Guest questions: from the portal to the hotel's Inbox

Why	Answer guests who asked their question in the Guest Portal: find it in the shared Messages queue and reply with the same editor you use for email.
Who	Administrators and front desk staff who handle guest conversations.
What you’ll get	The guest’s question found in Messages, an answer sent from the shared queue — and visible to the guest on their portal page.
Limitations	The format is question and answer, not real-time messaging. The guest works within limits: up to 2,000 characters per message and no more than 30 messages per hour per booking.

A guest does not always have the hotel’s phone number handy, or a mailbox they feel like writing to. What they do have is the Guest Portal — the personal page of their booking, where a question can be asked on the spot. The question reaches the hotel by itself and joins the shared message queue: from there, you handle it like any guest email.

How the guest asks

The guest signs in to the Guest Portal via the personal link from their booking — no password, no app. On the portal page, right where their booking is, they write a question and send it — something like “what time is check-in?” or “is parking available?”.

A guest can start writing straight away: whether the hotel’s mailbox is connected makes no difference to portal questions. There is no address to pick and no email to compose — the guest simply leaves a question about their booking.

Result: the guest writes in their portal, and the question reaches the hotel on its own — in the Messages section.

Where the question appears

The question arrives in the Messages section — one shared queue where guest emails and portal questions live side by side. From then on it follows the common routine: the “New” stage, an assigned owner, and a response deadline — the same as emails. If you are the one working the queue, there is no separate place to look for portal questions — they are already in the list.

You can tell the source once the thread is open: in the header, next to the subject, sits a source icon. Emails carry an envelope; portal questions carry a speech-bubble icon. In the list, rows look the same — name, subject, preview — so check the icon inside the thread.

Context arrives with the question: the thread is tied to the guest’s profile, and to the right of the conversation sit the “Linked to guest” and “Recent bookings” blocks. They show who is writing and about which booking before you reply at all.

How to reply

1. Open the thread in the Messages section — the question is visible in the conversation, like any message.
2. Below the conversation sits the same editor as for emails: the “Reply” tab, text formatting (bold, italic, underline, links, lists), “Attach” for a file, and “Template” for a saved snippet.
3. Write the reply and press “Send” — the button becomes active once there is text in the field.

Result: the reply goes into the guest’s Guest Portal — the guest will see it right where the question was asked. No separate reply channel needs to be set up.

If an answer should be agreed with a colleague first, there is a “Note” tab next to “Reply” — it is for the team, and the guest cannot see it.

What a portal question is not

The format is question and answer, not real-time messaging: the guest asks, and you reply from the queue once you have handled it. There is no instant dialogue — and none should be promised: the answer shows up on the portal page when you have sent it and the guest has opened the portal. The pipeline keeps an eye on the timing in the meantime: overdue threads are marked in red in the list.

There are volume limits on the guest’s side too:

• up to 2,000 characters per message;
• no more than 30 messages per hour per booking.

For the hotel this is protection, not a working constraint: one guest cannot flood the queue with a hundred empty messages or an endlessly long text. There is no need to spell these limits out to the guest — for them they are simply the frame of the question form.

No mailbox needed — except for the sign-in code

Portal questions reach Messages on their own: connecting the hotel’s mailbox is about receiving guest emails, not about portal questions. If no mailbox is connected yet and a yellow banner about email hangs over the list, it does not concern portal questions — they arrive either way. You do not need to set up a mailbox for the questions alone.

The difference shows up in one place — signing in. The guest enters the portal via the personal link and confirms the sign-in with a code sent by email, and those codes are outgoing mail: they leave from the hotel’s own address, which needs to be set up. Without it the question will not get lost — but the guest may never receive the code and never reach the portal where the question gets asked. Connecting the mailbox is covered in Connect the hotel mailbox.

See also

• Questions from the Guest Portal — the same story from the Messages side: spotting the question, the thread, and the reply.
• Guest messages: one Inbox — how the shared queue works: emails and portal questions side by side.
• The guest’s personal link: preview and reissue — how the guest gets into the portal and what to do when the link goes missing.