Alfred Co.host platform

Create properties & their library

Add each property and build its knowledge base from preconfigured library items — fields already named and described, so you fill in rather than start from scratch.

Manage each property’s subscription

Every property has its own plan, billing cycle and renewal date — all aggregated into one tabular view in your profile.

Test the AI before going live

Chat with Alfred using your own KB, across stay phases (pre-stay, stay, post-stay), and confirm it’s ready before guests ever reach it.

Customize the edges

Add custom fields, shape the escalation logic, and choose channels per property — WhatsApp, Telegram, or an iframe on your own site.

Configuring an AI, not a back-office

Most B2B tools have a user who already knows what they want. Here the user has to teach a system — what the chatbot knows, how much, for which property. The job was making that clear to someone who has never heard the words “knowledge base.”

Wildly uneven digital literacy

From the co-host with 20 properties to the owner of a single flat who signed up on a friend’s tip. The interface had to serve both — without patronising the first or overwhelming the second. No 12-step onboarding, no technical glossary.

Multi-property, separate subscriptions

Every property lives independently: its own plan, live or not, different channels active. Making that parallelism legible — without it collapsing into a configuration table — was non-trivial.

Design decisions into production React

The vibecoded work closed the gap between prototype and implementation directly — Claude Code to write real components, not mockups. It changed how I design: I now think in terms of state, not just screens.

Both the colour direction — chosen together with the team — and the broader UI of the platform, which I owned, were a deliberate bet on simplicity. The audience is huge and spans roughly 25 to 65: a single property owner and a 20-unit professional co-host use the same screens. That ruled out anything that depended on being digitally fluent.

So the interface is quiet, familiar and unhurried — legible type, generous spacing, one accent colour, no decorative motion. Not ultra-modern, not animation-heavy, not a parade of shapes and gradients. Restraint is the feature: the real fear was that a less tech-confident host would get lost in a busy, “designed” interface — that visual noise would read as stress, not delight. Every element earns its place, and the rest gets out of the way to keep cognitive load low without ever feeling dull.

Straight from the property list, the host types a question as if they were their own guest. Alfred answers using exactly what was entered in the KB, and a stay-phase selector (pre-stay, stay, post-stay) reflects how questions shift across the moment of the stay. The reality check: before handing Alfred’s contact to guests, you confirm it knows how to reach the flat, the WiFi code, the check-out time. It stops being an opaque system that “should work” and becomes something you can interrogate yourself.

Robin runs the same logic in the opposite direction: it answers the host’s questions about the platform itself — subscriptions, channels, the KB editor — not the properties. The manager’s assistant, not the guest’s. Where Alfred is the thing being configured, Robin is the help desk that explains how to configure it.

Touchpoints still need to expand. Alfred reaches guests on a focused set of channels today. The next step is widening that coverage — more messaging surfaces and integrations — so a host can meet guests wherever they already are, not where the platform happens to support.

We rely on third parties we don’t control. The assistant is built on external LLMs and channels like WhatsApp, so their availability, policy changes and pricing sit outside our hands. It’s a deliberate trade-off — and one we’re transparent about: the dependency is spelled out in the terms & conditions accepted at subscription.

The host can’t pick Alfred’s contact number. The number guests message Alfred on is assigned by us, not chosen by the client — the only number the host controls is the hands-off number, the one Alfred escalates to when it passes a conversation to a human. Letting hosts bring or choose Alfred’s own number is something to improve later.