How to add a chat box to your B&B or inn website

Jerry Ching, InnReply · October 27, 2026

Most small inns don't have a front desk at 10 PM. The innkeeper is turning down beds, doing tomorrow's shopping list, or asleep. Guests, meanwhile, are planning trips on the couch after dinner, and they have small questions that decide whether they book: is there parking, can the dog come, is breakfast gluten-free, what time can we check in if our flight lands late?

A chat box on your website is one way to answer those questions while you're busy. This guide covers what a good one should do for a small inn, what to tidy up on your site before you add one, and how the install works in practice.

What a chat box on an inn website should do

A lot of website chat tools were built for online shops or software companies. An inn has different needs. Here's what I'd look for:

• It answers from your own information. The chat should know your check-in time, your pet rules and your breakfast hours because it read them on your site, not because it guessed. A chat that invents a pool you don't have is worse than no chat at all.
• It says "I'm not sure" and hands the question to you. When it doesn't know, it should take the guest's email and send you the question, so you can reply when you're free.
• It helps with dates. The most common question is some version of "do you have anything on these nights?" A useful chat can show which rooms are free and send the guest to your own booking page with the dates filled in, instead of telling them to go look.
• It never takes payments itself. Bookings and cards should stay in the booking system you already trust.
• It looks like part of your site. Your colors, your inn's name, and small enough on a phone that it doesn't cover the photos.

Before you add one: tidy up your own pages

Any chat that answers from your website is only as good as what's written there. Spend twenty minutes on these before you add anything:

1. Check-in and check-out times, plus what happens if someone arrives late. "Check-in is 3 to 8 PM. Arriving later? Text us and we'll leave a key in the lockbox" answers three questions at once.
2. Pets. Which rooms, which animals, and the fee. If you don't allow pets, say so plainly. (There's a separate guide on pet policies and fees.)
3. Breakfast. What time, what's included, and whether you can handle allergies with notice.
4. Parking, kids, minimum stays and cancellation. These come up constantly and are often buried in a booking-page footnote.
5. Each room's details. Bed size, bathroom, stairs, how many guests it sleeps.

If these are clear on your site, guests can find them even without a chat. If they're not, no chat box can fix it.

How adding a chat box works

Almost every website chat, ours included, is added the same way: you paste one line of code into your website once, and the chat box appears on every page. The line is a small script tag. You don't need to understand it, you only need to know where it goes.

Most website builders have a box for exactly this, usually called something like "footer code", "code injection" or "custom code":

• WordPress: a free plugin such as WPCode gives you a Footer box.
• Squarespace: Website → Pages → Custom Code → Code Injection (Core plan or higher).
• Wix: Settings → Custom Code (a premium plan with a connected domain).
• Webflow: Site settings → Custom code (a paid site plan).

Paste the line, save or publish, and open your site on your phone to check. The full click-by-click steps with pictures are in How to add InnReply on WordPress, Squarespace and Wix.

If you'd rather not touch your website at all, you have two other options. Send the line to whoever looks after your site (it's a two-minute job for them), or, with InnReply, add us as a helper on your website and we'll paste it in for you. You never share your password, and we remove our access once it's live.

Test it like a guest would

Once it's on your site, grab your phone and ask it ten real questions, the kind your guests ask. Try the awkward ones too: "Can I bring two big dogs?", "Is there an elevator?", "Do you have rooms on Christmas Eve?" Then check three things:

• Did every answer match what's actually true at your inn?
• When it didn't know, did it say so and offer to pass the question to you?
• Did the question it couldn't answer actually reach your inbox?

Anything it got wrong usually points to a page on your site that's unclear or out of date. Fix the page, and the chat improves along with it.

What it costs

Prices vary a lot between tools, so check what counts as a "conversation" and what happens when you run out. For InnReply: the Free plan covers 1 location and up to 40 chats a month with no card. The paid plan is $8 a month for up to 2 locations and up to 1,000 chats a month, with a 7-day free trial. When a month's chats run out, the chat kindly asks guests to email you instead, so no one is left hanging.