Team Chat & Presence

See who on your team is online right now, and message them — text, photos, files and voice notes — without leaving the inbox.

TL;DR

What it is — a live "who's online" roster plus a private chat between team members: one-to-one messages, a channel for every team, and groups you create.

Who it's for — front-desk agents handing a guest over, team leads coordinating a shift, anyone who would otherwise jump to a personal messaging app.

Top outcome — guest hand-offs happen inside Lodgestory, with the customer chat one click away, instead of in a separate app where context gets lost.

At a glance


Plan tier	All tiers.
Who can use it	Account Owners, Admins and Users.
Conversation types	Direct messages, team channels (one per team of up to 500 members; members follow the team automatically) and groups (any members, created by anyone).
What you can send	Text with emoji, replies, reactions, edits and deletes; photos, videos, audio and documents (up to 10 per message, 25 MB each); voice notes up to 5 minutes; a customer chat shared as a card.
Privacy	Only the people in a conversation can read it — Admins and Account Owners included cannot read conversations they are not part of.
API	No.

How to find it

Team chat: the chat-bubbles icon on the left rail opens the team chat panel in the bottom-right corner. It stays open while you work in the inbox. The number on the icon is your unread count. (If you move Team chat off the rail, the count shows on the More button instead.)
Who's online: More → Team online on the left rail. The number beside it is how many teammates are online right now; click it to see who. Pin it to the rail from More → Customise to keep the count in view.
Share a customer chat: open the chat in Home → ⋮ menu → Share with teammate.

📸 [SCREENSHOT: team-chat-dock.png — inbox with the team chat panel open]

Conversations

Direct messages — start one from New conversation, or hover a teammate in the online roster and click the message icon.
Team channels — every team of up to 500 members has one. Its members are always the team's current members: add someone to a team and they can read the channel; remove them and they lose access straight away. A team larger than 500 has no channel (if it shrinks back, the channel returns with its history); for a large audience use several smaller teams or groups.
Groups — name it and pick people. The creator is the group's owner and can rename it, add and remove people. Anyone can leave; if the owner leaves the group (or the organisation), the longest-standing member becomes owner.

Messages arrive instantly. You'll see when someone is typing (in conversations of up to 30 people), and in direct messages you'll see Seen once they've read your latest message. Mute a conversation from its ⋮ menu to stop its notifications and keep it out of your unread count.

Files and voice notes

Attach with the paperclip, paste a screenshot, or drag files onto the message box. Add a caption if you like, then send. Photos, videos and audio play right in the conversation; documents download. HEIC photos are sent as files to download, because most browsers cannot display them.

To record a voice note, click the microphone (shown when the message box is empty), talk, and press send. Voice notes show a waveform you can scrub, and play at 1×, 1.5× or 2×.

Files sent in team chat are private to the conversation: they open only for its members, through links that expire after a few minutes.

Sharing a customer chat

Share with teammate sends the customer chat into a direct message, team channel or group as a card, with an optional note ("can you take this guest?"). Clicking the card opens the chat in Home.

Each person sees the card according to their own access: someone who can open that customer chat sees the guest's name, channel and whether it's open or resolved; someone who can't sees only that a chat was shared — never the guest's details. You can only share chats you can open yourself.

A bot journey's AI agent can also post here: with Alert the team switched on in its chat actions, it posts into the team's channel — "AI agent alert · <reason>", the agent's one-line note (quoted, marked as written by the AI agent; links shown but not clickable) and the customer chat card — under the channel's bot account, marked Bot. Team members who are not assigned to that chat (and are not admins) see only that a chat was shared, unless the action is set to also add the team to the conversation.

Notifications

New direct and group messages reach you as push notifications (browser or mobile app) whenever you are not looking at Lodgestory — that is, no Lodgestory tab is visible and the mobile app is not in the foreground. A tab left open in the background does not hold notifications back. Muted conversations never notify. Team channels don't send push notifications — they show an unread count instead. Your tab title shows (n) while new messages arrive in a background tab.

Ask Kaylee

Ask Kaylee in Insights "who's online right now?" or "who in Reservations is around?" for the live roster with last-seen times. Kaylee cannot read team chat conversations.

Limits


Message length	4,000 characters
Files per message	10
File size	25 MB (voice notes 10 MB)
Voice note length	5 minutes
Group size	100 members
Team channel size	Teams of up to 500 members
File types	Images (JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP), video (MP4, MOV, WebM), audio, PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, text, CSV, ZIP and HEIC (as a file)

Troubleshooting

A teammate always shows offline — they need Lodgestory open (or the mobile app in the foreground). If they just signed in, ask them to reload once.
A team has no channel — the team has more than 500 members. Channels are for teams of up to 500.
"You don't have access to this chat" on a shared card — the customer chat isn't assigned to you. Ask an Admin to assign it.
Microphone not available — allow microphone access for Lodgestory in your browser's site settings.