FAQ Q391: I'd like to allow my customers to use AI to make bookings

Planyo offers two ways for your customers to interact with Planyo using AI: a full MCP server and a simple AI assistant widget. By default AI features are switched off for all Planyo sites, you'll need to activate them on the AI settings page.

MCP server

There's an MCP server which allows any AI agent to connect to your Planyo site and perform a number of actions such as resource discovery, checking for availability, making reservations, interacting with previously made reservations etc. Please see Q390 for the details of the MCP server. Note that your customers would need to know the MCP endpoint and your MCP key in order to interact with your Planyo site using this method.

AI assistant widget / extension

The AI assistant widget is the easiest way you can let your customers use AI (text or voice) to check for availability and make reservations. This is a Planyo extension which allows you to add an AI assistant widget to the page with the Planyo plugin on your website. Note that this widget currently only works if you're using the "quick add to cart" shopping cart mode. Your customers can make a number of reservations which will be added to their shopping cart which will then need to be checked out by your customers manually. This solution makes it very easy to make reservations using very simple prompts without the need to tell the AI all the personal details etc. needed in order to finalize the reservation.

The AI assistant extension requires that you provide your own API key to any of the supported AI providers: Grok, OpenAI ChatGPT, Google Gemini or Anthropic Claude. You can also fully customize the system prompt template as the performance of the AI (and the fees paid to the AI provider) will greatly depend on the quality of the system prompt used.

AI settings

The AI settings page lets you switch on or off the AI support and it also lets you set rate limits (per minute, hour and 24h period) for a single IP address. Note that Planyo independently sets rate limits per IP so it's possible an abusive IP would be denied access even if the limits you set are not hit.