Auto Pilot is the mode of Hostify AI in which the agent answers your guest messages automatically — replying in the guest's language, escalating to your team when needed, or staying silent when no reply is required. This article covers how to set Auto Pilot up, what the agent can do, and what each setting does.
For the original Prompt Mode (Suggest Reply, Refine, Chatbot Q&A), see How to Utilize AI in Hostify.
Auto Pilot Mode is currently in Beta mode
What the AI Agent Can Do
When Auto Pilot is active, every new incoming guest message on a thread that's assigned to your bot user, on a listing you've enabled, during your active hours is forwarded to the AI agent. Here's the full picture of what it handles.
Answer guest questions automatically
Check-in / check-out times, WiFi password, house rules, amenities, parking, and other listing details.
Booking confirmation details (dates, guest count, listing name).
Neighborhood and area background.
Live nearby-places search (“closest pharmacy”, “how far is the beach?”) with approximate distances and live open/closed status during the stay.
Early check-in / late check-out feasibility — checks the calendar and housekeeping status before answering or escalating.
Simple follow-ups already answered earlier in the thread.
Update the reservation from the guest’s own words
Sets the planned arrival (ETA) when the guest says what time they’ll arrive.
Sets the planned departure (ETD) when they say what time they’ll leave.
Flips the checked-in flag when the guest confirms they’re at the property.
Flips the checked-out flag when the guest confirms they’ve left.
Reservation updates are opt-in. Each capability has its own toggle in the Reservation Updates section of the Auto Pilot settings page. Both are off by default.
Escalate to your team when needed
Files an internal note, stars the thread, and fires the escalation event in one step — for complaints, refunds, emergencies, maintenance, special requests, modifications, or anything it can’t confidently answer.
Sends the guest a brief reassurance message in the same turn.
See Escalation Setup & Notifications for how to wire up the actual notifications to your team.
Stay silent when silence is the right answer
Skips replying to acknowledgements (“thanks”, “ok”, “👍”), reactions to a teammate’s message, or closing pleasantries.
Goes into back-off after an escalation so the guest isn’t told “I’ve alerted the team” twice — but quietly attaches new critical info as an internal note if the guest provides it.
Speak the guest’s language
Replies in whatever language the guest uses (English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and others), even if they switch mid-thread.
Respect privacy and authority limits
Never shares door codes, exact addresses, or check-in instructions before a booking is confirmed.
Never makes pricing or refund commitments — those always go to your team.
Always defers to your Property Manager Instructions when they conflict with default behavior.
Behave like a human teammate
Waits a configurable response delay before sending so replies don’t feel robotic. The delay also acts as a message-coalescing window: if the guest fires off several messages in a row, the agent waits for the burst to settle and then handles them together as a single conversation instead of replying three times.
The delay is tunable per customer — short for snappy replies, longer to give your team a chance to jump in first and take the thread over before the AI responds. Setting it to 0 makes the agent reply as soon as it’s done thinking.
Only operates within your configured working hours (typically your team’s off-hours).
Steps aside instantly if a teammate takes over the thread — including dropping any reply that was still waiting in the delay queue.
Auto Pilot is opt-in per listing — enabling Hostify AI does not auto-enroll all properties.
Before you turn it on
The Hostify AI integration must already be installed and active on your account. See How to Utilize AI in Hostify.
You need to be staff, or a user with the
integrations/autopilotpermission, in order to flip the master toggle on/off. Other Auto Pilot fields can be edited by anyone with view access to the page.The listings you want to enroll must use the PMS service (channel-only listings without a PMS service are filtered out).
Outbound messaging on the channel must already work — Auto Pilot uses the same outbound path your team does (Airbnb, Booking.com, etc.).
Where to find it & how to set it up
In the Hostify UI: Integrations → Hostify AI → Auto Pilot.
