Altek
COMPARISON

Altek vs Opally

We spent a day reading Opally’s product properly, and got four things wrong before we started. Here is what is actually true, where they beat us, and how to tell which of the two your hotel should buy.

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Reviewed 18 August 2026 · written from Opally’s own website and documentation

Choose Opally if
  • You want phone calls answered and reviews replied to, not just email
  • You need Booking.com and Expedia messages in the same place
  • You run a PMS or booking engine we do not support
  • You want to sign up this afternoon and start on your own
  • You are under about a hundred rooms and want their entry tier
Choose Altek if
  • Your reservations team needs somewhere to work, with assignment, ownership and guest data in the thread
  • Your hotels sell a table and a treatment, not only a room
  • You want somebody to come back when a quote goes quiet
  • You run a group, a chain or a central reservations desk
  • You are above about a hundred rooms, where flat pricing wins

Four things we got wrong about Opally

We wrote a first draft of this page from second-hand notes. Then we read their website and their documentation end to end, and four of our claims turned out to be false. Every one of them was in our favour, which is exactly how this goes if nobody checks. Here is what we struck out.

  1. Opera Cloud is only available on requestOpera Cloud is a full integration of theirs, with multi-property support for chains
  2. They do not support BookVisitBookVisit is on their booking engine list
  3. They mention restaurants without naming any systemsThey integrate Resos and easyTable for live table availability
  4. Our approval controls are more careful than theirsTheir model matches ours, with confidence thresholds, send limits, and complaints and negotiations kept manual
Where we are the same

Start with what we agree on

Opally and Altek agree on more than either of us would normally admit.

Both read the guest inquiry, pull live availability and rates from your PMS, and draft a reply in your hotel's voice in over a hundred languages. Both create bookings, handle date changes and cancellations, send payment links and add guest notes. Both give you three levels of control: draft only, approve before sending, or automatic sending on the workflows you choose. Both hand complaints, negotiations and anything ambiguous back to a person.

If you are comparing feature lists, you will struggle to separate us, and you should be suspicious of any page that tells you otherwise. The real difference is what the two companies decided to build.

The hinge

The difference in one line

Opally describes its product as “purpose-built for hotel email within the front desk’s existing workflow.” That is an accurate description and a deliberate choice. It works inside Gmail and Outlook, with approvals and comments, and asks your team to change nothing.

Altek Inbox is the working environment itself, built for hotel reservations, with your property systems native to the thread rather than connected to it.

One makes the tab you already have smarter. The other replaces the tab.

One inquiry, two products

Hi, we would like two nights on the 14th and 15th, a room with a view if you have one. We would also like dinner on the Saturday, around eight, and my wife would love a massage on the Sunday morning if that is possible.

With Opally
  1. Reads the email and classifies what is being asked.
  2. Pulls live availability and rates from the PMS.
  3. Checks live table availability through Resos or easyTable, so the draft can say whether eight o'clock looks possible.
  4. Answers the spa question from your knowledge base.
  5. Drafts the reply with a suggested room and its price, in your voice, for someone to review and send.

Then a person opens the restaurant system to make the booking, and contacts the spa to make the other one.

With Altek
  1. Reads the thread and retrieves availability, rates, stay history and loyalty tier.
  2. Builds the offer: room options with photographs, what is included and the live price.
  3. Books the table for eight, in OpenTable, GastroPlanner or WaiterAid.
  4. Books the treatment for Sunday morning, in BRP.
  5. Prepares the reply and all three bookings together, for one approval.

If the thread then goes quiet, Altek comes back to it on the cadence you set, and stops when the guest replies.

