Questions from the Guest Portal

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Why	Answer guests who asked their question in the Guest Portal: find those threads 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 in the Messages section.
What you’ll get	A portal question recognized among emails, a reply delivered into the guest’s portal, and a thread linked to the guest’s profile.
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.

The Guest Portal is the guest’s personal booking page, and a question can be asked right there. It reaches the hotel on its own: a thread appears in the Messages section as if the guest had written to the front desk. From then on it is handled like everything else — a shared queue, an assigned owner, and the same stages as guest emails.

Where the question comes from

The guest signs in to the Guest Portal via their personal link — as usual, with no password and no app.
On the portal page they write a question about their booking.
A new thread with that question appears in the Messages section — at the “New” stage, in the shared queue next to emails.

There is one thread per conversation: the guest’s question, your replies, and team-log entries about the thread in the journal.

Result: a guest’s portal question lands in the hotel’s Inbox by itself — you do not need to connect the hotel’s mailbox for it. The yellow banner about mail not being connected in the list is about receiving email; portal questions arrive without it. The hotel’s mailbox serves a different purpose — receiving guest emails: connecting it is covered in Connect the hotel mailbox.

Telling a portal question apart from an email

The source is visible once you open the thread: 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; there is no separate source marker on the row.
The “person” icon to the right of the date means the thread is linked to a guest profile — it is not a portal sign.

Replying to the guest

Open the thread in the Messages section — the question is visible in the conversation, like any message.
Below the conversation sits the editor. The “Reply” tab is the one that answers: a “From:” line with the sending address, text formatting (bold, italic, underline, links, lists), “Attach” for a file, and “Template” for a saved snippet.
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.

Next to “Reply” there is a “Note” tab — it is for the team: “Internal note. The guest cannot see it. It is kept in the team log.” Handy when an answer should be agreed with a colleague first.

What a portal question is not

It is not real-time messaging. The format is question and answer: the guest asks, and the hotel replies from the Messages queue once it has handled the question.
There is no instant reply, 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.

The link to the guest

To the right of the conversation is the contact card: name, email, phone, and the type “Guest”. Two blocks in it do the daily work:

“Linked to guest” — the thread is tied to a guest profile: the link in the block opens the profile, and “Unlink” removes the tie.
“Recent bookings” — dates, room type, status, and totals of the guest’s recent bookings: context for the reply without leaving the thread.

The guest’s online registration form is not shown in the thread: it lives on the guest profile — go there when you need its answers. For a thread not linked to a profile, the card shows the type “Unknown”.

How much a guest can write

Portal messages come with two limits:

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: a 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.