Identifying Callers Who Ring From a Different Number
When someone calls your hotline, the assistant looks up their booking from the number they are calling from. That works for most guests — but a large share of bookings carry no phone number at all, and plenty of guests ring from a partner's phone, a hotel landline, or a second SIM. Those callers used to be anonymous for the whole call. Now the assistant can ask for the confirmation number on their booking email and find them from that instead.
Why this gap exists
A booking only carries a phone number if the channel passes one on, and many do not. Across a live portfolio the shape looks like this:
| Channel | Bookings with a phone number |
|---|---|
| Booking.com | Most |
| Airbnb | Around half |
| Expedia | Roughly one in four |
| Direct bookings | Depends entirely on what you collected at booking |
Without a second way in, every one of those callers reaches an assistant that cannot see their dates, their property, or their check-in details — and has to hand them to a person for something as small as “what time can I check in?”.
How the call goes
The assistant only asks when it has to. If caller ID already matched a booking, nothing changes — it never asks an identified guest to prove who they are.
- It asks once. “Can you read me your confirmation number? It's on your booking email.” The guest reads the whole number — no counting digits, no spelling out a prefix.
- It searches around today. Bookings arriving within about ten days either side are checked first, which is nearly always the stay the caller means. That is why the assistant does not need to ask for a date as well.
- It confirms. “Found it — Dana, the riverfront room, tonight through Saturday. Is that yours?” The guest can catch a wrong match before anything is acted on.
- The rest of the call is normal. From that point the assistant is working with the booking in front of it — dates, property, check-in times, house rules — exactly as it would for a caller it recognised from the start.
Which guests have a number to read out
The confirmation number is whatever the channel gave the guest, and it differs by channel:
| Channel | What the guest has | Works |
|---|---|---|
| Booking.com | The 10-digit confirmation number on their booking | Yes |
| Expedia | The 10-digit itinerary number | Yes |
| Airbnb | The 10-character confirmation code, letters and digits | Yes |
| Direct & booking engine | No channel confirmation number exists for these | Not yet |
Direct bookings are the open case: nobody ever issued the guest a code, so there is nothing to read back. Since you send those confirmations yourself, the fix is to put a reference in them — that is on the roadmap rather than something you need to solve today.
When it cannot place the caller
The assistant never guesses. Each dead end has its own next step, and the last one is always a person:
| Situation | What the assistant does |
|---|---|
| More than one booking matches | Asks for the caller's first name to separate them. It never reads out the candidates. |
| Nothing matches | Asks for the arrival date and tries again — this is how a booking months away, or a past stay, is found. |
| Still nothing | Hands the call to your team, exactly as it does for any other question it cannot answer. |
What it will never do
Identification is deliberately conservative. These are guarantees, not settings:
- It is never offered to a caller already identified by phone. A confirmation number read down a phone line is a weaker claim than the number the booking itself carries, so it can never move an already-identified caller onto a different booking.
- A code alone is never enough. The lookup is always bounded by dates — either the window around today or an arrival date the caller supplies. There is no way to search a code across your whole history.
- Access details are never read out. Door codes and check-in instructions go to the email or messaging thread on the booking, not down the line to whoever dialled.
- A short fragment is refused. Too few characters and the assistant asks again rather than guessing between similar bookings.
Turning it on
It is off by default — an existing assistant behaves exactly as it did before. Two things have to be true for a caller to be offered it:
- The action is enabled on the voice assistant that answers the hotline.
- That assistant's instructions permit looking a booking up. Starter prompts explicitly tell the assistant it cannot do this, which was correct while it genuinely could not — so the wording has to change at the same time.
The in-app control for this is on its way. Until it lands, ask your Enhanced Rentals contact to switch it on for a specific assistant — they will update the instructions in the same change.
Related
- Setting Up a Hotline — get a number answering before anything else.
- Calls — the log of every incoming call.
- Call Transcripts — read back exactly how an identification went.