It started with a text message.
Nothing dramatic. Just a guest, around 9pm on a Tuesday, asking for the WiFi password. Easy enough. Thirty seconds to reply.
No problem.
Except it was the fourth time that week someone had asked. And the password was already written on the card sitting right there on the kitchen bench.
We told ourselves we’d make it clearer at check-in and moved on.
A few weeks later, we made a proper guest guide. The full thing. Check-in instructions, WiFi details, parking notes, how to use the heater, a few local café recommendations. It took most of an afternoon, but we were proud of it.
We printed copies. Laminated one for the property. Sent a PDF to guests before they arrived.
Problem solved.
Then the WiFi password changed.
We replaced the coffee machine and suddenly the instructions made no sense. The café we loved closed down. Street parking rules shifted. The guide we’d carefully written started quietly drifting out of date.
So we updated the PDF. Reprinted everything. Re-laminated the copy. Sent the new version to upcoming guests.
And then something else changed.
And we did it all again.
Meanwhile, the messages kept coming.
Not because guests were difficult. Most were lovely. They just had questions, perfectly reasonable ones, and they needed answers in the moment they needed them. Sometimes at 7am. Sometimes at 11pm. Occasionally at 2 in the morning when the air conditioning wouldn’t cooperate and they had an early flight.
We tried saved replies. Longer guides. Shorter guides. Guides with photos. More notes around the house. We tried everything short of hiring someone to sit by their phone full time waiting for the next message.
Nothing really worked.
Because the problem wasn’t the guests. And it wasn’t the information. It was that we were the ones stuck in the middle, manually connecting the two every single time.
When AI started becoming genuinely useful, we kept coming back to that problem.
We didn’t want a generic chatbot. We’d seen those. They felt cold and usually frustrated people more than they helped. We wanted something that actually understood a property, the rhythm of a short stay, and the way a thoughtful host communicates. Clear, warm, and accurate.
Something that could learn.
That was the piece we couldn’t stop thinking about. Every answer we gave a guest disappeared into a message thread and was effectively lost. The next guest would ask the same question and we would start again from scratch.
What if it didn’t have to be that way?
What if every answer made the next stay easier?
What if your guest guide got better over time instead of slowly becoming outdated?
That became Alfie.
You tell Alfie about your property. Start with the basics and add more as you go. Guests ask questions. Alfie answers what it knows and flags what it doesn’t. You fill the gaps once. Alfie remembers.
The next guest gets an instant answer.
And the one after that.
And the one after that.
Slowly, almost quietly, the interruptions fade. Not because guests stop asking questions, but because Alfie is already there with the answer.
The guide that once took an afternoon to write and a week to fall behind becomes something alive. Something shaped by real stays, real questions, and real updates.
We built Alfie because we were tired of repeating ourselves.
But also because we knew there was a host somewhere sitting at dinner with their phone face-up on the table, half present, waiting for the next buzz.
That felt like a problem worth solving.
Hosting is still the best part. The guests, the reviews, the feeling that your place becomes part of someone’s trip or celebration or quiet weekend away. That never gets old.
It’s just the 9pm WiFi password text that wears you down.
Alfie handles that part.
The rest is still you.
