Automated Guest Messages for Hostels: What to Send and When

The short answer

Automated guest messages reduce front-desk questions when each message does one job at one moment: confirm the booking, tell the guest how to get in, explain how the stay works, and explain how to leave. They create questions when they are long, vague, or end with an open invitation to reply.

The working sequence is five messages. Send a short confirmation at booking, an arrival-details message a few days out, a how-to-get-in message the day before arrival, a house-basics message once the guest has checked in, and a checkout message the evening before departure. After they leave, send one thank-you with a review request. Keep each message to one topic and one link. Send it in the guest's language, or in plain, short English if you don't know it.

The rest of this post covers what goes in each message, how to choose languages, and the three automated messages that cause more replies than they prevent. We run guesthouses ourselves (more on that at the end), so this comes from watching our own front desk, not from a theory about guest psychology.

Start by counting questions, not by writing templates

Before you automate anything, spend one week writing down every question your front desk gets, from WhatsApp, OTA inboxes, email and in person. A simple tally is enough:

Questions cluster around moments, and those moments are where your messages go. If a question shows up twice a week, a message may not be worth building. If it shows up every day, answer it before the guest has to ask.

Do the tally per channel too. If 80% of your late-arrival questions come through WhatsApp and none through the OTA inbox, you know where the message needs to reach the guest.

The sequence, message by message

1. Booking confirmation (immediately)

Purpose: confirm the booking and set one expectation. The OTA already sends its own confirmation, so yours should not repeat it. Say who you are, give the address with a map link, and tell the guest when the next message is coming.

Hi Maria, your booking at [Hostel] is confirmed for 14–17 March. Here is our location: [map link]. A few days before you arrive we'll send the check-in details. Nothing to do until then.

The last line matters. Without it, some guests write to ask whether they need to do something.

2. Arrival details (3 to 5 days before)

Purpose: tell the guest what they need and how check-in works. This is the first message with real operational content:

• Check-in hours, and what happens if they arrive outside them.
• What to bring: passport or ID, plus any deposit or local tax you collect on arrival.
• If you offer self check-in, the link to start it.
• One reliable way to reach you if the flight or bus is delayed (usually a WhatsApp number or a phone number staffed at night).

Keep it under about 100 words. If you need more space, you are putting house rules in the wrong message. Those belong later.

3. How to get in (the day before, or the morning of arrival)

Purpose: get the guest from the street to the front desk or the door without a phone call. This is the message guests actually read, because they are about to need it.

• A map pin, plus one sentence describing the entrance. Say the thing a stranger would need: green door next to the pharmacy, ring the bell marked Reception.
• Walking or transport directions from the one or two places most guests arrive from (the bus station, the airport train, the ferry pier).
• The early-arrival policy in one line: can they leave luggage, and from what time can they get into the room.

If you run self check-in, this is where the link goes, with one sentence on what it does. In our own setup, the guest scans their ID, the system matches the name against the day's bookings (spelling doesn't have to be exact, and low-confidence matches are flagged for staff), and the screen shows the room and bed number and the entry code in the guest's language. That removes the most common desk exchange of the afternoon: spelling a surname twice and then reading out a door code.

4. House basics (shortly after check-in)

Purpose: answer the questions guests have in their first hour, once, in a place they can find again. Wi-Fi name and password, breakfast hours and location, quiet hours, where to find towels and lockers, and the one number to call if something is wrong.

Two rules make this message work. First, limit it to five or six items. Second, put anything longer (a full list of house rules, local recommendations) behind a single link rather than pasting it in. A guest web page is better than a long chat message because it stays in one place and you can update it without editing templates. Kimchee's My Stay guest web app is built for exactly this.

5. Checkout reminder (the evening before departure)

Purpose: prevent the 10:55 a.m. rush at the desk. State the checkout time, where to leave keys or cards, what to do with luggage after checkout, and what the late-checkout option costs, if you offer one. A fixed price, such as $5 for two extra hours, ends negotiation. Leave the price out and every guest asks.

6. Thank-you and review request (the day after)

One message. Thank them, and include the review link for the platform that matters most to you. Don't send a reminder to the same guest. Guests who want to review will; a second nudge adds little and sometimes irritates people.

Which language to send in

Language is where many hostels get this wrong, because they either send everything in one language or try to translate everything and end up with awkward text.

• Use the language on the booking when you have it. Some OTAs pass a guest language or country, and some don't. Check what your channel data actually gives you before you build rules around it.
• Don't infer language from nationality or phone prefix. A Swiss guest might want French, German or English. A Brazilian guest needs Portuguese, not Spanish. In Southeast Asia and Latin America, many guests travel on a second or third language, and English is often the shared one.
• Pick your top two or three languages from your own bookings. Look at the last three months of reservations. Cover those well, and send simple English to everyone else. For many hostels this turns out to be a short list.
• Plain English beats a poor translation. Short sentences, no idioms, no abbreviations. Check-in from 2 p.m. Reception is open until 10 p.m. works for almost everyone. Have a native speaker read every non-English template once before it goes live.
• Put the critical details in numerals and links. Times, addresses, codes and map pins survive translation. Long explanations don't.

