What's new in Hostli: August 2026

A long month. The theme running through most of it: fewer things sitting in a queue waiting for you to press approve, and better reasons behind the numbers we spend your money against.

Replies to your best reviews post themselves

Until now every drafted Google review reply waited for a human to approve it. In practice a four star review with a warm comment and no complaint sat in the queue for two days and got a reply that would have been identical whenever it went out.

Replies to reviews rated four stars and above now publish on their own. Anything at three stars or below still stops for you, because that is the reply where the wording matters and where an automated answer can do real damage. A star-only review with no written text gets a fixed thank you rather than a generated one: an assistant handed "five stars, no comment" invents details of a stay the guest never described, permanently and in public.

Find it under Reputation. The switch is per property, and the approval queue behaves exactly as before for everything it still catches.

The WhatsApp assistant follows the conversation

The assistant used to read each message on its own. Answer a question, then say "and the second one?", and it had already forgotten what the first one was.

It now carries the thread. Follow-ups, corrections and one-word answers land in the context of what came before, and a voice note is transcribed and answered like any other message. When a message arrives that it genuinely cannot answer, you get told rather than the message being quietly dropped.

Anything that would spend money still asks you first, in the same words it would use in the app.

Ad budgets now respect Meta's own published minimums

Meta will not deliver an ad set funded below its minimum for that currency and optimisation goal, and it does not tell you. The campaign simply does not spend.

We used to guard against this with a flat figure we had chosen ourselves. It was thirty three times the minimum for an impressions campaign and, worse, below the minimum for the conversion campaigns most hotels actually publish. Hostli now reads the real minimums from Meta once a day, per currency and per optimisation tier, and raises a budget to clear the floor rather than letting a campaign publish into silence.

The numbers move as exchange rates move, which is why they are read daily rather than written down. You can see the current set for any currency in the public

Campaign audiences built from who actually books

For properties with Google Analytics connected, guest personas are now derived from your own booking data rather than from the categories a platform offers. The band that books most often is frequently not the band worth most, and optimising for booking count quietly prefers the cheaper guest.

Campaigns generated from this month onward use those personas for targeting and for the angle the copy takes. Existing campaigns are untouched.

Also in this release

• A Google Ads advisor reads your account and says which of its recommendations are worth acting on, and which are Google selling you more Google.
• Notifications hold until a working day. A campaign that finishes generating at 22:00 on a Friday no longer buzzes the phone of somebody who cannot do anything about it until Sunday.
• Your Google Business Profile listing now reports reach alongside reviews, so the listing is measured rather than assumed.
• Custom audiences can be built from people who engaged with your Instagram and Facebook content, not only from site visitors.

Under the hood

• Creative generation no longer silently truncates a long instruction, which had been quietly shortening the brief on a minority of campaigns.
• Reporting windows: a rolling window no longer sums the same day more than once, a defect that inflated some breakdown metrics.
• Stability work across the inbox, the campaign editor and the weekly digest.