At a glance

CapabilityOpallyAltek
ShapeAn add-in for Gmail and OutlookAltek Inbox, an email client built for reservations. Or Altek for Outlook, if your team would rather stay put
ChannelsEmail, chat, voice, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, SMS, review replies, Booking.com and Expedia messagesEmail, chat, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram. SMS and voice on the roadmap
Property management systemsMews, Apaleo, Opera Cloud, Stayntouch, SynXis, Spectra, Techotel, Mini Hotel. Infor HMS live soonMews, Opera Cloud, Visbook/BookVisit, Infor HMS. Apaleo, Cloudbeds and Stayntouch on the roadmap
Booking enginesProfitroom, BookVisit, WebHotelier, SiteMinder, Amadeus iHotelier, GuestCentric, SirvoyBookVisit
Reservation actionsCreate, date changes, cancellations, payment links, guest notesCreate, modify, cancel, payment links, guest notes
RestaurantLive table availability and context, via Resos and easyTableThe table booked, in OpenTable, GastroPlanner or WaiterAid
SpaAnswers questions about the spaBooks the treatment, through BRP
OffersOne suggested room from availability, with its priceSeveral options with photographs and live prices, across room, table and treatment, matched to what the guest asked for and to their loyalty tier
Follow-up when a guest goes quietNot offeredOn the cadence you set, stopping when the guest replies
Autonomy and the human boundaryOff, Review, Auto-send per workflow, with confidence thresholds and send limitsDraft, Approve, Autonomy per property and per action type. Effectively the same model
The team's workspaceApprovals and comments inside Gmail and OutlookAssignment, ownership, guest and loyalty data in the thread, revenue and urgency ranking, service-level flags, one desk or forty properties
Inbox assessed before go-liveNoEvery deployment
Marketplace listingsMews, ApaleoMews, Oracle Cloud, Microsoft
Pricing€4 to €6 per room per monthOne flat price per hotel per month
Trial14 days30 days

Checked against opally.com and their public documentation in August 2026.

Difference one

A place to work, not a panel to work in

Gmail and Outlook were not built for a reservations team. They have no concept of a guest, a stay, a loyalty tier, a property or who owns which inquiry. However good the intelligence layered on top, the place your team works is still a general-purpose mail client with a hotel-shaped panel beside it.

Altek Inbox was built by people who worked in hotels, for the people who still do:

Assign an inquiry to the person who should own it, so nothing sits in a shared mailbox that belongs to everyone and therefore to nobody.Work the same inbox together across shifts and desks, with the handover visible instead of verbal.The guest's profile, stay history and loyalty tier sit in the thread, not in a system somebody has to remember to open.Inquiries ranked by revenue and urgency rather than by arrival time, so the group inquiry worth forty thousand euros is never behind twelve questions about parking.Anything past your service level is flagged before a guest notices it was.One desk, or forty properties. Each hotel keeps its own voice and its own approval rules, under one group standard.

This is the part that turns knowing what converts into bookings. A finding only becomes revenue if every person, on every shift, applies it to every thread. That needs a desk built around the standard, not a suggestion box inside a mail client.

Difference two

What converts is not how fast you answer

Opally's promise is to answer guests in seconds. It is the promise every product in this category makes, including, until recently, ours.

Our own data says it is not what decides the booking. Across the reply-time buckets we measure in the inbox assessments we run before every deployment, guests answered within two hours book at close to the same rate as guests answered the next day. In most reservations inboxes, median first response during office hours is already well under an hour. Speed was solved before any of us arrived.

The caveat is real and we will state it: speed matters up to a point. If your weekend inquiries wait fourteen hours, you have a genuine problem and both products will fix it. Past that point, answering faster stops winning bookings.

What separates a booking from a silence is whether the reply surfaced and settled what was actually standing between that guest and the booking, whether it showed them what they would be booking, and whether it closed with a clear next step. Altek is built that way because we measured it, not because it sounded right.

Difference three

Offers, not a rate in a sentence

Both products can put a room in a reply. Opally's draft suggests one room from availability with its nightly price.

An Altek offer is composed: several options where several make sense, with photographs, what is included and the live price, matched to what the guest actually said they wanted and to their loyalty tier. For a resort it covers the table and the treatment alongside the room, because to the guest that is one stay and one decision.

A price in a sentence is a number to compare against other hotels. A room shown properly is something to want.

Difference four

Somebody comes back when the thread goes quiet

In a 90-day assessment across six reservation mailboxes, 91% of quoted inquiries that went quiet were never followed up. Not followed up late. Never.

It is the largest pool of recoverable revenue we find in a hotel inbox, and it costs nothing to reach except somebody remembering. Altek tracks a quoted thread that has not been answered, prepares a follow-up on the cadence you set, sends it in the same thread and stops the moment the guest replies. It becomes a rule of the property or the group.

Opally does not offer follow-up on a quiet thread, on its website or in its documentation.

Difference five

We read your inbox before we configure anything

Every Altek deployment starts with an assessment of the hotel's own mail. Every message in a defined window, grouped into threads, machine and bulk senders removed, response measured as elapsed clock time to the first substantive reply, medians rather than averages.

Those findings set the configuration: which hours need cover, which mailboxes get follow-up first, whether the central team is asking routing questions instead of quoting, where quoted threads go quiet. It is free, read-only and needs no installation.

No other product in this category starts there, and it is the reason our deployments are configured around what your inbox actually does rather than around what we assumed it would.

Which one is yours?

The long version of the verdict at the top of this page, now that you have the argument behind it.

