AI AssistantRouting

Bot Triggers & Routing

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

Estimated time: 5 minutes

Two channels, one AI

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

💬 Guest messages

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

📞 Phone calls

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

How routing works

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

Bot type	What it does
Routing bot	Receives every message or call first. Selects the right assistant based on property matching. You configure this in AI Agents → Bots → [your routing bot] → Instructions.
AI assistant	Handles the actual conversation — answering questions, providing instructions, and deciding when to escalate. Configured with a name, persona, and property-specific knowledge.

💡

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

What the bot can do

When a guest contacts you, the AI assistant 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)

The bot's knowledge comes from the Instructions tab of each bot — a free-text field where you describe your property, policies, and how the bot should behave. The more context you provide, the better the answers.

When the bot escalates

The AI assistant escalates to your team when:

⚠The guest explicitly asks for a human
⚠The situation requires a judgment call (complaints, damage, safety issues)
⚠The bot 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.

ℹ️

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

⚠️

For voice call escalations, the bot 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. Bots without this toggle enabled will handle all calls themselves, which is the right behaviour for self-contained bots like demo or FAQ-only lines.

Configuring your bot

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

Instructions

The main knowledge base for the bot. Write everything the bot should know: property details, house rules, check-in info, emergency contacts. Plain language works best — the AI interprets it naturally.

Overview

Shows recent conversations handled by this bot, escalation rate, and a log of actions taken (messages sent, escalations triggered).

Analysis

AI-generated summary of recent bot performance — common guest questions, topics the bot struggled with, and suggestions for improving the instructions.

For a full setup walkthrough, see Setting Up Your AI Assistant.

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