As many of you have already noticed, Airbnb bookings are coming in (via the calendar import) without any guest name, phone, email address or other details on them.
This is happening because, sometime yesterday, Airbnb changed their calendar sync engine (the iCal feed) to remove all of the guest information. They have not offered any explanation for this; the guest info just disappeared. They still show the Airbnb reservation # and dates but nothing else.
Will Airbnb put the guest information back in the calendar sync?
We don't know. It's possible that this is a temporary glitch and Airbnb will fix it soon, but that's a pure guess on our part.
If you have a contact at Airbnb, try reaching out and asking about this. Many PMs are part of a "Airbnb PM support group" that you can email directly with questions - see what they say.
Our guess is that Airbnb did this, on purpose, for security or privacy reasons. Frankly, it was always strange that Airbnb included the guest's phone number and (proxy) email address in the calendar feed. This is unusual for iCal feeds. No other major channel did this except for Airbnb, so it was probably a matter of time before they plugged the hole.
How do I get the guest's name, phone and email?
Two words: Channel Bridge. Our Channel Bridge tool will continue to find and download everything about the booking regardless of what the calendar import (iCal) includes.
The reason we created Channel Bridge was precisely for situations like this - VRBO and Airbnb do not provide users with guest and booking data, and the data they do provide is often incomplete. Channel Bridge attempts to correct this problem by logging in to your channel account, as the user, and normalizing and downloading all the information possible about the booking.
We are continuing to make Channel Bridge better. We are days (hours?) away from releasing a "manual mode" for Channel Bridge that will allow you to make manual tweaks to the charges that Channel Bridge creates in case you need to fix something. We are working on a "direct injection" process where you can bypass the Excel file download and have Channel Bridge do direct imports. We are also designing a future "auto" mode that will run every 10 or 15 minutes on your machine. So lots in store for Channel Bridge.
We are tracking updates to this Airbnb sync issue on our forum here. So if you want to ask questions, to us or other OwnerRez users, or provide updates that you find on your end, please do that so everyone can stay on the same page.
