Need for text messaging to work!

[Robert752]

Traveling to Chile in March, and have booked 6 different Airbnb's. At at least one point, we will be staying with no wifi, no internet access, and my flip-phone. Disabling (or truncating) text messaging will potenially cause problems (we had one miserable evening in San Diego last fall, when due to text messages being truncated while on the road, were unable to find the apartment we had booked or communicate with host). By the way, if we wanted to use the Airbnb app in Chile, it would require an entire process of registering a US smartphone with the government and purchasing a local SIM card. We can land spacecraft on comets, but Airbnb can't figure out how to restore normal text messaging? Is it now virtually impossible to work with Airbnb without a smartphone? The old way worked just fine!!!

[Matthew285]

@Robert752, the situation you describe is a real problem.

I have not been traveling much on AirBnB, and we have not been hosts very long.

Did the AirBnB system previously send and receive the entire texts sent via the AirBnB messaging system?

What did it do when a given message was longer than an SMS is allowed to be?

And when did they change it?

[Robert752]

I discovered this in November. I don't know when those texts began being truncated. I received one today from a host truncated after 66 characters (including spaces). When traveling internationally, voice & text work normally in most cases, but data (like the Airbnb app on a smartphone) would require a foreign sim card or wifi access. Why this can't be remedied is a mystery to me...