The form gives you these settings:
Auto Guest Communication (master toggle)
Turns Auto Pilot on or off for the whole account. Turning it off unsubscribes the webhook so the agent stops receiving any guest-message events.
Bot Name
The first name your AI introduces and signs off as in messages (default: Eve). It’s also the assignee name your team sees in the inbox.
Custom Instructions
Free-text instructions loaded into the agent’s brain on every reply. See Knowledge Base & Content Best Practices for what works well.
Reservation Updates
Two opt-in toggles that control whether the agent can write reservation data based on what the guest says:
Update Planned Arrival / Departure — when enabled, the agent sets the planned arrival (ETA) and planned departure (ETD) on the reservation when the guest mentions their arrival or departure time. Off by default.
Update Check-in / Check-out Status — when enabled, the agent marks the guest as checked-in or checked-out when they confirm arrival at or departure from the property. Off by default.
When either toggle is off, the agent can still answer questions about arrival times and check-in status — it just won’t write the data back to the reservation.
Active Hours Schedule
A weekday-by-weekday schedule. When enabled, Auto Pilot only acts on messages whose timestamp falls inside one of your daily windows. When disabled, Auto Pilot is active 24/7. See the Active Hours section.
Enabled Listings
The exact set of listings the agent is allowed to handle. Listings not in this list never reach the agent. For child units of a multi-unit listing, the parent listing’s enablement applies.
Assign all open conversations to bot
A button (visible after Auto Pilot is active) that bulk-assigns the bot to every open thread on your enabled listings. Useful when you first switch Auto Pilot on — without it, the agent only handles new threads from that point on; existing ones stay assigned to whoever they were assigned to.
Knowledge Base
The Knowledge Base is where you store facts the agent can look up when answering guest questions — WiFi passwords, parking instructions, appliance guides, local taxi numbers, or anything else guests commonly ask about. Each entry has a title, a body (the answer), and is scoped to a specific listing or shared across all listings.
The agent searches the Knowledge Base on every incoming message. If it finds a matching entry, it uses that content to compose its reply. If there’s no match and no other data source covers the question, the agent escalates.
Key points:
One fact per entry — short, focused entries work better than long documents.
Use the title as the question — e.g. “What is the WiFi password?” rather than “WiFi info”.
Per-listing or global — assign an entry to a single listing for property-specific facts, or leave it unassigned to apply to all.
Languages — write entries in the language your team is most comfortable with; the agent translates on the fly when replying.
For detailed guidance on writing effective entries and structuring your Knowledge Base, see Auto Pilot — Knowledge Base & Content Best Practices.
Guest Guide (Mr.GG)
Mr.GG is Hostify’s guest-facing digital guidebook — and everything you set up there automatically feeds the Auto Pilot agent. When the agent needs to answer a guest question, it checks Mr.GG data alongside the Knowledge Base.
The most useful Mr.GG sections for Auto Pilot:
House Manual — appliance instructions, house rules, parking details, trash collection schedules. The agent pulls from this when guests ask “how does the washing machine work?” or “where do I put the rubbish?”. See House Manuals Setup in MrGG.
Area Guide — curated recommendations for restaurants, supermarkets, pharmacies, beaches, attractions, and more. When a guest asks “where’s the nearest supermarket?”, the agent checks your Area Guide first. If you’ve curated an entry, it uses that; otherwise it falls back to a live Google Places search. See Area Guide in MrGG.
Entry Instructions — check-in procedures, door codes, lockbox locations. The agent uses this to answer “how do I get in?” (only after the booking is confirmed). See Entry Instructions in MrGG.
The richer your Mr.GG content, the fewer questions the agent needs to escalate. For general Mr.GG setup, see MrGG Settings.
Escalation
When the agent encounters something it can’t or shouldn’t handle on its own — a complaint, a refund request, a maintenance issue, an emergency, or a question it doesn’t have enough data to answer — it escalates. In a single step, the agent:
Attaches an internal note to the thread summarising the issue and why it was escalated.
