[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"blog.post.rye-and-beyond-ai-search":3,"blog.related.rye-and-beyond-ai-search":133,"blog.adjacent.rye-and-beyond-ai-search":139},{"data":4,"meta":129},[5],{"id":6,"Title":7,"Content":8,"Description":9,"Category":10,"slug":11,"createdAt":12,"updatedAt":13,"publishedAt":14,"readTime":15,"documentId":16,"Image":17,"author":69,"Seo":114},122,"How we turned holiday-let search into an AI concierge, built on Chat Thing","**Most \"AI search\" is a chatbot bolted to the corner of a page.** For Rye & Beyond Cottages, a holiday-lettings brand on the East Sussex coast, we built the opposite: an AI concierge that drives the actual search interface. It filters the catalogue, checks live availability, plans the trip, and writes the results straight onto the page. And the conversational layer, the part everyone assumes is hard, we barely wrote. That's the bit Chat Thing does.\n\nHere's the twist up front, because it's the whole point of this post: the AI was the easy part. Stick with me and I'll show you why.\n\n![The Rye & Beyond widget on load: an AI concierge on the left, the full cottage catalogue on the right.](https:\u002F\u002Fres.cloudinary.com\u002Fdjyjvrw5u\u002Fimage\u002Fupload\u002Fv1782912218\u002Fhero_4b881301ce.png)\n*The widget on load. Chat on the left, the full catalogue on the right. One surface, two ways in.*\n\n## Holiday-lettings search is three hard problems in a trench coat\n\nYou've got a catalogue people want to browse and filter. You've got fuzzy, human intent (\"somewhere dog-friendly near the beach with a woodburner for a long weekend\") that keyword filters can't read. And you've got availability, which changes by the day and makes half of a beautiful results page irrelevant the moment someone picks dates.\n\nMost sites pick one and fake the rest. Rye & Beyond wanted all three to work together, and they wanted it to feel like talking to someone who knows the cottages rather than filling in a form. So we built a single embeddable surface where a guest can browse and filter the cottages, search them by meaning, see live availability and real stay prices for their dates, and talk to a concierge that operates the whole thing for them.\n\n## The concierge drives the real UI, it doesn't sit beside it\n\nThis is the bit that makes it feel different. The assistant doesn't answer in a side panel and leave you to do the clicking. It operates the actual interface.\n\nWe gave the concierge a set of tools, registered as Chat Thing power-ups, and each one maps to something a person can do on the page: record a preference, set the stay dates, run a search, write the results into the grid, open a cottage, build a shortlist, compare two side by side, plot what's nearby, plan an itinerary, email it. Ask it for \"a dog-friendly cottage in Rye that sleeps four\" and it records the preferences, checks live dates, runs the search, and sets the results. Every step is a visible tool call in the thread, so using it reads like watching someone competent use the site.\n\n![The assistant turning a plain-English request into filters, a live availability check and a set of results.](https:\u002F\u002Fres.cloudinary.com\u002Fdjyjvrw5u\u002Fimage\u002Fupload\u002Fv1782912222\u002Fagentic_search_e6b96b47fe.png)\n*Ask in plain English and watch the grid answer. The assistant records preferences, checks live dates, sets the results. Each step is a visible tool call.*\n\nBecause the tools are the same actions a human has, anything the guest does by hand and anything the assistant does end up in one shared state. Filter by hand, the chips update. Ask the concierge, the same chips update. There's no second copy of the truth, and that single decision is what stops the whole thing feeling like a bolt-on.\n\n## Search by meaning, not keywords\n\nThe \"semantic search\" on most sites is a keyword match with better marketing. Ours is real. Every cottage is indexed for vector search, so when someone searches \"romantic bolthole with a woodburner\", the natural-language query is ranked by meaning and mapped onto the live catalogue. Not a filter pretending to understand. An actual ranker doing the understanding, with the editable catalogue still in charge of the facts.