Build vs. Buy — Conduit for Hospitality AI
Build vs. Buy
Build it in six months, or buy it today.
ChatGPT in your PMS gets you a demo. Conduit gets you a working hospitality agent in days.
/ THE LANDSCAPE
Deep or broad. Everything else makes you pick one.
A hospitality agent has to be both: deep enough to know your operation and broad enough to work every channel and tool. Here is where the usual options land.
Build it in-house
- Deep, but rigid
- Every workflow is its own engineering project. It works until your operation changes, then someone has to go rebuild it.
Conduit
- Deep and broad, day one
- Knows hospitality out of the box, works every channel, and learns the way your team actually runs in a matter of days.
A VA team or spreadsheets
- Manual and one-off
- Scales by headcount, not software. Context leaks every time a thread hops from one app to the next, and the pager never sleeps.
ChatGPT or Claude + Zapier
- Broad, but shallow
- Drafts a reply, forgets your SOPs, and can't actually book the room, push the refund, or dispatch the contractor.
/ HEAD TO HEAD
Conduit vs. building it yourself
| Feature | Conduit | Build it yourself |
|---|---|---|
| Time to live | Days | 6+ months, 3–5 engineers |
| Hospitality knowledge on day one | Hospitality context from 50M+ guest conversations | Starts from a blank prompt |
| Channels | WhatsApp, SMS, email, phone, Airbnb, Booking, native | Wire and maintain each one yourself |
| PMS & tooling | Native connectors: Guesty, Hostaway, Mews, Cloudbeds, Opera… | Build and babysit every integration |
| Takes action | Books, refunds, dispatches, upsells | Drafts text a human pastes |
| Learns your operation | Absorbs your SOPs and exceptions in days | Re-explained in every prompt |
| Coverage | 24/7, 140 languages, under a minute to first reply | Office hours, one language |
| Security & reliability | SOC 2 Type II, monitored, on-call | Your team owns the pager |
| Keeps improving | New capabilities ship continuously | Competes with your real roadmap |
/ THE THREE WALLS
Every DIY build hits the same three walls
Context
A single guest thread plus their reservation history, your listings, your house rules, and last night's maintenance log blows straight past any prompt window. Conduit pre-computes that context so the agent walks into every conversation already knowing the situation.Action
General-purpose AI writes you a nice paragraph. It can't move a reservation, push a refund, send the upsell, or ping the on-call plumber. Conduit acts inside the systems you already run, not in a chat window you copy-paste out of.Maintenance
WhatsApp, Airbnb, Booking, and every PMS API change on their own schedule. A side-project agent quietly rots between sprints. Conduit's connectors are monitored and maintained for you, so the thing you bought keeps working.
/ THE PROOF
What you get on day one, not in two quarters
- 50M+
Guest conversations handled - $3B+
Reservation value influenced - 87%
Of guest messages resolved autonomously - 95%
Guest CSAT - <1 min
Median first response - 300+
Hospitality brands
Build vs. buy, answered
Can't I just connect my PMS to ChatGPT and call it done?
You'll get a convincing demo and then hit three walls: context (a guest's full history plus your listings and SOPs won't fit in a prompt), action (a chatbot drafts a message, it can't actually book or refund), and maintenance (channel and PMS APIs drift, and a side project rots). Conduit is the layer that solves all three, not the model underneath it.
We have engineers. Why not build it ourselves?
Isn't buying just paying for a model we could call ourselves?
How long until Conduit is actually running?
Is our guest data safe?
What if we already started building?
/ STOP BUILDING, START SHIPPING