HiJiffy's Email Copilot Cuts Hotel Reply Times From 5 Days to 1

Hotel guests wait nearly 15 hours for an email reply — 14 hours and 58 minutes on average — even though hospitality teams themselves respond in under five hours once they're at their desks. That gap, measured by EmailAnalytics across 27.7 million emails in Q1 2026, is the problem HiJiffy says its new Email Copilot was built to close. At pilot property Oliva Nova, response times fell from five days to one during peak season.

Email Copilot, launched now as an add-on for HiJiffy customers on the Aplysia 3 platform, drafts email replies for reservations and front-desk teams inside the HiJiffy console. It never sends anything on its own: a human reviews every draft before it goes out. The 2016-founded, Portugal-based company — headquartered in Vidigueira, with offices in Lisbon and Porto, and more than 2,600 hotels across 60-plus countries — has built the tool to attack a specific labor pattern. Emails pile up overnight, so teams start each morning already behind.

How the three agents work

The system runs three sequential AI agents. The first matches a guest's request to the hotel's Answer Templates. The second searches the property's Knowledge Base. The third combines both into a single reply — and when an email contains several unrelated questions, the agents answer all of them in one coherent draft. Staff can adjust tone, translate the reply into any language the console supports, and summarize long threads on demand.

At Oliva Nova, the productivity numbers showed up fast. Ainoa Martín, who works reservations at the Spanish property, said: "We answer in a day now. Last summer it was five days." She added: "Before, a proposal took me about 30 minutes, and I only work eight hours. Now it's five to seven minutes because I only add the options."

That's roughly a 30-minute task compressed to five — an 80-plus percent cut on one of the most time-consuming items in a reservations agent's queue.

What does transparency look like in practice?

Every suggestion ships with an Insights panel showing the Answer Templates used and the Knowledge Base documents or website pages behind the answer. When information is missing, or a question needs human judgment, the system flags it rather than guessing: it inserts a visible tag showing what the agent must complete, and the Send button stays locked until every tag is resolved.

"The hard part wasn't generating a reply. It was making sure the team never sends one it shouldn't," said José Mendonça, CTO and Co-Founder at HiJiffy. Sent emails carry a "Generated by AI" or "Generated with the help of AI" label, and a dedicated report tracks adoption, time saved, and gaps in each hotel's Knowledge Base.

CEO and Co-Founder Tiago Araújo framed the economics plainly: "We didn't build Email Copilot to replace the reservations team. We built it so they stop losing time hunting for information and spend it on the guest instead. The AI handles the first draft; the final call is always human."

HiJiffy's track record includes UNWTO recognition as one of the most innovative companies in global tourism in 2020 and a 4.5/5 score across 200-plus verified reviews on Hotel Tech Report, plus a Level III certification for global customer support. With Email Copilot now live for Aplysia 3 users, the company is betting that inbox backlog — not staffing speed — is the next frontier in hotel guest communication.