\n\n## Availability, done honestly\n\nThis is the part that quietly makes or breaks a lettings site. We overlay a live availability check on the catalogue: give it dates, a party size and whether a dog's coming, and it returns exactly which cottages are bookable and the real total for that stay.\n\nThen we show everything. Available cottages get a badge and a real stay price. Booked ones stay on the page, greyed and clearly marked, so a guest never hits a dead end or wonders why their favourite vanished. A \"show available only\" toggle clears the rest when they're ready to commit.\n\n![Cottages tagged against real dates: available ones priced, booked ones greyed but still visible.](https:\u002F\u002Fres.cloudinary.com\u002Fdjyjvrw5u\u002Fimage\u002Fupload\u002Fv1782912225\u002Favailability_21fb42f452.png)\n*Every cottage tagged against real dates. Available ones show a total stay price. Booked ones stay visible but greyed, so nobody hits a dead end.*\n\nWe were careful about one thing, and it matters more than any feature: the assistant never guesses. If no dates are set, it won't call anything \"available\". It says so, offers to check, and only claims availability once the live lookup has actually run. An AI concierge that confidently books you a cottage that's already taken is worse than no concierge at all. Open any cottage's calendar and you get its own live view, booked days in red, free days in green, pulled per cottage so it matches what's actually bookable.\n\n![A per-property availability calendar, booked days red, free days green.](https:\u002F\u002Fres.cloudinary.com\u002Fdjyjvrw5u\u002Fimage\u002Fupload\u002Fv1782912228\u002Favailability_calendar_13fe4951d8.png)\n*Every cottage carries its own live calendar, fetched per cottage so it always matches reality.*\n\n## Turning a search into a trip\n\nOnce a guest is leaning towards a cottage, the concierge can plan the holiday around it. It pulls local events happening during the stay and the nearest beaches, pubs, restaurants and attractions, plots them on the map with distances from the front door, and writes a day-by-day itinerary you can actually scan.\n\n![A day-by-day itinerary plotted on the map, with the timeline alongside.](https:\u002F\u002Fres.cloudinary.com\u002Fdjyjvrw5u\u002Fimage\u002Fupload\u002Fv1782912230\u002Fitinerary_9a682395cf.png)\n*The assistant builds the itinerary from real events and nearby spots, then plots it as a timeline you can read day by day.*\n\nAnd the guest can have the whole thing in their inbox: a branded itinerary email with the cottage, the dates, what's on, the day-by-day plan, nearby highlights with distances, and a button straight to booking.\n\n![The branded HTML itinerary email, with hero image, what's on and the day plan.](https:\u002F\u002Fres.cloudinary.com\u002Fdjyjvrw5u\u002Fimage\u002Fupload\u002Fv1782912237\u002Fitinerary_email_5da960aefc.png)\n*One tap and the plan is in their inbox. Branded, dated, with a booking link, every stop with a distance from the door.*\n\n## The small things that make it feel finished\n\nThe headline features get you in the door. The small ones make it feel like a real product rather than a demo. Ask the concierge to compare a few cottages and it flips to a side-by-side with honest pros and cons for each, drawn from the real data: which sleeps the most, which is cheapest per night, which has parking, which is closest to the things you asked to be near.\n\n![Three cottages compared side by side, each with a \"how it compares\" list.](https:\u002F\u002Fres.cloudinary.com\u002Fdjyjvrw5u\u002Fimage\u002Fupload\u002Fv1782912239\u002Fcompare_fd297170a9.png)\n*Ask to compare and the assistant lays them out side by side, with real pros and cons per cottage, not marketing fluff.*\n\nCards carry quiet \"good to know\" notes scanned from the house rules, steep stairs, an unfenced garden, a pond near where the kids and the dog will be. On mobile the chat becomes a slide-up sheet over a results-first screen, so the assistant is always a tap away without getting in the way. None of it shouts. All of it adds up to a search you can trust.