Just shipped this project and wanted to share the full technical breakdown because hotel/hospitality AI doesn't get much attention compared to the usual chatbot and SaaS use cases.
The client manages 500 hotel properties. Their support team was manually handling around 15,000 guest emails per day. Same questions over and over across hundreds of hotels but each one still needed a human to read it, understand it, find the answer, and reply.
Here's how the system works end to end:
Layer 1: Email ingestion and question extraction
This was the hardest part. Guest emails are messy. A typical one looks like:
"Hi there, we're coming for our anniversary on the 20th and I was wondering if you have any room upgrades available. Also is the spa open to guests or do we need to book separately? We're driving so need to know about parking too. Last time we stayed the wifi was a bit slow in our room, has that been fixed? Thanks!"
That's four separate questions plus a complaint wrapped in one email. If you just embed the whole thing and search the FAQ database you get a blended result that partially answers one or two questions and misses the rest.
So I built an extraction layer that reads the full email and breaks it into individual questions. It handles directly stated questions ("is the spa open?"), implied questions ("we're driving" implies they need parking info), complaints that need acknowledgment but aren't FAQ-searchable ("wifi was slow"), and informational context that shouldn't be treated as a question at all ("coming on the 20th").
Getting this extraction reliable was probably 40% of the total development time.
Layer 2: FAQ knowledge base with vector search
All hotel FAQs get embedded and stored in a vector database. Different properties have different amenities, policies, and details so the search is scoped per hotel. When a guest emails the Berlin property asking about breakfast, it searches the Berlin FAQ, not the Munich one.
Each extracted question from Layer 1 gets searched independently against the relevant hotel's FAQ. This is critical because searching each question separately gives way better retrieval quality than searching the entire email as one blob.
Layer 3: Response assembly
Takes the extracted questions plus their FAQ matches and generates a natural email response. The tone needs to sound like a helpful hotel staff member, not a chatbot. It addresses every question the guest asked in a logical order and flags anything it couldn't find an FAQ match for so the support team knows which emails need human follow-up.
What I learned:
The question extraction step is where most email AI projects would fail. It's tempting to skip it and just do whole-email retrieval. That works for short simple messages but completely breaks down on real customer emails that ramble across multiple topics. Investing the time in proper extraction made everything downstream work better.
The per-hotel scoping was more important than I expected. Generic FAQ answers that don't match the specific property create confusion and erode trust. A guest asking about parking at a city center hotel needs a different answer than one asking about parking at a resort property.
I made a full step-by-step video walking through the entire build process if anyone wants to see the actual implementation: link
Happy to answer questions about the architecture.
[link] [comments]