Your first week with Talk with Guest.
Day by day, this is what onboarding actually looks like on the Talkguest platform for a boutique property between fifteen and eighty keys. Written by the onboarding team, not by marketing, so the times below are the times it actually takes.
What you agree to do before we start
Every Guest Talk onboarding begins with a signed order form and a scheduled kickoff. Before day one you nominate an on-property champion. This is one person, usually the front-office manager or the assistant GM, who owns the migration from the property side. It is not the general manager unless the property is small enough that the GM is the receptionist. The champion joins every day-one to day-five call and has the authority to make final calls on rate mapping, channel priority and message templates.
You also send three artefacts to your onboarding engineer forty-eight hours before kickoff: a full current-year reservation extract from your existing PMS, a screenshot of every OTA connection with its commission and cancellation policy, and a list of the users who will need Talkguest logins in the first week. All three are handled through a shared secure workspace; nobody emails a CSV of guest data to anybody.
What we do before you see us
By the morning of day one your Talkguest tenant exists, your subdomain is set up, and your account is preloaded with the master data pulled from your extract. You will already see your rate plans, your room types and the last twelve months of reservations in a staging environment. Nothing is live yet — no OTA is talking to Talkguest, no guest is receiving a message — but everything is there for you to look at and complain about.
Monday to Sunday, in order
Monday: kickoff and rate audit
Ninety-minute kickoff call at 10:00 with your onboarding engineer and your revenue advisor. We walk through the imported rate structure and you correct anything the extract got wrong. Most properties find at least two obsolete rate plans and one live plan that was never in the old system's export. Monday afternoon you and the champion review the imported room types and confirm the connectivity plan: which channels stay, which channels go, which channels get added.
Tuesday: OTA remapping
Your onboarding engineer opens API sessions with your Booking, Expedia and Airbnb extranets and remaps the property to Talkguest as the channel manager. This is a two-hour block during which your reception team must not touch the extranet manually. Rate parity is validated live after each channel switches. If you run Hostelworld or HRS the same process runs on Wednesday morning.
Wednesday: PMS switch and reservation reconcile
Wednesday is the day the platform goes live for reception. New reservations from every connected channel flow into Talkguest. Your old PMS is put into read-only mode. Existing forward-booked reservations are already in Talkguest from the extract, and the reconcile view shows any deltas that appeared between the extract and cut-over. Most properties see zero deltas; a busy fifty-key hotel might see two or three.
Thursday: messaging templates
WhatsApp Business API provisioning finishes today. Your champion sits with your onboarding engineer for two hours to tune the pre-arrival flow, the check-in flow, the in-stay flow and the post-stay review request. We start from the Portugal template pack and rewrite in your voice. See the WhatsApp playbook for the exact templates. By end of day Thursday your first message goes out to a real guest for tomorrow's check-in.
Friday: housekeeping app and staff training
Friday morning your housekeepers get a login on their own phone. The mobile web app opens instantly, shows the rooms assigned for the day, and marks status with a tap. Reception sees status changes in real time. Friday afternoon is a ninety-minute all-staff training session with your onboarding engineer and your champion, focused on the tape chart, the reservation screen and the WhatsApp inbox. Everyone attends. Everyone.
Saturday: reception dry run
Saturday is the first weekend on the platform. Your onboarding engineer is on standby on WhatsApp from 8:00 to 22:00 and available inside fifteen minutes for any issue. Most Saturdays are boring. Occasionally something interesting happens on a group check-in and we handle it live. Reception logs any friction in a shared note and we address it Monday.
Sunday: the first review
Sunday afternoon your first Talkguest-generated review request lands with a checked-out guest. By Monday morning you usually have your first review through the platform. This is a symbolic moment more than an operational one, but it is a good end to the week.
The three failure modes we watch for
- A champion who cannot make decisions. If the champion has to ask the owner about every rate change, week one stretches into week three. Nominate someone with authority.
- Legacy OTA credentials that nobody remembers. Booking.com API credentials from a former GM who no longer works at the property will block Tuesday. Get them ahead of time.
- An unfrozen rate strategy during the switch. If your revenue manager changes rates in the old system on Tuesday afternoon while we are remapping, we will fight about it for a day. Freeze rates from Monday evening until Wednesday morning.
What week two looks like
Week two is when the platform earns its keep. Reception falls into rhythm. The champion shifts from setup to optimisation, moving templates from good to great. Your revenue advisor at Talkguest runs the first performance review on Friday of week two, looking at pace, pickup, ancillary attach and message engagement. From that point onward the check-ins happen every two weeks for the first three months and monthly thereafter.
Reading in parallel
The onboarding runs faster if the champion reads two other guides ahead of time: connecting Booking.com and Expedia for the OTA remapping context, and direct booking optimization to prime the first week of website changes. Both are ten-minute reads. The pricing page and the boutique Lisbon case study are useful context for the board conversation you will have at the end of the first month.