How do you approve an AI's guest reply from your inbox?
October 9, 2026 · hosting · trust
You answer the email. When StayPilot holds a drafted reply for your review, it lands in your regular inbox as a normal message: the guest's question, the draft underneath it, and a signed token in the subject line. You reply with one word — SEND or SKIP — or start your reply with REPLY: and your own words go to the guest instead of the draft. There is no dashboard to open and nothing to install. We run this loop on a live co-hosted listing, so what follows is how it actually behaves, including the part most tools get wrong: what happens when your answer is ambiguous.
Why approval has to live where you already are
Draft mode only works if reviewing drafts is nearly free. The whole point of the draft phase is to build a streak of approvals you barely had to think about — and that streak dies the day each approval means logging into another tool. If review costs a login, drafts wait until you are at a computer, guests wait on the drafts, and you are back to being the bottleneck you were trying to retire. Your mail app is already on your phone and already wakes you politely. So the draft comes to it.
The three answers it accepts
SEND — the draft goes out exactly as written. A few natural equivalents work too: "yes", "ok", "approve", "go ahead", "looks good".
SKIP — the draft is discarded and nothing is sent. "No", "hold", "discard" and "don't send" mean the same thing. The thread stays yours to answer in the Airbnb app if you prefer.
REPLY: — everything after the colon is sent to the guest verbatim, replacing the draft. This is the escape hatch for the drafts that are close but not right: you fix it in the same reply that approves it.
Everything else is refused, on purpose
The parsing rule is strict: the whole answer has to be a send word or a skip word. "SEND but wait until I check the door code" is not a send — it is held as unclear, nothing reaches the guest, and you get a short note back asking for exactly SEND, SKIP, or REPLY:. Plain prose without the REPLY: prefix is never forwarded either; when we tested "Please do not send this yet.", the system held the draft and asked, rather than guessing. The reasoning is simple economics: one more round trip with you costs seconds, while a stray sentence reaching a guest costs trust. Quoted history and signatures are stripped before parsing, so replying from a phone that appends "Sent from my iPhone" does not confuse it.
The checks standing behind one word
A one-word approval is only acceptable if the machinery around it is paranoid. The token in the subject is cryptographically signed and tied to one specific draft in your account — a reply that carries no valid token approves nothing. The reply must come from your address: a SEND from anyone else is refused. A second SEND on the same draft does nothing, because the draft is already sent — so a double-tap, or a spouse replying to the same thread, cannot message the guest twice. And if delivery fails after your approval, you are told plainly that nothing went out, so a yes never silently becomes a no.
What gets held in the first place
In draft mode, everything is held — that is the contract. Later, when routine questions have earned autopilot, the holds are the replies the AI is not confident enough to send and the topics that always route to you. Either way the loop is the same email, the same three answers, the same refusals.
How fast the loop runs
We timed it on a live run: from the SEND leaving the phone to the guest's reply being delivered was about three seconds. The slow part of the pipeline is deliberately you — and only for as long as you want to be in it.
If you want to see what those drafts would look like for your place, paste your listing into the demo at /try and ask it the last three questions your guests sent. Every answer it gets right is a 2am email you would have approved in one word from bed — or slept through, once it earned the send button.