Stars the thread so it stands out in your inbox.
Fires the Escalation event, which can trigger an Auto Message to notify your team (email, SMS, push, or in-app).
Sends the guest a brief reassurance message (“I’ve flagged this for the team”) so they know a human will follow up.
After escalating, the agent enters a back-off period — it won’t reply to further messages on that thread until a teammate takes over. If the guest sends new critical information during back-off, the agent silently adds it as another internal note rather than replying.
To make escalation work end-to-end, you need to create an Auto Message on the Escalation event so your team actually gets notified. For step-by-step setup, available variables, and common patterns, see Auto Pilot — Escalation Setup & Notifications.
How auto-assignment works
The first time a guest sends a message on a brand-new thread for an enabled listing, the bot is automatically assigned to that thread — and the agent picks it up.
A few important nuances:
Only on truly new threads. As soon as anyone (you, a teammate, an automation) has assigned, starred, snoozed, or otherwise touched a thread, the bot will not auto-grab it on later messages — even if no one is currently assigned.
A null assignee is treated as deliberate. If you assigned someone and then unassigned them, the bot interprets that as “a human is handling this” and stays out.
Child listings inherit the parent’s enablement. If you have a multi-unit listing and you’ve enabled the parent, all child units count as enabled.
Use the Assign all open conversations to bot button to retro-fit Auto Pilot onto threads that pre-date your activation.
Active hours, in detail
Times are in your account timezone.
Each day has its own is active flag — uncheck it to make the agent silent on a particular weekday entirely.
Overnight windows are supported. A row with
start = 22:00,end = 06:00covers midnight–06:00 of the next day correctly.Disabling the master Active Hours Schedule toggle makes the agent run 24/7 — there is no implicit “business hours” default.
Turning Auto Pilot off
The bot user record stays in your account (so historical thread assignments don’t break) but no auto-assignment runs.
The webhook subscription is deleted — no further events go to the agent.
Re-activating creates a fresh subscription and re-pushes the latest config. The bot user is re-used, not re-created.
Who can change what
View the Auto Pilot page, edit Bot Name / Custom Instructions / Reservation Updates / Schedule / Enabled Listings, use “Assign all open conversations to bot”: staff or users with the
integrations/autopilotpermission.Toggle Auto Pilot on or off: staff only, unless the user has the
integrations/autopilotpermission. Non-staff trying to flip the toggle silently get blocked — the value reverts.
Things to check if something looks off
Is the Hostify AI integration active? Integrations → Hostify AI should show “Active”.
Is Auto Pilot itself active? Master toggle on the Auto Pilot page.
Is the listing in the Enabled Listings list? (Or its parent, for child units.)
Is the thread assignee the bot? In the inbox, the assignee chip should be the bot’s name. If it’s a teammate, the agent will skip every message until you reassign.
Are we inside active hours right now? If you’ve enabled the schedule, mismatched timezone is the most common gotcha.
The agent answered the ETA question but didn’t update the reservation? Check whether Update Planned Arrival / Departure is turned on in the Reservation Updates section.
Is the answer wrong, or just incomplete? Incomplete → add the missing fact to the Knowledge Base (or update the relevant Mr.GG template / area-guide entry). Wrong because of an authority decision (refund, late check-out approval) → update Custom Instructions. See Knowledge Base & Content Best Practices.
Did the agent recommend the wrong nearby place? Check whether your Mr.GG Area Guide has a curated entry for that category — if not, the agent fell back to live Google Places. Add the recommendation to your area guide.
The agent escalated, but the team didn’t get notified? Most likely there’s no Auto Message configured on the Escalation event — see Escalation Setup & Notifications.
Related articles
Auto Pilot — Knowledge Base & Content Best Practices (Custom Instructions, KB entries, Mr.GG)
Auto Pilot — Escalation Setup & Notifications (wiring up team notifications)
How to Utilize AI in Hostify (Prompt Mode)