Rial Estate

The context

Rial Estate works in short-term rentals in Milan. It manages apartments on behalf of their owners, who hand over the property and leave the running of it to Rial Estate, and it also takes on renovations. The apartments are in Bicocca, Città Studi and Lambrate, and the tagline on its site sums up the job well: "Immobili che diventano casa", properties that become home.

In a business like this, every booking brings the same sequence of messages: the confirmation, the check-in instructions, the tourist tax payment, the check-out reminder, the request for a review. Their substance barely changes, but each one has to go out at the right moment, to the right person and in their language. Multiply that by every apartment and by guests arriving from different countries, and it turns into repetitive work where a single slip can leave someone standing at a door with no instructions.

The goal was to take this repetitive work off the team's plate without losing control of the conversations. The project took three forms: a WhatsApp agent for guests, an app for the staff, and the automations that connect both to the booking system. The website completes the picture: it is the storefront where direct bookings come from.

An agent that follows every stay

At the heart of the project is an AI agent that messages guests on WhatsApp, live since August 5, 2026. It is connected to Smoobu, the booking system Rial Estate uses to manage its reservations: when a new booking comes in, the agent picks it up and sends the confirmation, without anyone having to open the calendar and remember to do it.

From there it follows the stay step by step. Before arrival it sends the check-in instructions with a PDF attached and the link to pay the tourist tax. Before departure it sends a check-out reminder, and at the end of the stay it asks for a review. Every message depends on the dates and details of the booking, so it arrives when it is actually needed: not too early, when the guest won't read it, and not too late, when they are already on their way.

We call it an agent because it works on its own: it reads the booking, figures out what stage the stay is at and picks the right message for that moment. But when the information is about getting into the apartment or making a payment, a verified text is worth more than a creative answer, so the content isn't made up each time. The automation decides when to write and to whom, not what to promise.

The guest's language, from the country code

Not all of Rial Estate's guests speak Italian, and check-in instructions read through a machine translator are often the start of one more phone call. The agent writes to each guest in their own language, choosing from six based on the country code of their phone number. It's a simple rule that asks nothing of the guest and works from the very first message.

A guest who gets the confirmation in their own language can tell right away that there is a careful organization on the other end, and tends to read the instructions that follow more closely. That's exactly the idea: clear information, in the right language, before it turns into questions someone has to handle by hand.

On WhatsApp's official platform

There are shortcuts for messaging customers on WhatsApp that rely on personal numbers or unauthorized tools. We took the opposite route: the agent runs on Meta's official WhatsApp Business Platform.

That means following Meta's rules on what can be sent and when, and getting solid foundations in return: a recognizable business sender, delivery and read status for every message, and no worry about the number being blocked for unauthorized use. For a business that lives on bookings, the channel to its guests can't be an experiment.

It matters to the person on the receiving end, too. A message from a business profile that carries the company's name inspires more trust than an unknown number explaining how to get into an apartment.

A staff app with every conversation in it

The agent takes care of the predictable messages, but guests reply, ask questions and flag problems. Those conversations can't live on one person's phone. That's why we built a messaging app for the staff that brings every guest chat together in one place.

It's a PWA: it installs on a phone straight from the browser, with no app store involved, and picks up updates without anyone having to download a new version. When a guest writes, a push notification comes in, and the team opens the conversation and replies right there. Next to every message sent you can see whether it was delivered and whether it was read, so nobody has to wonder if the guest got the instructions.

We chose a PWA over a native app for practical reasons. It runs on iPhone and Android from the same codebase, and every fix reaches everyone at the same moment, with no waiting for app store review. For an internal tool the team uses every day, it's the lightest option to maintain.

In practice it's a shared inbox for the whole team: conversations no longer depend on someone's phone, and anyone can pick up a chat right where it left off.

The automations around the booking system

The agent and the app work because booking data arrives on time. Every new booking and every change reaches the system in real time through Smoobu webhooks, the automatic notifications the booking system sends as soon as something changes.

A real-time channel isn't enough on its own: a notification can get lost, and a service can be unreachable for a few minutes. That's why there is also a periodic safety check that goes back over the bookings and catches any that slipped through. On top of that, scheduled jobs run every day, look at arrival and departure dates and send the right messages at the right time, with no one pressing a button.

It's the same method we bring to SMEs: first map the real journey, in this case from booking to review, then automate the repetitive steps and leave people the work where they make the difference.

The website, where direct bookings start

The project also includes Rial Estate's new website, in seven languages. The home page is a 3D map of Milan with the apartments marked by pink pins, and each apartment has its own page with a photo gallery and a direct booking widget connected to Smoobu: bookings made through the site skip the commissions charged by booking portals.

For contact, the site uses a single channel: WhatsApp. Behind the pages there is also the work on visibility: structured data, language versions linked to one another, and permanent redirects from the old site, so the pages Google already knew aren't lost.

The result

Since August 5, 2026, the agent has been looking after Rial Estate's guests on WhatsApp, from the booking confirmation to the review request, in six languages. The team works from a single app with every conversation, notification and read status, and bookings arrive from the booking system in real time, with a periodic check that catches any that slipped through.

Around all this is a business with figures Rial Estate publishes on its own home page: 17 apartments managed, 12 renovations completed and an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 from more than 1,000 Airbnb reviews. The website, in seven languages, is live at rialestate.it.

If your business also sends customers the same messages every day, start with our page on WhatsApp chatbots for businesses. If you'd rather see how the agent is built, our blog has a technical article on this project.