Where guest relationships get lost
Your property management system knows who's in room 12 tonight. It's less good at the rest: the wedding inquiry that came in by email and sat for two days, the corporate retreat that asked for a quote and never heard back, the family that has stayed four times and still gets treated like strangers at check-in.
That work usually lives in a shared mailbox and a sales manager's memory. Everything Portal gives it a pipeline, an owner and a history.
How the portal is set up for hospitality
Pick the Hospitality setup from the industry setups and you start with:
- Guests and bookings. People are guests, and the work is bookings. Rename them if you say parties or events.
- A bookings pipeline with six stages: Inquiry, Quoted, Booked, In house, Stayed and Review. Each booking is a card with a value, so a wedding block and a weekend suite sit side by side.
- Fields for stays: Arrival date, Departure date, Room type, Party size, Booked through, Confirmation number, Special requests and Last stay.
- Tags like returning, first-stay, event and business, so you can filter and automate.
- A shared inbox where guest email is threaded and filed to the guest. Connect Microsoft 365, Outlook, Gmail or Google Workspace, and assign each conversation to a person.
- Contracts signed online. Send an event contract or group block agreement as a document. The organizer types or draws a signature, and everyone gets the signed copy with a signing certificate.
- Invoices for deposits on weddings and groups, with open and view tracking, partial payments and reminders. Card payments are coming; for now guests see your payment instructions.
See the hospitality section for more.
A day for a resort sales manager
A wedding inquiry arrives through the website form at 8:50. The planner's details land as a guest with lead source Website and the message kept. An automation assigns it to the sales manager and creates a task to send a quote today. She gets a team chat alert, and an "unanswered for 60 minutes" trigger creates a second task if nobody replies.
She sends the quote and moves the booking to Quoted. If it's still there after five days, the stale deal trigger sends a friendly follow-up email. When the couple says yes, she sends the event contract to sign and an invoice for the deposit. She can see when the invoice is viewed, and the remaining balance stays open as a partial payment.
Before arrival, the ready-made guest pre-arrival automation emails directions, parking and check-in details. After checkout, the guest thank-you automation sends a short note. Both templates can be switched on and edited.
At the front desk, the Wright family is tagged returning. Their record shows past stays, party size and special requests, so the welcome is personal. The hotel guest guide covers this flow in more depth.
What's connected, and what's coming
Email connects directly to your mailbox, and you can send from your own domain. Website forms post straight into contacts. Incoming webhooks and an API connect your own systems.
Be clear on the property system side:
- Hotel system sync is coming. Connections to OPERA Cloud, Cloudbeds, Mews, Guesty and more are in progress, so reservations and guest profiles can come in automatically. They aren't live yet.
- Until then, webhooks work today. Any system that can send a webhook can create guests and start automations, with every call logged.
- Business texting and card payments are coming. Guest messages go by email for now.
See the integrations section and the roadmap.
Getting started
Export past guests from your property system to a spreadsheet and import them, mapping columns to Last stay, Room type and Party size. Add open group and event inquiries to the right stages. Switch on new inquiry assignment, pre-arrival and thank-you first.
