Require *real* Airbnb Guest Phone Number Collection on POC Form

The Request

For Airbnb bookings only, adjust the POC Form so that the phone number field is left blank *AND* is a required field, so that hosts can continue to reliably collect guests' real phone numbers.

The Background

As of September 30, 2025, Airbnb is transitioning to issuing temporary phone numbers for guests that are created at the time of booking and expire 2 days after booking.

This means that where OR has previously been autopopulating the phone number field on the POC (point of contact) Form, this will now autopopulate with this temporary number instead. If left as-is, while guests do have the opportunity to adjust this, many simply will not, clicking through to complete the renter agreement

This creates several issues for hosts, including:

• Workflows: Unpredictable impact on any manual and automated communication via SMS related to the booking
• Convenience: Door code generation would become the last 4 digits of their *temporary* phone number, which is not memorable at all for guests
• Perishable: The number expires 2 days after booking, preventing any future communication with the guest around rebooking later directly, etc.
• Privacy/Security: The temporary number is owned and monitored by Airbnb, so any communications will likely be seen/heard by their systems and any third party they decide to share it with now or in the future

Here's a recent ongoing OR discussion on this topic: https://www.ownerrez.com/forums/general-help/airbnb-will-be-hiding-guest-phone-s-starting-sept-30

Other details

As part of the suggested solution above, it would be helpful to:

• Ensure the number (now collected manually) on the POC form is slotted in as the guest's *primary* phone number on the contact record so it's used as such throughout the ecosystem like door code generation, smart fields like {CPHONEPR} (Contact Primary Phone Number), etc.
• Still collect the temporary number from Airbnb and add it to its own field in a guest's OR contact record

It's unclear exactly which what locations around the world this is rolling out to currently, or could be rolled out to in the future, but if there's a way to detect whether the number coming through from Airbnb is one of their temporary numbers, then the OR POC Form could dynamically populate with the blank field when it is, and just use the original flow if it's not. This would avoid unnecessary changes for OR users who aren't yet affected by this change.

Finally, I submitted a question about how this would be handled to OR support, and got the below friendly, though unsatisfying response. Not only is asking the guest to change the number in a pre-populated field an unreliable way to collect the data, the suggested language also seems likely to trigger an Airbnb flag for trying to move guests to book off-platform.

From OR Support:

The number on the POC form will be pre-populated with the number that comes in from Airbnb. You may want to consider updating your channel template with some language like:

"Airbnb now provides temporary phone numbers for guests. Please ensure you provide your real phone number when filling out the point of contact form and renter agreement in the link below."

When the guest fills out the POC form with their real number, it will be considered the primary number on the booking and will be used by the system for the door lock code, which is generated 3 days before arrival.

Thank you, @Tyler! Appreciate the well-written and clear feature request!

Thanks, Tyler.  

I agree, trying to tell guests to override a number they don't recognize on the form is not an acceptable way to move forward.

I can't imagine it's too terribly challenging to just stop importing that number altogether.  

Ideally, there'd be a new field entirely for this "Airbnb Temporary Phone Number", but I recognize that's going to be a bit more work.

Either way, this temp number from Airbnb has very little use, and I'd prefer to just ignore it altogether.

@Eric Agreed that just not importing any # for Airbnb bookings feels like the v1.0 of the solve here.

Doing that for every single OR user could feel heavy-handed to those operating in areas where these temp numbers haven't/aren't rolling out, but maybe there's an easy solve for that hangup, too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The problem with not importing that temp Airbnb number is that the vast majority of guests do not see and respond to the triggered message going through Airbnb to sign the rental agreement when they book, so a second message has to be sent via SMS to get them to sign. If that number isn't imported, then we will have to go to the booking on Airbnb instead of OR and manually send them the message to sign the agreement.

I've never had to use SMS to get the POC signed, they always do it through the app. I send a few reminders, but they've always signed after getting those. That said, I agree we should still get the temporary phone number as well for situations like you mentioned.

Thank you for requesting this and for all the thinking behind your request. 

Hi, everyone!

We spoke with our contacts at Airbnb who have assured us that this Airbnb feature is limited to a small number of non-API connected hosts.

The article referenced in the initial post here is nearly a year old, and it should also be noted that the article makes no mention of September 30th for a start date. https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/3764 

If you are an API connected host with OwnerRez and received an email from Airbnb regarding this, please forward that to us, ensuring we can see the email address Airbnb sent it from and the entire message you received. Please also include your Airbnb Host ID.