not clear. Then TravelPal holds the thread and asks your team. It does not guess.
Will TravelPal change a booking in Octorate?
No. The arrival time on an Octorate reservation is read-only. The rules for updating a single field of a booking are not published. So TravelPal writes nothing back onto the record. TravelPal does not offer a paid time change on a booking that came from Octorate.
Which channels does the Octorate connection cover?
Whatever you sell through. Octorate names the portal on every reservation. Among them are Booking.com, Airbnb, Vrbo, Expedia, Hostelworld, Holidu, Agoda, Ctrip, Rakuten, Rentals United and HomeToGo. It also has its own booking engine, which is your direct business. A portal guest gets TravelPal's messages in that portal's conversation, and a direct guest gets 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 use?
TravelPal connects to 33 property management systems. Below are the systems closest to Octorate in how widely they are used.
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Octorate is a trademark of its owner. TravelPal is not affiliated with or endorsed by Octorate.