When a guest books through Booking.com, your messages do not go straight to them. They go through Booking.com, which delivers them in the guest's Booking.com chat and changes them on the way. Booking.com does this to every message a hotel sends, whichever system it comes from. Once you know what changes, you can write messages that still work when they arrive.
Booking.com removes formatting and hidden links
Before the guest sees your message, Booking.com removes all formatting. Buttons, colours, layout, and any link placed behind a word or button disappear, and only the plain text is left. A message that looks right in the Bookboost editor can arrive with nothing for the guest to click.
To keep your links working, write the full web address into the message text, for example https://yourhotel.com/check-in. Booking.com leaves written-out addresses in place, and most phones and email apps make them tappable.
If you build campaigns for OTA guests, make this a habit: always insert link tokens as plain text, never inside a button.
WhatsApp and SMS messages are not changed by Booking.com, so links work normally there. However, since 28 September 2026, Booking.com no longer shares guest phone numbers, so you can only use these channels once a guest has given you their number.
Booking.com gives you a changing email address for the guest
Booking.com never shares the guest's real email address. Instead, it gives you a Booking.com address that forwards to the guest. It can issue a new one as the conversation goes on: an address ending in @guest.booking.com for the reservation, and addresses ending in @mchat.booking.com for messages.
This affects how you reply:
Before you reply, check that the address the guest last wrote from is set as the primary address on their profile. If an older address is primary, your reply goes to an address Booking.com no longer uses, and the guest never receives it.
After you reply, if the guest also has a personal email address on their profile, set that back as primary. Otherwise your campaigns go to Booking.com instead of to the guest.
Take extra care with guests who have both a personal address and a Booking.com address on their profile. It is easy to send to the wrong one without noticing.
Add your domains to the Booking.com whitelist
Booking.com can hold back messages from domains it does not recognise. Add your own domain and the Bookboost domains to your Booking.com whitelist so your messages get through.
What Booking.com messaging does not support
Formatting cannot be restored. There is no setting in Bookboost or Booking.com that keeps it.
The Booking.com address is not the guest's email address. It belongs to Booking.com and expires, so do not use it for marketing.
The AI Agent does not reply to all Booking.com messages. It is able to answer FAQs, if it has the knowledge, but it cannot respond to reservation-specific questions. Your team answers them in the Unified Inbox.
Expedia works differently. Expedia connects to Bookboost directly, so none of the above applies. See Set up the direct Expedia integration.
If Booking.com messages are not reaching Bookboost
See Setting up Booking.com to send guest messages to Bookboost. If messages arrive as raw emails, see What is the Booking.com email parser?
Getting help
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