AI ColleaguesRouting

Colleague Triggers & Routing

Enhanced Rentals uses AI Colleagues to automatically respond to guest messages and answer phone calls. This guide explains how messages are routed to the right colleague, what a colleague can do, and when it hands off to your team.

Estimated time: 5 minutes

Two channels, one AI

Your AI Colleague handles guests in two ways — messaging and voice:

Guest messages

Incoming Hostaway guest messages trigger the colleague. It reads the conversation, generates a reply, and sends it back — all automatically, within seconds.

Phone calls

When a guest calls your hotline number, the voice AI Colleague picks up immediately and speaks with the guest. No hold music, no voicemail.

How routing works

Enhanced Rentals uses a routing colleague to decide which colleague handles each guest. The routing colleague looks at the incoming message (or call) and selects the appropriate colleague based on the property and configuration.

Colleague role	What it does
Routing colleague	Receives every message or call first. Selects the right colleague based on property matching. You configure this in AI Agents → AI Colleagues → [your routing colleague] → Instructions.
Informational colleague	Handles the actual conversation — answering questions, providing instructions, and deciding when to escalate. Configured with a name, your business details, and knowledge base access.

If you only have one property or one colleague, you don't need to think about routing — the system uses your single colleague for everything. Routing matters most when you have multiple properties with different check-in instructions or languages.

What the colleague can do

When a guest contacts you, the AI Colleague can:

→Answer questions about the property (check-in time, WiFi, parking, house rules)
→Provide check-in and check-out instructions
→Answer general FAQs about your business
→Detect when the guest needs human help and escalate
→Respond in the guest's language (multilingual support)

A colleague's knowledge comes from the business details you fill in on its Instructions tab, the live reservation and listing data it reads each conversation, and the knowledge base you give it access to. The more detail you provide, the better the answers.

When the colleague escalates

The AI Colleague escalates to your team when:

The guest explicitly asks for a human
The situation requires a judgment call (complaints, damage, safety issues)
The colleague cannot answer confidently after multiple attempts

When escalation happens, a support case is created and your team is notified — via Slack if you have the webhook integration configured, or directly in the Support section of the dashboard.

You can configure escalation notifications in Settings → Integrations → Webhooks. See Slack Notifications for Escalations for a setup guide.

For voice call escalations, the colleague must also have Allow escalations to human agent enabled on its Overview tab. This is separate from the webhook setting — both must be configured for voice escalations to work. Colleagues without this toggle enabled will handle all calls themselves, which is the right behaviour for self-contained colleagues like demo or FAQ-only lines.

Configuring your colleague

Go to AI Agents → AI Colleagues in the sidebar, then click a colleague to open its detail page. Key tabs:

Instructions

The Your details form for a managed colleague — fill in your business facts (company name, check-in info, access instructions). It also shows a plain-English summary of how the colleague behaves and the live data it reads.

Knowledge Base

Choose how much of your knowledge base this colleague can read — off, public, internal, or the full hub — and optionally scope it to specific audiences.

Overview & Tests

Overview maps how this colleague is wired to hotlines and other colleagues. The Tests tab and the Test button in the header let you try it before it goes live.

For a full setup walkthrough, see Hiring an AI Colleague.

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