\n\n![On mobile the chat is a slide-up sheet over a results-first screen.](https:\u002F\u002Fres.cloudinary.com\u002Fdjyjvrw5u\u002Fimage\u002Fupload\u002Fv1782912241\u002Fmobile_chat_52af7737f7.png)\n*On mobile the chat is a slide-up sheet. Results first, assistant a tap away.*\n\n## The part that surprises people: the AI was the easy bit\n\nBuilding an assistant that drives a real app sounds like the hard part. It isn't, because the conversational layer runs on Chat Thing.\n\nChat Thing handles everything that's genuinely fiddly: the chat interface, the conversation state, the model, streaming, and the secure handshake into the page. What we bring is small. We register each of the app's actions as a power-up, a function plus a short description of its inputs, write a system prompt that gives the concierge its persona and house rules, and push the current page state as context. Load the SDK, register a handful of tools, override the prompt. That's the integration.\n\nSo the effort goes where it should: into the product. The search, the availability logic, the itinerary, the map, the details. The AI is a thin, well-understood layer on top, not a research project. That's also why the pattern moves to the next business cleanly. Swap the tools for that company's actions, rewrite the prompt, and the same agentic front end comes along for the ride.\n\n## Want this for your catalogue?\n\nIf you run a business with a lot of inventory and customers who don't quite know how to filter for what they want, an estate agency, a travel brand, a marketplace, a big shop, this pattern fits. An AI concierge that drives a real, filterable, bookable surface, with honest live data underneath, and the conversational layer handled for you by Chat Thing.\n\nWe help companies design and build exactly this. If you'd like one for your own catalogue, [get in touch](https:\u002F\u002Fchatthing.ai) and we'll talk through what it would take.\n\nNot a chatbot in the corner. A search experience that happens to be agentic all the way down. 🐰\n\n---\n\n*Built on [Chat Thing](https:\u002F\u002Fchatthing.ai) (the conversational layer), by the team at [Pixelhop](https:\u002F\u002Fpixelhop.io).*\n","A case study in agentic search: how we rebuilt holiday-lettings search for Rye & Beyond as an AI concierge that drives the whole interface, with the conversational layer handled by the Chat Thing 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concierge for holiday-let search on Chat Thing","How we rebuilt Rye & Beyond's holiday-let search as an AI concierge that drives the whole interface, with the conversational layer handled by Chat 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Your AI Agent to 8,000+ Apps with Zapier","# Connect Your AI Agent to 8,000+ Apps with Zapier\n\nMost chatbots answer questions. Yours can book the meeting, update the CRM, post the Slack message, and send the follow-up, all in one conversation.\n\nThat's what the Zapier power-up unlocks. Your Chat Thing agent stops being a question-and-answer widget and starts doing the work your team would normally click through a dozen tabs to finish.\n\n> ⭐ **Available on paid plans.** The Zapier power-up is part of Chat Thing's paid tiers. Free plan users will need to upgrade to connect it.\n\n## What the Zapier power-up does\n\nThe Zapier power-up plugs your agent into Zapier, which connects to over 8,000 apps, including Google Calendar, Slack, Notion, HubSpot, Stripe, Mailchimp, Airtable, and thousands more.\n\nWhen a visitor asks your agent to do something, the agent picks the right Zapier action, fills in the details, and fires it. No code. No separate workflow builder. Your agent is the trigger.\n\n## What you can build: 5 starter ideas\n\n| Agent type | Someone says... | Your agent does... |\n| --- | --- | --- |\n| **Meeting scheduler** | \"Book a call with Sarah next Tuesday at 2pm\" | Creates a Google Calendar event and emails the invite |\n| **Lead capture** | \"I'd like a demo, here's my email\" | Adds the lead to your CRM or Google Sheet |\n| **Internal ops** | \"Post the release notes to #product-updates\" | Sends a formatted Slack message to the channel |\n| **Support triage** | \"Find the invoice for john@example.com\" | Searches Stripe and returns the link |\n| **Content publishing** | \"Add this topic to the content backlog\" | Creates a new row in an Airtable or Notion database |\n\nThose are starting points, not a ceiling. If Zapier connects to an app, your agent can probably do something useful with it.