Let guests raise their hand on a sold-out property, on the page or in a chat conversation, so you can email them the moment their exact dates open back up, instead of losing them for good.
What it does #
A sold-out date range is not a dead end for a guest, it is a delayed booking waiting for the right nudge. Without a way to ask “let me know if this opens up,” that guest leaves your site and books somewhere else, or forgets to check back. Availability Watchers turns that dead end into a captured lead: guests can raise their hand right on a sold-out property page, or, if you also run the AI Concierge, simply by asking the chat widget.
Here is what that looks like on the property page:
- A guest searches a property for June 12 to June 19 and the quote comes back sold out.
- A “Watch these dates” card appears under the booking widget.
- The guest clicks it. Your site resolves the exact dates and party size and shows them back for confirmation, so nobody is signed up for a window they did not ask for.
- The guest enters an email address and submits.
- They get a confirmation email and click the link in it. Landing on the page is enough; the watch confirms itself the moment it detects real activity there (moving the mouse, scrolling, tapping, or pressing a key), so there is usually no separate button to press. A plain confirm button still appears after a few seconds as a fallback, in case JavaScript is off or nothing is detected. Nobody is watching anything until that confirmation happens, so there is no risk of watching an email address that never asked for it.
- From then on, your site rechecks availability for that exact window a few times a day. The moment it opens up, the guest gets an email. If several of their watched homes open up at once, that is one email listing all of them, not a flood of separate messages.
- If the dates pass, or the guest has already been emailed several times about the same watch, the watch retires on its own.
Guests can also ask through chat #
If you run the AI Concierge alongside Conversion Kit, guests do not have to find the “Watch these dates” card at all. They can set up, check on, and cancel watches by talking to the concierge, using the same waitlist language they see everywhere else in the chat widget:
- “Let me know if anything in the Gulf Shores area under $300 a night opens up for August 12 to 19” sets up one watch that can cover several matching homes at once, not just whichever property page the guest happens to be on.
- “What am I watching?” lists every watch the guest has started in that conversation, each with its own dates and homes.
- “Cancel my August one” brings up a confirmation card. Nothing is cancelled until the guest presses the button, so the concierge itself never cancels a watch on its own say-so.
If the AI Concierge’s tabbed widget shell is turned on, guests also get a Waitlist tab in the chat drawer: a running list of every watch they have going in that session, with a status pill (Active, Pending, Paused) for each, and, for any watch they started, an on/off switch to pause or resume it themselves without cancelling it outright or waiting on an email. A watch paused by the guest stays paused until they flip it back; the switch does not appear on a watch the site itself paused (for example, for a licensing lapse), since that one is not the guest’s to toggle. See AI Concierge: Home Tab for what that tab looks like.
If a guest comes back on a different device, or in a browser where they have cleared their data, that tab will look empty even though their watches are still active behind the scenes. A “Joined on another device?” link in the tab lets them enter the email address they used; your site emails them a link that brings their waitlist back on the new device with one click.
Every watch goes through the same one confirmation email before anything is monitored, no matter which door the guest came through. Because chat watches are tied to that chat session, the concierge can only list, cancel, pause, or resume watches it helped create within roughly the last week; older ones still work through the cancel link in their emails, or through the device-recovery link above.
This needs both plugins active. The conversation itself is the AI Concierge‘s job; the watching, checking, and emailing is Conversion Kit’s. Guests only get the conversational version when Availability Watchers is turned on and licensed here in Conversion Kit, and the AI Concierge chat widget is live on the same site. With only Conversion Kit active, guests still get the on-page card. With only the AI Concierge active and Availability Watchers off or unlicensed, the concierge tells the guest availability alerts are not set up yet and offers to take their contact details instead.
One honest limit worth knowing, on the property-page card specifically: it only appears once your site’s core booking widget can tell the difference between “these dates are genuinely sold out” and “the quote call just failed.” That distinction is a small, separate update to the booking widget itself. Until your site has it, turning this tool on will not show the on-page card yet. The chat version does not depend on that update.
How to turn it on #
1. Open the Conversion Kit settings #
From your WordPress admin, go to HomeRunner Toolkit and open the Conversion Kit settings.
2. Enable the tool #
Toggle Availability Watchers on. This is a Premium tool, so it needs an active Conversion Kit Premium license. See HomeRunner Add-on Pricing for what’s included at each tier.
If you also run the AI Concierge, this is the only switch you need for the chat side too. Once Availability Watchers is on and licensed here, guests can start asking the concierge to watch, list, cancel, pause, and resume dates without any extra setup inside the AI Concierge itself.
3. Adjust the limits if you want to #
The defaults (below) work well for most sites out of the box. Raise or lower them from the same settings screen if your volume or email sending policy calls for it. These limits apply the same way whether a watch started on a property page or in a chat conversation.
4. Check in on the Watchers Health page #
Under HomeRunner Toolkit, the Watchers Health admin page shows whether the background check is running, whether it can reach your PMS data, how many watches are active, and how many confirmation and opened-up emails are stuck or failing to send. Glance at it after turning the tool on to confirm everything is moving.
5. Check Demand Radar for what guests are actually asking for #
Next to Watchers Health, the Demand Radar admin page is a read-only report of what guests asked to be notified about: the most-requested date windows and party sizes, your most-watched homes, and a breakdown of how many watches started on a property page versus in chat. When a guest raises the request through the AI Concierge, Demand Radar also breaks out the regions and amenities they mentioned, a demand signal your booking calendar cannot show you on its own. It counts confirmed (double-opted-in) watches as the headline number, with pending-confirmation watches shown alongside for context.
Settings #
| Setting | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Max watches per email address | How many active or pending watches a single email address can hold at once, so one guest cannot quietly fill up your capacity. Applies to watches from the page and from chat alike. Default: 5. |
| Max active watches site-wide | A ceiling on total active watches across your whole site, protecting your outbound email sending and background check budget. Default: 200. |
| Emails per watch before auto-expiry | How many “your dates opened up” emails a single watch can ever send before it retires automatically. Prevents the same guest from getting notified indefinitely about a window that keeps opening and closing. Default: 5. |
| Retention (days) before anonymization | How many days a finished watch (expired, unsubscribed, or cancelled) keeps its email address before that address is anonymized. Default: 30. |
Tips #
- How this differs from Price Alerts: Price Alerts watches a property the guest is already looking at for a price drop. Availability Watchers watches for the exact dates the guest wanted to become bookable again. Run both if you want, they cover different moments in the guest’s search.
- The watcher emails (the confirmation email, the “dates are open” alert, the expiry notice, and the device-recovery link) are all editable the same way as every other automated email on your site, whether the watch came from the page or from chat. See Email Customization to adjust subject lines and copy.
- For more on what guests can do in that same conversation, see AI Concierge: Property Chat.
- If watches are not converting, check that your confirmation emails are actually landing in inboxes first. No watch goes active until the guest opens that link, so email deliverability is the first thing to rule out.