Place an “Ask our concierge” bar on any page so guests can describe their ideal stay in plain language and drop straight into the concierge, instead of wrestling with search filters.
What it does #
Your homepage hero and landing pages usually send guests into a search form full of dropdowns and date pickers. For someone who just wants to say “dog-friendly cabin near the lake for four in July,” that is friction at the exact moment they are most interested.
The Ask Bar gives them a natural-language way in. You drop it on a page with a shortcode, and guests get a simple “Ask our concierge” prompt. On desktop it expands into an ask field with a microphone and a few quick suggestion chips; on mobile it opens a clean full-screen panel with the same options. When the guest submits their question, the Concierge opens right there and answers, with no jarring page reload, landing straight in the conversation itself, even on sites where the chat drawer normally opens on a Home tab first.
You place it with the shortcode [hr_hero_ask], and you control how it looks and reads from the Search Ask Tab section of the Chatbot tab in AI Concierge settings.
If your site also runs the Toolkit’s Search Bar Pro, the two features share one ask experience rather than offering guests two separate ways to describe a stay. See Hide when Search Bar Pro is present below.
How to turn it on #
1. Enable the Ask Bar #
In AI Concierge settings, open the Chatbot tab, scroll to the Search Ask Tab section, and turn the Ask Bar on. It is off by default, so it will not appear until you enable it and add the shortcode.
2. Place the shortcode #
Add [hr_hero_ask] to any page, for example your homepage hero or a landing page.
3. Customize the wording and look #
Still in the Search Ask Tab section, set the label, sub-line, button text, the rotating example questions, the suggestion chips, and the brand accent color so the bar matches your site.
Settings #
| Setting | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Enabled | Turns the Ask Bar on or off. Off by default. |
| Open mode | Whether the bar starts collapsed until clicked (accordion, the default) or expanded on load. On mobile it always opens as a tap-to-open panel. |
| Header label | The main prompt, for example “Ask our concierge.” |
| Sub-line | The smaller line beneath the label, for example “Describe your ideal stay in your own words.” |
| Submit button label | The text on the submit button. Defaults to “Ask.” |
| Rotating examples | The example questions that cycle through the input as placeholder text, to show guests what they can ask. Ships with five example questions by default. |
| Suggestion chips | The quick-tap suggestions shown with the bar. You can add, remove, and reorder them, and give each one an icon from a small built-in set (family, pet, walk, heart, star, bed, water, calendar, location, dining) or leave it icon-free. Ships with three default chips. |
| Brand accent | The accent color used for the bar, to match your branding. Blank by default, which inherits your theme’s color. |
| Fallback target URL | Only used if the page the Ask Bar sits on does not have the Concierge chatbot loaded. In that case, submitting a question sends the guest to this URL instead. Leave it blank (the default) and the guest’s own page reloads with the question attached, which then opens the Concierge and submits it automatically once the chatbot is present. On a normal setup, with the chatbot present on the page, the Concierge always opens in place and this field is not used at all. |
| Hide when Search Bar Pro is present | On any page that also carries the Toolkit’s Search Bar Pro search bar, the Ask Bar shortcode renders nothing, since Search Bar Pro’s own What field already serves as the describe-your-stay entry point there, and showing both would give guests two competing ways to ask the same question. Pages without Search Bar Pro are unaffected. On by default. |
Tips #
- The Ask Bar shines in a homepage hero, where a natural-language prompt converts better than a cold search form.
- Use the suggestion chips and rotating examples to hint at the kinds of questions that work well, such as a vibe, a location, or a group size.
- Make sure the Concierge chatbot is enabled on any page carrying the Ask Bar shortcode, so questions open the Concierge in place instead of falling back to the fallback URL.
- Your rotating examples and header label are not just for this bar: if you also run the Toolkit’s Searchbar Pro, its What field picks up the same copy automatically for its own concierge typing placeholder, so you only configure it once here.
- The Ask Bar is one entry point into the same assistant you configure elsewhere. See Operator Tools for the full settings map and the Overview for how the Concierge understands guests.