AI guest messaging on Rentals United threads
TravelPal reads your properties, reservations, and open nights from Rentals United, answers Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, and Expedia guests inside their own channel threads, and reaches the rest through the email proxy Rentals United runs. Connect it only when Rentals United is your own channel manager and the guest thread lives in it: it distributes inventory rather than running the operation, so if your reservations sit in a property management system that pushes into Rentals United, connect that system instead and leave this one alone.
One connection, running both ways. Every item on it is detailed below.
What TravelPal reads from Rentals United
Rentals United is run by property management companies that handle their own distribution, pushing one set of units out to Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, Expedia, and the sixty-plus booking channels it counts in its own network.
Properties, with the captions put back on the photos
Name, street, coordinates, your own description, house rules, the check-in window and check-out time, and both occupancy numbers Rentals United keeps: the party the price covers and the most the unit sleeps. Captions live in a list of their own rather than on the image, so TravelPal joins them back up instead of showing a guest an unlabeled gallery. The arrival instructions box is deliberately left behind: Rentals United has no door-code field, so that box is where a lockbox combination and a staff member's personal number end up, and what you want a guest to have belongs in your knowledge base instead.
Reservations, and the agent that created them
Rentals United puts no channel name on a reservation. It names the address that created it, so TravelPal matches that against the agent dictionary Rentals United keeps for your account and knows an Airbnb booking from a Booking.com one before the first reply. A creator that is not a known agent is treated as unknown rather than assumed to be direct, because direct is the only kind of booking TravelPal would ever change dates on. The guest's language comes off the same record, resolved against Rentals United's own language list, so the first reply is in the language they booked in.
A lead is not a booking
Rentals United keeps eight reservation statuses, and TravelPal treats them as it finds them. Confirmed bookings and approved requests are real stays and get a concierge. A request or a lead does not, because Rentals United itself describes a lead as a conversation a guest started that holds no availability, and nobody wants an arrival message going to somebody who never booked.
One reservation can cover several units
A single Rentals United booking can name more than one property, and it comes back with a separate stay block for each. TravelPal will not guess which unit the guest is standing in, so a booking like that is left for your team rather than given the check-in instructions of whichever property happened to be listed first.
The thread, walked back to its first message
Rentals United hands back message history newest first, a page at a time, so TravelPal walks the whole thread and reads it in order before answering: the concierge joins a stay mid-conversation instead of repeating a question your team already handled. Rentals United also sends its own automated messages under the same host identity your people use, and no field separates the two, so TravelPal treats both as your side of the thread and stays quiet rather than talking over either.
Availability, without a made-up nightly price
TravelPal reads which nights are open, the minimum stay, and the days Rentals United marks closed to arrival or departure. It does not read a price per night, because a property here is priced by a daily, length-of-stay, or full-stay model, and under the last two there is no such thing as the price of one night. An extra night is quoted from your rules rather than from a number the system never published.
What TravelPal writes back
Every message goes out through Rentals United, never around it, so your own inbox shows exactly what each guest was told.
Replies go out on the thread the channel owns
Rentals United sends each message over its own thread's channel, so an Airbnb guest is answered inside Airbnb and a Booking.com guest inside Booking.com, exactly where your team would have typed. There is no rail to choose and nothing to redirect: the guest is answered where they wrote.
Everyone else through the email proxy
For the channels Rentals United does not integrate natively it acts as an email proxy, and TravelPal uses that whenever the reservation carries an address. Rentals United carries no SMS and no WhatsApp rail, so nothing on this connection claims one.
No thread yet means nothing is sent
A reply needs a thread that already exists. The one way to open a new one in Rentals United always makes an email thread, and emailing somebody who booked on Airbnb is a different act from answering them, so TravelPal waits for the guest's own thread rather than starting a side conversation your channel inbox will never show.
Connected in four steps
Rentals United switches API access on for your account, and TravelPal does the rest itself.
Ask Rentals United to turn API access on
API keys follow a signed commercial agreement with Rentals United, and guest messaging is a separately priced product: their documentation says access to the Guest Communication API is quoted by their sales team. One email to your account manager covers both. Ask for API keys and for guest communication in the same message.
