Amsterdam-based HolidayHero has made its Model Context Protocol (MCP) server generally available to every customer, opening up infrastructure the company originally built to run its own business. Operators can now connect an AI assistant — Claude, ChatGPT, or an agent of their own — to their workspace and let it work across the whole of the guest stay: conversations, itineraries, tasks, offers, guidebook content, and guest signals.
How It Works
The server is switched on by the operator directly in settings, without involving HolidayHero, and is included in the platform at no additional cost. The company has also published the complete list of what an agent can read, what it can write, and what it’s never permitted to do, on a public page requiring no registration.
A Different Layer of the Stack
HolidayHero positions itself as sitting above the property management system (PMS) rather than replacing it. A PMS’s MCP server exposes a reservation; HolidayHero’s server exposes what happens after the booking, through to rebooking.
Hjalte Niehorster, CTO and co-founder of HolidayHero, explained the distinction: “An agent connected to a PMS can change a booking. An agent connected to HolidayHero can run the stay. Those are different questions, not competing answers to one. If your PMS ships an MCP server, use it for the booking and point the same assistant at us for everything after it.”
Because this layer sits above the PMS by design, the server behaves the same way across HolidayHero’s 25+ PMS integrations.
What Operators Asked It to Do First
The earliest requests from operators have been notably unglamorous. Three examples, in the operators’ own words:
“Find the reservations arriving this week with no phone number on them.” A booking without a mobile number can’t be sent a check-in link, a door code, or a WhatsApp message — and nobody notices until the guest is standing outside. The agent reads the week’s arrivals, flags the gaps, and creates a task against each one.
“Write the shift handover.” Currently written at the end of a long shift by someone who wants to go home — exactly when it gets written badly. The agent reads the day’s conversations, open tasks, and outstanding arrivals, and drafts the handover for the duty manager to correct rather than compose from scratch.
“Build my monthly report.” Normally assembled in a spreadsheet on the first Monday of every month. The agent pulls the month’s occupancy, offer uptake, message volume, resolution rate, and guest signals, and writes the report.
None of these are new capabilities — every one is something the platform already held, and something a staff member already did by clicking. What the MCP server changes is who clicks.
The Queue Written by Guests
The most unusual capability emerged from a mechanic already running inside the platform. HolidayHero’s own AI answers 94% of guest questions. When it can’t answer one, it doesn’t guess or simply escalate — it creates a task to extend the property’s guest app content, so the next guest who asks receives a real answer.
Over a month, those tasks accumulate into a list, effectively written by guests, of everything a property has never quite explained — whether the car park barrier needs a code after midnight, which beach has a lifeguard in September. An agent connected over MCP can now work that queue: reading the open content tasks, reading the conversation behind each one, drafting the missing guidebook section, and attaching it to the task for a person to approve.
“An operator’s own AI closing the gaps our AI found is the part nobody has written about yet,” Niehorster said.
A Role, Not a Key
An agent connected through the server inherits an existing platform role, with the same permissions a staff member would be given — there’s no master key. Every action is attributed to the agent and the role that granted it, and is reviewable. The MCP layer changes the interface, not the compliance posture: GDPR, EU data residency, and PCI DSS Level 1 all apply unchanged.
HolidayHero has run its own product board, sales pipeline, and marketing website through internal MCP servers for several months prior to this launch.
Niehorster reflected on the design process: “We did not build this in order to announce it. We built it because we needed it, and going back to clicking started to feel absurd. The protocol was the easy part. The hard part was deciding what an agent must never be allowed to touch, and there is no specification for that. It is a judgement about your own business, made one tool at a time. We got it wrong at least once, in public, on our own data. That is why the permission model shipped before the server did.”
About HolidayHero
HolidayHero is a European AI guest-experience platform that runs the stay, both guest-facing and back-office, on whatever property management system an operator already uses. It serves boutique hotels, hotel groups, holiday parks, vacation rentals, aparthotels, and hostels across 23 countries, and has processed 235,431 reservations. Pricing starts at €6.50 per unit per month, published, with no setup fee.
