SMS messages to guests using Zapier, Make.com, or another tool

Two-way SMS is implemented already, at least in the sense that when a guest responds, you’ll see it in your Hospitable message thread. It might still be in early rollout where you have to opt in to it though. The catch is that it’s only for ad-hoc messages that you manually send. It doesn’t yet support automatic/scheduled messages. 

Have you looked into something like Twilio?

What I do, which isn’t a terrible solution at low-scale, is that a few days before check-in I send an automated SMS message to myself, as the “Manager” teammate. The content of that SMS gives me the guest phone number, and a string of text that I can copy-paste into a new text that only takes me a couple extra seconds to send from my phone.

Be cautious of the fact that for Airbnb, the phone number you're texting is actually an Airbnb-provisioned number, assigned to the guest only temporarily, and will eventually be recycled to some other random person. They spy on those messages just like they do the in-app messages. 

I’m curious about SMS as well. We opted in to use it on Hospitable, but so far it only seems like I can send SMS messages to some guests. Why is it not available for all guests?

Interesting discussion. We approached the same problem from the opposite direction.

Instead of proactively sending check-in information to every guest over SMS, what if the guest could simply call when they need help?

The phone agent identifies the reservation, verifies the guest, and then has access to the property-specific check-in instructions, access details, directions, etc. It can send an SMS only when something actually needs to be sent.

We built this with Una + Hospitable and I’m curious whether hosts would see this as a useful fallback for guests who can’t access their Airbnb/Booking.com messages.