Opally is the better choice if
  • You want one platform for every guest message. Phone calls, review replies on Google and TripAdvisor, Booking.com and Expedia messages, web forms. Altek does none of those four.
  • You run a PMS or booking engine we do not support. Their lists are considerably longer than ours.
  • You want operational follow-through, such as lost items routed into Faundit or housekeeping tasks into Sweeply.
  • You want to start this afternoon, on your own. Five-minute setup, self-serve, 14-day trial. Altek involves a conversation.
  • You are a smaller property on their entry tier. Below roughly a hundred rooms their pricing is cheaper than ours.
  • Your team will not move, at all. They are explicit that nothing about the workflow changes.
Altek is the better choice if
  • You want the reservations desk to have a home. Assignment, ownership, service levels, guest and loyalty data in the thread, and the whole estate in one place.
  • Your hotels have a spa. Opally answers questions about the spa. Altek books the treatment.
  • You want the table booked, not looked up. Opally reads live table availability. Altek makes the reservation.
  • You want somebody to come back when a quote goes quiet, as a rule rather than as a good intention.
  • You are a group, a chain or a management company that needs governance rather than reporting.
  • You have a central reservations desk, which carries the most booking-related mail in a group and answers it slowest.
  • You are above roughly a hundred rooms, where flat pricing wins and keeps winning.

What it costs

Opally charges €4 per room per month on Starter and €6 on Pro, with minimums of €100 and €150. Altek charges one flat price per hotel per month, banded by property size, with no per-room, per-response or per-integration fees.

CapabilityOpally (Starter / Pro)Altek
A 60-room hotel€240 / €360€399
A 120-room hotel€480 / €720€549
A 300-room hotel€1,200 / €1,800€549

Below about a hundred rooms, their entry tier costs less than our smallest band, and we would rather say so than let you work it out later. Above it, flat pricing wins and the gap widens, because a per-room price rises every time you sell another room and ours does not move at all. Against Pro, the tier carrying every channel, Altek is already cheaper at around ninety rooms. Our price does not change with season or volume either: the number you agree in February is the number you pay in August.

Hotels that responded faster
and got more bookings

Hotel Mayfair property.

How Hotel Mayfair Reduced Email Reply Time to 30 Seconds

Lydinge Resort property.

How Lydinge Resort freed up many hours a month for real hospitality

The Well Spa & Hotel property.

How The Well Automated 16,000 Guest Conversations and Responds to Emails Up to 3.5x Faster with Altek AI

Altek vs Opally FAQ

The questions hotels ask when they are choosing between the two.

Is Altek or Opally better for hotel groups?
It depends on what the group needs. Opally reaches further across channels and systems, with cross-property reporting and a longer PMS list. Altek goes deeper on the reservations desk: permissions per property, per action type and per risk level with an audit trail on every action, mixed Mews, Opera Cloud and Visbook estates under one contract, spa and restaurant reservations executed rather than looked up, follow-up on quoted threads, and an assessment of your own inboxes before anything is configured. Groups running Opera Cloud can use either product.
What does Altek do that Opally does not?
Gives the reservations team a purpose-built email client rather than an add-in, with assignment, ownership and guest and loyalty data in the thread. Books spa treatments. Makes the restaurant reservation rather than reading availability. Composes offers with photographs and live prices across the whole stay. Follows up when a quoted thread goes quiet. Reads the hotel's own inbox before configuration.
What does Opally do that Altek does not?
Answers phone calls, drafts review replies for Google and TripAdvisor, handles Booking.com and Expedia messages, and offers web forms. It supports a longer list of property management systems and booking engines, plus operations tools and e-signature. Altek has voice and SMS on the roadmap and does not do review management.
Can both send emails without a human?
Yes, and this is not a difference between the two products. Both offer drafting, approval before sending, and automatic sending on the workflows you explicitly enable. Both fall back to a draft when a request is ambiguous, and both keep complaints and negotiations with a person. Anyone telling you one of us is fundamentally safer than the other has not read both.
How do the prices compare?
Opally is €4 per room per month on Starter and €6 on Pro, with minimums of €100 and €150. Altek is one flat price per hotel per month, banded by property size. Below roughly a hundred rooms Opally is usually cheaper. Above it Altek is, and the gap widens with size.
Which one should a hotel with a spa choose?
Altek, if the spa is part of what you sell rather than an amenity you describe. A guest asking for a room, dinner at eight and a treatment on Saturday is three bookings in three systems. Altek prepares all three for one approval. Opally will answer the question about the spa accurately, but somebody on your team still makes the booking.