Not all escalations are “urgent”. Just because someone asks what the wifi password is at 3am and I haven’t configured a wifi password in your KB doesn’t mean it should be (what I’ll call) priority-escalated.
But there are urgent requests that should be priority-escalated regardless of whether or not you have a high-confidence answer. E.g., “the sink pipe burst and the bathroom is flooding”. Even if there’s a KB response of “oh. that’s unfortunate.” *, it should priority-escalate to me.
I could provide my phone number and a reminder to call me immediately, and that would be better than nothing, but my phone number is already in the Airbnb app and that relies on the person actually doing it. Also, the calls will come directly from the guests and my phone is often in DND mode and/or I rarely answer calls from random numbers.
I’m sort of solving this today by signing up for a Google Voice number and putting it in my Airbnb profile and then configure my phone so that Google Voice bypasses DND.
I don’t know how normal Prohost escalations work (SMS? App?) but it’d have to be from a consistent number that can be configured to bypass DND. Additionally priority-escalations need to be from a different SMS number or with a different message category than normal escalations so that normal escalations (wifi password) don’t bypass DND. Ideally, priority escalations would send reminders (e.g., 5 minutes) until I acknowledge one.
Lastly, I don’t want to have to allowlist “urgent” things. E.g., I might allow list leaking pipes and fire but I wouldn’t think to allowlist “i’m locked out and can’t get in” until after it happens. The model should be able to detect urgency.
Or an even better response would be “thanks. we’ll get on this. in the meantime, please help us out by turning off the master water by following these 10 kinda dirty steps”. IMO, that’s an amazing use case for ProHost because it’s not something I would want to put in my House Manual (too much detail, too “pushy”, overwhelms the house rules, all for the 0.0001% chance that it happens). But having it as an immediate auto response makes a lot of sense.
Bill Ulammandakh
Team•
Sep 6, 2025
Thank you for providing these details! Very helpful for developing this feature!
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Comments2
James Shannon
Aug 24, 2025
Just a few additions:
Not all escalations are “urgent”. Just because someone asks what the wifi password is at 3am and I haven’t configured a wifi password in your KB doesn’t mean it should be (what I’ll call) priority-escalated.
But there are urgent requests that should be priority-escalated regardless of whether or not you have a high-confidence answer. E.g., “the sink pipe burst and the bathroom is flooding”. Even if there’s a KB response of “oh. that’s unfortunate.” *, it should priority-escalate to me.
I could provide my phone number and a reminder to call me immediately, and that would be better than nothing, but my phone number is already in the Airbnb app and that relies on the person actually doing it. Also, the calls will come directly from the guests and my phone is often in DND mode and/or I rarely answer calls from random numbers.
I’m sort of solving this today by signing up for a Google Voice number and putting it in my Airbnb profile and then configure my phone so that Google Voice bypasses DND.
I don’t know how normal Prohost escalations work (SMS? App?) but it’d have to be from a consistent number that can be configured to bypass DND. Additionally priority-escalations need to be from a different SMS number or with a different message category than normal escalations so that normal escalations (wifi password) don’t bypass DND. Ideally, priority escalations would send reminders (e.g., 5 minutes) until I acknowledge one.
Lastly, I don’t want to have to allowlist “urgent” things. E.g., I might allow list leaking pipes and fire but I wouldn’t think to allowlist “i’m locked out and can’t get in” until after it happens. The model should be able to detect urgency.
Or an even better response would be “thanks. we’ll get on this. in the meantime, please help us out by turning off the master water by following these 10 kinda dirty steps”. IMO, that’s an amazing use case for ProHost because it’s not something I would want to put in my House Manual (too much detail, too “pushy”, overwhelms the house rules, all for the 0.0001% chance that it happens). But having it as an immediate auto response makes a lot of sense.
Bill Ulammandakh
Sep 6, 2025
Thank you for providing these details! Very helpful for developing this feature!