TL;DR: Across a 30-day sample of 1.6 million guest messages, about 4 in 10 arrived outside 9-to-5, and the after-hours mix skewed toward messages that need a fast reply: complaints, wifi problems, maintenance, and lockouts that peak between 11pm and 2am.

Key findings

  • About 4 in 10 guest messages arrive outside 9-to-5

  • Complaints run about 1.9× their normal share overnight. Wifi problems spike late at night, also around 1.9×. Maintenance runs about 1.6× after 9pm.

  • Lockouts peak between 11pm and 2am. A message at 1am is six to seven times more likely to be "I can't get in" than one at 9am.

  • After-hours access problems are about 60% more likely to go unanswered for two hours than daytime ones.

Once the front desk goes home for the night, the guests don't. Somewhere around 1am you get the worst version of it: a guest stuck at the door with a code that won't work, nobody awake to help, and a message that just sits in the inbox until morning. By the time someone finally answers, the guest's been locked out for ages and the one-star review is already half-written.

We wanted to see how common that overnight scramble really is, so we looked at 1.6 million guest messages over 30 days, converted every one to the property's local time, and sorted them by what the guest was actually asking.

Our last report went through 900,000 guest messages and found roughly 80% are the same repeatable questions over and over. That was what guests ask. This one's about when they ask it, because the message landing at 1am is nothing like the one that comes in at 1pm.

When do guests message the most?

Guest messaging runs around the clock, and about 4 in 10 messages arrive outside 9-to-5. During the day, the inbox is mostly logistics: check-in times, arrival questions, where to park. After dark, the mix tilts toward the messages you least want to miss. Complaints, wifi problems, and maintenance all climb well above their normal share once the day winds down.

After dark, the inbox fills with complaints, wifi problems, and maintenance issues. Each cell shows how common a message type is in that part of the day versus its normal share.

What do guests ask about late at night?

Late at night, the single sharpest pattern is access. Lockouts and "the code isn't working" messages peak between 11pm and 2am. At 1am, a guest message is six to seven times more likely to be someone unable to get in than it is at 9am. One property sees a handful of these a month and writes them off as bad luck. Look across a whole network of them and the pattern is impossible to miss.

The share of guest messages that are lockouts by local hour, lowest around 9am and peaking near 1am.

How Akia covers the overnight shift.

Akia is the AI Agent for hospitality, and overnight is exactly the window it's built for: the hours when a guest still needs an answer and no one's awake to give it.

Akia answers using your property's knowledge and the guest's reservation.

A guest messages at 1am and Akia already knows who they are, what unit they're in, and what their stay looks like. Akia pulls the right entry steps for that specific unit and walks the guest through them on the spot, in whatever channel they messaged from.

Example on how to instruct your Agent with step-by-step instructions. 

Title: Room Access Troubleshooting

Instructions: When a guest says they cannot enter their room or their code/key is not working, help them troubleshoot step by step.

  1. First, confirm the room/unit name or number and ask what happens when they try to enter.
  2. Ask them to verify they are at the correct door.
  3. Ask them to re-enter the code slowly and carefully.
  4. If relevant, remind them to press any confirm/unlock button after entering the code.
  5. Ask them to try the handle after entering the code.
  6. If it still does not work, ask them to wait 30 seconds and try again.
  7. If available, ask them to send a photo of the keypad/lock or describe any lights, sounds, or error messages.
  8. If the issue still is not resolved, apologize and escalate to staff immediately.

Agents handle issues around door codes, wifi, devices like tv air conditioners within the room as well. 

A lockout is the clearest case.

Akia confirms the guest and their reservation, checks whether a valid code exists for that stay, and reissues the code or triggers door access right there in the conversation. A lot of overnight access problems get solved before anyone has to be woken up or sent out to the property. See the door locks Akia works with.

You decide how far Akia goes.

Akia can complete the action on its own, ask a staff member to approve it first, or prep the handoff with the full context attached. You set that per question type, and move things from supervised to agentic as your confidence grows.

Anything that needs a person gets escalated with the context already there.

A real complaint, a safety issue, anything Akia isn't sure about, will notify your team with the guest, the reservation, and the full conversation attached. Your on-call staff gets woken up for the things that actually need them, not for a door code.

Akia covers every channel from one inbox.

SMS, WhatsApp, Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, web chat, and email all run through the same place, so a guest who switches from Airbnb to a text at midnight gets the same answers without re-explaining anything.

The daytime inbox is a solved problem for most properties. The overnight one is where reviews, refunds, and a guest's first hour get decided, and it's the shift that's hardest to staff.

See how Akia's guest services agent works, or book a demo to see how Akia handles your property's most common overnight messages.