Automation · Customer service and scheduling
Answer what is booked and what a guest owes without opening LobbyPMS
A Met reads bookings, rooms, channels, extras and guest balances from LobbyPMS and answers over WhatsApp. Read only, and in verification today.
How do I answer what is booked and what a guest owes without opening LobbyPMS?
A front desk Met connected to LobbyPMS reads five things from the PMS and answers with them in the hotel chat, which bookings are recorded, which rooms exist and of what type, which channel each one came through, what can be ordered and at what price, and where the guest account stands. All of that is lookup. The five tools of the connector read and none of them write, so booking, moving dates, checking a guest in, adding an extra or charging is still done inside LobbyPMS. And there is a bigger warning worth reading first, the connector is IN VERIFICATION. Its routes are confirmed but the shape of their responses is not, so today the tools return no data, they answer with the detail of what is still to be mapped. This page is the procedure that runs once that mapping closes, and connecting your hotel token is exactly what closes it.
Where it applies: Colombia. LobbyPMS is a Colombian PMS, used mostly by hotels, hostels and glampings in the country. The token is per property, so each hotel connects its own.
What starts it
When the customer writes
Nothing is scheduled. The Met assigned to the channel receives the message from whoever is at reception, written in plain language ("whose name is 204 under?", "how much has 12 run up?"), and answers in the same conversation. It works the same from the receptionist phone or from the computer at the desk.
Nothing to set up. The Met assigned to that channel picks up the conversation and runs the procedure inside it.
Who runs it
Front desk Met
Customer service team
Not a named, seeded Met, but an internal hotel Met that talks to the front desk team and not to the guest. Its job is that reception can answer without keeping the person standing there waiting while somebody hunts for the booking on another screen.
Channels: WhatsApp
What you need connected
- LobbyPMS Sell and serve
5 steps · 5 tools
The procedure, step by step
Each step shows the tool that runs. They belong to the real connector: if one of them stopped existing, this page would not build.
- 1
See which bookings the hotel has recorded
This is the starting point, because the booking is where the guest, the dates, the assigned room and the balance live. It serves the question that actually reaches the desk, "whose name is 204 under and until when?". What this step does NOT do yet, and it is better said here than later, is filter by date range, because that filter is one of the pieces of the contract still unverified.
- 2
Locate the room in the hotel inventory
A booking names a room and the desk needs to know which one, its type, its capacity and its rate. The listing is the inventory exactly as the hotel loaded it into the PMS, not a list typed into a prompt that goes stale within a week. It is still unresolved whether occupancy (free, occupied, being cleaned) lives in this resource or has to be crossed with bookings, and until that is known the Met does not claim a room is free.
- 3
Say which channel the booking came through
A hotel does not sell only through its own site, it sells through online agencies, by phone and at the desk, and the right answer changes with the channel, because the rate, the cancellation policy and who collects all depend on it. The listing returns the channels the hotel has set up in LobbyPMS. It is also the resource we know least about, it is still to be confirmed whether it brings connected channels with their sync status or the available ones.
- 4
Answer what the hotel sells besides the room
Restaurant, minibar and services. The catalogue of extras is what makes it possible to answer what can be ordered and at what price without anybody keeping that list outside the PMS, and the price comes from LobbyPMS, never from the model. Whether that price already includes tax is still to be verified, so the Met hands over the figure exactly as the PMS returns it instead of adding or removing a tax on its own. Reading the catalogue is not posting the charge to the account, and that last part the connector does not do.
- 5
Look up where the guest account stands
Invoices and folios are the most delicate of the five resources, because they are figures somebody pays at the desk and one badly mapped field here is money charged wrong. That is why it is the last to be signed off, and why the Met does not round, does not add up items on its own and does not anticipate a total. Once the mapping closes, it answers the balance with the items the PMS returns. Collecting it is another matter, and none of the five tools does that.
Before you start
What you need ready
The Met solves none of these for you. If one is missing, the automation stops there.
-
A hotel running on LobbyPMS
The connector reads what is already in the PMS. It does not create the account, load the room inventory or build the catalogue of extras. If bookings still live in a spreadsheet, this recipe has nothing to read from.
-
The hotel API token
The hotel generates it itself, with an administrator user, under Settings, Users, permissions and API, View Token. It is per property, so each hotel connects its own and Meteor cannot generate it for you. Credentials are configured per workspace.
-
The Meteor IP allowed, if your hotel restricts by IP
LobbyPMS can limit a token to certain addresses. If your hotel switched that on, the outbound IP of Meteor has to be registered in that same panel or everything answers with an authentication error. It is the most common reason a perfectly valid token fails.
The limits
What this automation does NOT solve
Better said here than discovered halfway through the rollout.
-
It returns no data yet. The connector is in verification, so the five tools answer with the detail of what is still to be mapped and the Met is instructed to say exactly that rather than fill the gap on its own.
-
It does not book, move dates or cancel. The five tools read and nothing else, any change to a booking is made inside LobbyPMS.
-
It does not run check in or check out, assign rooms or hand over keys. None of that exists as a tool, not even blocked while it waits for verification.
-
It does not charge or post extras to the folio. No payment links, no payment records and no closing of a guest account, that still goes through whichever payment method the hotel uses.
-
It does not confirm availability. Answering "is there a room from the 12th to the 15th?" requires filtering bookings by date range, and that filter is one of the unverified pieces.
-
It is not a channel for the guest. A folio balance and other people's bookings are sensitive data, so this recipe is written for the hotel team and not for answering whoever writes to the public WhatsApp line.
FAQ
Questions about this automation
You can switch the connector on and load your token, and that is exactly what helps close the verification. What you cannot do yet is lean on its answers, because while the mapping stays open the tools report what is missing instead of returning data.
Because the procedure is real and so is its limit, and both fit on the same page. The five PMS routes are confirmed by probe and the block that stops them is in the code on purpose, so that no hotel receives invented availability or folios. What is missing is the token of a real account, and this page records what gets unlocked when it arrives.
No, and that is the answer that hurts most. Knowing what is free requires crossing the room inventory with bookings filtered by date, and that date range filter is one of the pieces that are not verified. Until it is, the Met says it cannot confirm availability rather than risk a yes.
Technically the flow would be the same, but think it through first. A folio balance and the hotel bookings are other people's data, and the connector does not verify who is asking, that identification has to come from the hotel. That is why this is written for the desk.
The LobbyPMS token is per property and credentials are configured per workspace in Meteor, so each hotel gets its own. That is exactly what you want, the reception of one property should not find another one's folio.
The Met says it could not look it up and offers to pass the request to reception. There is no local copy of the bookings or the inventory, and an invented answer about a room or a balance is worse than an honest "I could not look it up".
By connecting your hotel token. With a real account we can read the bodies the PMS returns, write the normalisers and lift the block. The first hotel to do it is the one that shapes the connector for everyone else.
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