Copy both keys from API keys
In Rentals United, under API keys, you get an access key and a secret key. The same pair authorizes the property and reservation side and the messaging side, so there is one thing to paste and not two. A wrong key is rejected on the spot, on a read of a static dictionary, so a mistyped paste costs nothing but a retry.
Say whose properties we should read
If you connect TravelPal to your Rentals United account as a Vacation Rental Service, add your Rentals United username and we read the inventory shared with that sub-user. If the keys belong to the account that owns the properties, leave it blank and we read its own.
The notifications register themselves
TravelPal registers the reservation handler URL and subscribes to new threads and messages, then takes both back off if you ever disconnect. There is nothing else to configure inside Rentals United. Properties import in the background, each one read in full, because the list Rentals United returns carries only an id, a name, and a location. Every stay from then on gets its own private guest link.
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 Rentals United connection will not do
Every property management system draws its own lines, and the ones Rentals United draws are worth knowing before you switch anything on. TravelPal works inside them rather than around them.
The import reaches back one week and no further
Rentals United lists reservations by when they were last changed rather than by arrival date, and it will not accept a range older than seven days. A guest arriving Friday who booked a month ago is not in that list, and there is no by-arrival listing anywhere in the API to ask instead. Everything from the day you connect forward arrives on its own, so connect a week ahead of the arrivals you want the concierge on.
Some threads are with the channel, not with your guest
A Rentals United thread can be a conversation with Booking.com's own staff instead of with the person staying, and one reservation can have both. TravelPal answers only the thread whose recipient is the guest and leaves the channel's thread to your team. When a new message is pushed before its thread can be read, it is held rather than answered, because the notification says which thread it belongs to and not who is on the other end.
No team-only note, and no line to record a sale on
Every message in a Rentals United thread is delivered to the person on the other end, so there is nowhere in the thread to put a note meant for your team. There is no folio and no extras line either, and the one offer object Rentals United publishes is an Airbnb pre-approval that carries neither a price nor dates. Sale notes and anything held for a person reach your team in your own channel and by email, and the money is collected the way you already collect it: see what TravelPal sells.
Dates and calendar stay with the channel that owns them
Rentals United can change a stay inside itself, and it states plainly that the change is not passed on to the sales channel, which would leave Airbnb or Booking.com holding different dates than you are. Its availability write covers a unit on every channel at once and reports nothing about what it moved, so an undo could release a block your own team set. TravelPal therefore writes no dates and no blocks here: a date change goes back through the channel that owns the booking.
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.
Rentals United integration FAQ
Should I connect Rentals United or my property management system?
Connect Rentals United when it is your channel manager and the guest thread lives in it. If your reservations sit in a property management system that pushes inventory into Rentals United, connect that system instead: it holds the reservation, the folio, and the record your team works from. The integrations page lists every system TravelPal connects to. There is no reason to connect both.
Do I need Rentals United's permission to connect TravelPal?
Yes, and it is one email. Rentals United issues API keys under a commercial agreement, and its guest communication product is priced separately and quoted by its sales team. Ask your account manager for API keys and for guest communication access in the same message. Once the access key and secret key are in your hands, there is nothing further to approve.
Which guests can TravelPal answer on Rentals United?
Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, and Expedia guests are answered inside their own channel threads, which Rentals United carries natively. Guests from the other channels it distributes to are reached through the email proxy Rentals United runs, whenever the reservation carries an address. There is no SMS or WhatsApp rail in Rentals United, so neither is offered.
Will my existing bookings be there on day one?
Partly: only the recent ones. Rentals United lists reservations by their last change and refuses a range older than seven days, so the first import picks up what moved in the last week rather than everything on the books. Everything created or changed after you connect arrives by itself. Connect a week ahead of the arrivals you want covered.
Does connecting Rentals United cost extra?
Not from TravelPal. What Rentals United charges for its own guest communication product is between you and them.
Not the system you run?
TravelPal connects to 33 property management systems. These are the ones nearest Rentals United in how widely they are used.
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