The same applies to guest-facing pages. Kimchee's guest pages come in four languages (Korean, English, Japanese and Chinese), so if your guests mostly need other languages, check that fit against your booking data before you commit to any tool. It's a limit we'd rather you know about up front.

Three automated messages that cause more replies than they prevent

1. The welcome wall of text

This is the message that includes the house rules, the breakfast menu, the laundry prices, the neighborhood guide, the checkout policy and a paragraph about your hostel's story, all at check-in. Nobody reads it on a phone while carrying a backpack. What follows is predictable: the guest asks about the one item buried in paragraph six, and your staff answers it from memory while the message sits there.

Fix: split it. Five or six essentials go in the house-basics message. Everything else goes behind one link. Test it by reading the message on a phone screen. If you need to scroll more than twice, it's too long.

2. The open-ended mid-stay check-in

Hi! How is everything so far? Let us know if you need anything! It sounds hospitable, but it asks for an answer without telling the guest what to answer. The replies tend to be one of three kinds: a bare fine, thanks that someone still has to read, a complaint about something already over (the noisy room last night), or a question that belongs at the desk anyway. Each one needs a human to read it and decide whether it needs action.

Fix: replace it with a message that gives the guest something specific. Tell them where the problem-reporting number is, and say who will answer it and when. If you want feedback, ask for it after checkout, where the guest can answer in one place and doesn't need an answer from you in real time.

3. The what-time-are-you-arriving question

Many hostels send What time will you arrive? a day or two before. It feels like good service. In practice, a good share of guests don't know yet, answer around 3? maybe later, and then update you again from the road. Others answer in a different channel from the one you asked in. Staff end up cross-referencing replies and still get surprised at 11 p.m.

Fix: don't ask. State the default and the exception. Check-in is 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. If you'll arrive after 10, message us on WhatsApp at [number] and we'll arrange it. The guests who need to tell you will do it. The guests who don't need to tell you won't send you anything.

The common thread: each of these messages asks the guest to write back without telling them what to write. A message that prevents a question has a single clear next step for the guest, whether that's a link, a number or a time.

Rules for writing each message

1. One topic per message. If you are tempted to write also, you need another message.
2. One link at most. Two links split attention, and the guest taps neither.
3. Put the action in the first sentence. Start your check-in here beats a paragraph of context.
4. Give times, not adjectives. Reception is open until 10 p.m. not reception is open late.
5. Name a human. Signing the message with a first name, or the desk's name, tends to produce better-quality replies than a signature like The Team.
6. Avoid emojis as meaning. They are fine as decoration, but they don't replace words in translation.

Check whether it's working with your own numbers

You don't need anyone else's statistics. After a month with the sequence running, repeat the one-week tally from the start of this post and compare it to the first one. Two things should show up:

• The question types you targeted should drop. If directions questions are unchanged, the how-to-get-in message is unclear or arrives too late.
• Replies to automated messages should be rare. If many guests reply to a specific message, look at what that message is asking, and whether the guest knew what to do next.

Change one message at a time so you know which edit did what.

Where this fits in your system

You can run this sequence from an OTA's built-in messaging, a spreadsheet and a lot of discipline, or from your property management system. The deciding factor is whether the messages know about the booking: the guest's name, dates, bed and language. A template without that data is easy to get wrong, for example sending a checkout reminder to a guest who extended their stay.

Kimchee PMS is an all-in-one PMS for hostels, guesthouses, hotels and Airbnb hosts, with the channel manager included at no extra cost. It includes automated guest messages, self check-in (ID scan, room QR codes and a front-desk kiosk), the My Stay guest web app and housekeeping tools. You can read about the full list on the features page and how a stay flows through the system on the how it works page.

We're not writing this from a distance. The people who build Kimchee run One Way Guesthouse near Busan Station (about 38 rooms), KIMCHE Guesthouse Downtown in Seomyeon (about 45 rooms), JMC Residence (15 studio units) and One Way Guesthouse Vancouver in British Columbia. The message sequence above is what we ended up with after watching which questions kept reaching our own desks.

A starting checklist

• Tally your front-desk questions for one week, by channel.
• Write the five messages, one topic each, each under about 100 words.
• Choose two or three languages from your real booking data. Use plain English for everyone else.
• Delete the welcome wall of text, the open-ended check-in and the ETA question, if you have them.
• Give every message either a link, a number or a time as its one next step.
• Repeat the tally after a month and edit one message at a time.

If you'd like to see how this sequence looks inside a PMS built by people who run hostels and guesthouses, get in touch with us and we'll walk you through it.