Track adds an Airbnb masked phone field, and staff need a setting changed to call guests

Track has pushed a batch of channel changes, and one of them needs action before your team notices something is broken.

New Airbnb reservations may now arrive carrying a temporary guest phone number in a new Masked Phone field, with the guest's real number staying on their Airbnb profile. If you want on-site staff to be able to call or text a guest, you have to add their numbers under Approved Phone Numbers in your Airbnb channel settings.

That is the kind of change that is invisible until a housekeeper cannot reach a guest about a late checkout, or an arrival instruction text goes nowhere. Worth doing before the weekend rather than after.

The rest of the Airbnb work

Airbnb has retired its Super Strict 30 and Super Strict 60 cancellation policies for most listings. Track now handles the rejection rather than letting it block everything behind it. When Airbnb declines a Super Strict policy, Track sends Airbnb Firm instead and saves that on the unit, so description, room and photo updates keep reaching the listing.

That is the useful detail. A rejected policy used to be able to hold up unrelated content updates, which is how a listing ends up with last season's photos.

Accessibility amenities attached to photos, such as shower grab rails, now sync to Airbnb too.

Airbnb notifications keep syncing in the Channels view and in the Airbnb Host Notifications report.

Booking.com and the other channels

Reservations that arrive with no guest phone number now import rather than failing, and the same applies to reservations from Expedia, SynXis and TravelClick. This is downstream of Booking.com's decision in late September to stop passing guest phone numbers to connectivity partners, which left PMS vendors handling reservations with a field they used to be able to count on.

Properties with a Conservation Fee now sync fees and taxes using the fee type Booking.com accepts today. Large photo updates are paced to Booking.com's limits rather than being rejected in bulk.

Choosing Inntopia when adding a channel now opens the Inntopia setup page.

Unified Promotions

Track also points at its Unified Promotions feature here, which lets you build a discount once and run it across Booking.com, Marriott, Airbnb and Vrbo. That includes a 15% Top-Rated Guest discount on Airbnb, aimed at travellers with an overall rating of 4.8 or better and at least three reviews.

What to do with this

The pattern across all of it is that the channels keep changing their own rules and the PMS absorbs the change. Most of what Track shipped here is absorption, and you do not need to do anything about it.

The exception is the masked phone numbers. Any automation that texts an Airbnb guest, and any process where staff pick up the phone to a guest, depends on that Approved Phone Numbers setting now. Check it, then check that your arrival messaging still reaches a real Airbnb booking rather than assuming it does.