Latest / STR Unpacked / Your Text Flow Just Broke
Transcript
- Ben: Morning and welcome to your short term mental bulletin on the 1st of October, if you can believe it. so this is a really interesting story, I think, which maybe you may have noticed as it broke a couple of days ago, but in the kind of battle of like operators versus OTAs with direct bookings, Booking.com. So if you look at Booking.com's reservations through a channel manager or property management system. The guest phone number actually stopped arriving from Monday. So Bookings Connectivity Changelog says this. The reservations API no longer includes phone numbers of guests globally as of September 28th, 2026. The migration guide is wider. From the 28th of September, all new reservation payloads omit the number, including payloads for past dated bookings, modifications, and cancellations. Numbers already in your system are not deleted, you just can't pull one again. So how it breaks depends on your integration. On the OTA specification on the telephone element, it has removed from the payload. So on B.xml, the element says stays and arrives empty, which can quietly overwrite a number that you already hold. This is short notice rather than no notice. Booking put it on operator help pages on the 21st of September and in the developer migration guide on the 23rd of September. What stops is narrower than it might seem. So text messages, WhatsApps, phone calls all stop. Guest messaging does not. And the guest email alias is still sitting in the same example payloads. Booking uses to show the phone number has gone. So booking's own help page says PDFs and QR codes are not supported as attachments in the chat, and that to share a PDF you should also use the email alias. So if your arrival flow sends a c a door code or a parking permit as a PDF or a QR image by text. And the obvious replacement channel will not carry it. The number itself is a now a manual lookup in the extranet or the pulse app, one booking at a time. So your checking automation just moved to a channel that will not carry a QR code. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you tomorrow.