Bring-your-own phone number for SMS and Whatsapp
Answered
The current SMS feature where messages go out to guests using Hostaway's phone number is not very friendly. Guests call the phone number expecting to get in contact with us. It's disjointed and makes for a poor guest experience. Instead, a much better approach would be to have the option to bring our own phone number. Messages can be sent to Hostaway and calls can be routed to whichever voice integration we want to use. This way guests can call the phone number that they're receiving our messages from and actually reach us like they expect to.
On the technical front, this can be optional. You can require that it be a Twilio phone number and simply integrate with our Twilio account via API. This way, we could have Twilio route SMS and MMS to the Hostaway integration, and voice calls can be routed to SpokePhone, Aloware, Talkyto, or any other business phone tool that integrated with Twilio so that guests can call our number and actually reach us the way they expect to. Hostaway's current SMS solution is Twilio so a lot of the functionality is already built. On top of this, an added benefit to Hostaway is that Hostaway would save on their own Twilio expense because any clients that integrates their own Twilio account would pay for their Twilio usage separately.
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Official comment
Hello this is Yanni from the product team here at Hostaway. We've starting the discussion with the engineers to see whether this is feasible. I can't promise anything to you yet, but we are looking into it.
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Hey Tommy,
Thanks for your suggestion. I'll pass this along to our Product Team!0 -
This would be helpful indeed. And corresponding with that to write SMS from different country numbers (like Germany)
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Bump^ this would be an excellent feature.
Additionally, changing the name of the WhatsApp number to being customizable would be great, so we can use the name of our property management feature.
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@Lange and @Jake, will you please up-vote the request? The way Hostaway uses these feature requests is that they consider implementing the ones with the highest number of votes. By commenting alone, that doesn't get Hostaway to give attention to this because it won't even be at the top of their list when they sort all of the requests by number of upvotes to select which to consider. The way that you upvote it is by clicking the up arrow next to my post text. On desktop, it's right below the "follow" button (but is not the follow button itself! look right below it, it's the tiny up arrow)
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This would be absolutely amazing
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@Malahide, will you upvote the request please? The way that Hostaway used this is that they implement the features that have the most upvotes. If it’s not upvoted, even if it has many comments, it won’t catch their attention. The way that you upvote it is by clicking the tiny up arrow under the “follow” button. Right now it has 6 upvotes. The up arrow to upvote it is right on top of the number 6.
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It would be nice to display our Company Name as Sender ID to help gain trust at the time of booking.
We use SMS widely due to the higher engagement rate, especially for important reservation-related details.4 -
Bump
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Bump - Would love to have a dedicated phone line that repeat guests can save and call later and have better text options since there is a limit on sms.
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Bump
Ability for guests to call the number they are texting would be a huge benefit. Also, improving current SMS function so we're not limited to 140 characters would be very helpful.
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Bump
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mandatory feature for me....
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This is becoming a huge issue for us. We have to keep another app to communicate with guests. Only the person on the reservation can text us in Hostaway. Past guests also cannot text us. That is not reasonable. I'm hoping they consider doing something!!
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Adding a comment here again. This is extremely important for us and I see this as a basic feature. First of all, I have to send 3-4 text messages for a client when I need to explain something. This looks unprofessional messy. We should be allowed to go beyond 140 characters. Secondly, guests complain it is hard to know how to contact us as the HostAway text comes from a +1 number (doesn't create trust) and we have our own number for phone calls and whatsapp. Very confusing and does not create a smooth client experience. Thank you for enabling a feature that allows us to link our own phone number to Hostaway.
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+1
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