\n\n## One message. Three automations. Zero clicks.\n\nHere's what makes this different from traditional automation.\n\nTraditional automation is trigger-based: \"when X happens, do Y.\" Rigid. Pre-defined. You spend the weekend wiring Zaps and hoping you covered every path.\n\nWith the Zapier power-up, your agent decides which actions to fire based on what the visitor actually says. So a single sentence can trigger several actions in the right order.\n\nVisitor: *\"Schedule a follow-up with this customer in 3 days, add them to our VIP list, and ping me on Slack when it's done.\"*\n\nYour agent:\n\n1. Creates a Google Calendar event for 3 days from today.\n2. Adds the customer to the VIP tag in HubSpot.\n3. Posts a confirmation to your #sales channel.\n\nOne sentence in. Three actions out. The agent picked the right tools and the right order because it understood the intent, not just the trigger.\n\n## Setup in 4 steps\n\n1. In your Chat Thing dashboard, open your agent and go to the **Power-ups** tab.\n2. Add the **Zapier** power-up.\n3. Follow the in-app flow to connect your Zapier account and pick the actions you want your agent to use (Calendar, Slack, CRM, etc.).\n4. Give each action a short, specific description so the agent knows when to fire it. Save.\n\nOnce it's connected, chat to your agent like normal. If a request matches one of your enabled actions, the agent will use it.\n\n## Pair it with your other power-ups\n\nThe Zapier power-up gets more interesting when you chain it with the rest of your agent's toolkit.\n\n- **Web browsing + Zapier:** \"Search for the latest AI news and post the top three links to #research.\"\n- **Notion + Zapier:** \"Pull the Q2 roadmap from Notion and send a summary to the exec Slack channel.\"\n- **Human handoff + Zapier:** agent captures the lead, adds them to the CRM, then escalates the live conversation to a human.\n\nOne request. Multiple tools. Zero dashboards opened.\n\n## FAQ\n\n**Do I need a paid Zapier account?**\nYou'll need a Zapier account. Zapier's free tier covers light usage; higher volume or multi-step flows typically need a paid Zapier plan. Your Zapier usage is billed by Zapier, separate from your Chat Thing subscription.\n\n**How does my agent know when to use a Zapier action?**\nEach action has a description you write during setup. The agent uses that description, plus the context of the conversation, to decide when to fire it. Keep descriptions specific. \"Book a meeting on Sarah's calendar\" works better than \"do calendar stuff.\"\n\n**What happens if a Zap fails?**\nThe agent surfaces the error from Zapier and can retry or fall back depending on how you've configured the action. You can also check runs directly in your Zapier history.\n\n**Can I limit which actions the agent can trigger?**\nYes. Only the actions you explicitly enable for each agent are callable. Anything you haven't enabled is off-limits.\n\n**Does the agent need approval before firing an action?**\nYou can configure confirmation prompts in the power-up settings for anything high-stakes, so the agent asks the user (or you) before firing.\n\n## Ready to automate the boring parts?\n\nOpen your Chat Thing dashboard, head to the **Power-ups** tab on any agent, and add the Zapier integration. Pick three or four actions you'd use every day and let your agent take it from there.\n\n[**Start free and upgrade when you're ready →**](https:\u002F\u002Fchatthing.ai\u002Fpricing?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=content&utm_campaign=zapier)\n\n📚 [**Read the full guide in our documentation**](https:\u002F\u002Fchatthing.ai\u002Fdocs\u002Fzapier-power-up?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=content&utm_campaign=zapier)\n","Connect your Chat Thing agent to 8,000+ apps with Zapier. Book meetings, update CRMs, post to Slack, all in one conversation.","blog","zapier","2026-06-26T14:02:44.112Z","2026-06-26T14:06:16.115Z","2026-06-26T14:06:16.230Z",4,"p3yo44vkm6h1fan2xnhfz2t6"]