Read before the guest: Booking.com delivers your upgrade offer

Since September 28, the guest's phone number no longer reaches your PMS, so the upgrade offer travels on Booking.com's rules

by Markus Busch

Since September 28, every Booking.com reservation arrives in your hotel's systems without the guest's phone number. The name is there. The dates, the room type and the rate are there. The phone number field is empty. Booking.com announced it in a short note to the software companies that connect hotels to its site, and it applies to every hotel.

For many hotels, that number carried the message that sells: the one that goes out a few days before arrival. A WhatsApp hello. A text with the online check-in link. And behind that link, the offer: the suite upgrade, the late check-out, the parking space, the breakfast the guest didn't book. Guests who see it add things to the folio before they arrive. Guests who don't see it buy at the desk, or not at all.

For a guest who booked on Booking.com, that message now has one way in. Booking.com controls it. And in the same week, WhatsApp started charging hotels for messages that used to be free.

The phone number stopped on September 28

Your PMS, your channel manager and your guest messaging tool no longer receive the number. That covers every new booking, every change and every cancellation. Numbers you already have stay where they are.

The number still exists. It shows in the Extranet and in the Pulse app, where someone at reception can look it up one booking at a time. It just no longer flows into the systems that send your messages.

Booking.com says the change protects guests, and the problem is real. Scammers have been sending travelers WhatsApp and text messages that quote real booking details and push them to pay urgently to keep their room. That is how Booking.com described it to its partners. Security researchers at Bridewell have tracked fake Booking.com login pages aimed at hotel staff since January. Fewer copies of the number mean fewer places to steal it from.

At the hotel, nothing beeps. Your system was set to send the welcome by WhatsApp. It finds no number and skips the guest. No error, no warning. The welcome doesn't go out, and neither does the offer inside it.

You could copy the numbers out of the Extranet by hand. That costs hours of someone's week, and Booking.com's own help page asks hotels to keep guest conversations on its platform.

What's left: Booking.com's own messages

Every Booking.com booking comes with an email address that belongs to Booking.com and ends in @guest.booking.com. Booking.com forwards what you send to the guest's real inbox. It is plain about why you get this address instead of the real one: "we don't share private email addresses." If the guest has no Booking.com account, the message arrives as an ordinary email.

So your offer can still reach the guest. It just passes two checks on the way, and the hotel runs neither of them.

The first check is for links. Booking.com strips out any link the hotel hasn't approved in the Extranet. If the address of your check-in page isn't on the list, the software companies that send these messages say the guest sees "[Link was removed]" where the link should be. Your offer sits behind that link.

The second check is for the sender. An email from an address the hotel hasn't registered with Booking.com doesn't reach the guest. That comes from Booking.com's help text, as quoted by the PMS company AirHost.

Both are fixable. Add your check-in tool's web address, add your sending address, and the offer goes through. It's a one-time job in the Extranet's messaging settings. The quicker test is to ask whoever runs your guest messages which channel the welcome to a Booking.com guest goes out on today.

But the rules are Booking.com's. Your offer reaches the guest because your settings match those rules. On September 28, Booking.com showed it can change the rules for every hotel overnight.

WhatsApp started charging for replies on October 1

For your direct guests, and for any guest who gives you a number, WhatsApp is your own channel. Three days after Booking.com's change, Meta, which owns WhatsApp, changed what it charges businesses.

Here is how it works. A hotel can only start a WhatsApp conversation with a pre-approved message, and Meta charges for each one. So the upgrade offer you send first always cost money.

What's new is the replies. Since October 1, Meta charges for the replies a business sends after the guest writes back. Each hotel phone number gets 1,000 free replies a month; from the 1,001st, every reply is billed. Those replies had been free since November 2024. The price depends on the guest's country, and there is no discount for volume.

Picture the sale. The guest answers: yes to the suite, and can we check in at 1 pm? Reception confirms the upgrade. Then the time. Then sends the parking instructions. Three replies. A small hotel may stay inside its free 1,000 for the month. A hotel that answers more than about 30 WhatsApp messages a day uses them up before the month is out, and from then on each reply is a charge. Small each time. But the part of the conversation that closes the sale is now metered.

The software companies have a standard answer for Booking.com guests: send a short form soon after booking and ask for the phone number. The form sits behind a link. For a Booking.com guest, that link goes through Booking.com's messages, and past Booking.com's link check.

Only the software sellers count what the offer earns

The only figures for what pre-arrival offers bring in come from companies that sell upsell and messaging software. Nobody has said how much of it came from Booking.com guests before September 28. Mews says more than 1,000 of its hotels already connect their guest messages directly to Booking.com. Duve says the answer is an online check-in invitation sent inside Booking.com's own messages, which works once the hotel has approved the link. Both sell what they recommend.

No hotel company has said what the change cost it. Booking.com's reason, fraud, is real and documented, and nothing here says the change was made to take the offer away from hotels. What is on record is simpler: since September 28, a Booking.com guest gets your upgrade offer only through Booking.com.

Read also: Read before the guest: Gmail's AI skips your newsletter

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