Question 1

What do I need to get started?

Accepted Answer

A Lodgify account connecting your properties to Airbnb, VRBO, and/or Booking.com. pepperAssist syncs against your existing Lodgify data — it doesn't replace Lodgify or your channel listings.

Question 2

How does pricing work?

Accepted Answer

The greater of $29 per property per month or 3% of that property's revenue, pulled automatically from your connected Lodgify account. See the Pricing page for a calculator against your own numbers.

Question 3

What channels does the AI actually handle?

Accepted Answer

SMS, email, Telegram, and in-app chat today. Voice/phone support is explicitly not a goal — pepperAssist is text-first by design. WhatsApp is a stated future channel, not available yet.

Question 4

Can the AI approve a refund or exception on its own?

Accepted Answer

No. Anything that costs money or grants an exception — refunds, discounts, early check-in, late checkout, pet exceptions, a vendor's quoted repair cost — always waits for a real owner decision (web or Telegram). This is a hard rule, not a configurable default.

Question 5

Does the no-voice design protect against AI voice-cloning scams?

Accepted Answer

It removes one real attack surface. AI voice-cloning has become a documented vector for vacation-rental fraud — cloning a manager's voice to talk a guest through a fake "emergency" wire transfer or refund. Because pepperAssist has no phone channel at all, there's no voice to clone in the first place, and because no request that moves money or grants an exception can be actioned without a real owner decision, a convincing message alone — by voice or text — can't move money on its own. This describes what the product structurally can't do, not a fraud-detection feature.

Question 6

Is my data secure?

Accepted Answer

API keys (like your Lodgify key) are encrypted at rest, and every organization's data is isolated from every other's at the database layer. We're not SOC2-certified yet — that's a maturity milestone ahead of us, not something we claim today.

Question 7

Is guest conversation data used to train AI models?

Accepted Answer

No. pepperAssist sends guest messages to Anthropic's commercial API (not a consumer product), whose commercial terms contractually prohibit using API customer content to train models. Your guests' conversations stay yours.

Question 8

Do you ever see or store my card number?

Accepted Answer

No. Card setup and every monthly charge run through Stripe's own hosted payment fields — pepperAssist only ever stores the opaque payment-method reference Stripe hands back, never the actual card number. Cardholder data never touches our servers, and if a charge ever gets disputed, you're notified the moment it happens.

Question 9

Is pepperAssist a channel manager or booking platform?

Accepted Answer

No. Lodgify, Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking.com stay your systems of record for listings and bookings. pepperAssist acts as the property manager inside those tools rather than replacing them.

Question 10

Can I sign up right now?

Accepted Answer

pepperAssist is pre-launch — we're onboarding a small group of hosts directly rather than open self-serve signup. Request early access and we'll reach out.

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