Airbnb Certified Channel Manager: What Preferred and Preferred+ Actually Mean

Airbnb grades every channel manager on API success rate over a rolling 180 days. 40 partners hold Preferred or Preferred+ status in 2026. Here is the full list, the grades, and what moved.

There is no such thing as an Airbnb certified channel manager. The real programme is called Preferred Software Partners, it has two tiers, and as of 24 August 2026 exactly 40 companies hold a place in it: 19 at Preferred+ and 21 at Preferred.

Airbnb also grades each one on integration quality and feature offering, and publishes those grades. The page carries a noindex tag, so Google will not show it to you. That is most of why every article you have read on this subject was written by a company that is itself on the list.

Key takeaways

• Airbnb lists 40 Preferred and Preferred+ software partners as of 24 August 2026, up from 32 in the 2025 cohort and 34 in 2024.
• Integration quality is not marketing language: Airbnb defines it as the partner's success rate connecting to and communicating with the Airbnb APIs, measured as a rolling average over the most recent 180 days.
• Preferred means a partner meets Airbnb's technical, foundational and performance requirements. Preferred+ means it exceeds them, and holds the top-tier status in the programme.
• 14 of the 19 Preferred+ partners score Excellent on both integration quality and feature offering, including Guesty, Hospitable, Hostaway, Hostfully, Lodgify and OwnerRez.
• iGMS held Preferred+ in 2024, does not appear in the 2025 cohort at all, and is back in 2026 one tier lower at Preferred, which no vendor announcement mentions.

What an Airbnb certified channel manager really is

The phrase hosts search for is "Airbnb certified channel manager". The thing that actually exists is the Preferred Software Partner programme, and the distinction matters because certification implies a pass or fail while the programme is a graded ranking that gets re-cut every year.

A channel manager itself is the plumbing. Airbnb defines it as software that centralises a property's availability and pricing and distributes that data to online channels, and lists the payoff as fewer pricing and availability discrepancies across channels and higher booking conversion from accurate real-time data. Nothing in that definition is about quality. Two tools can both push a calendar and one can fail 6% of its API calls.

That failure rate is what Airbnb decided to measure. Getting into the programme at all requires passing a data security review and an API quality review, and partners are then evaluated on integration, technical, foundational and performance standards. Only then do they get a tier.

This is worth caring about at the analytics layer too. MagicBNB's PMS connection syncs properties, reservations, reviews, guests, messages and payouts from Hospitable and Hostfully, both of which sit at Preferred+ with Excellent on both grades, and critical events like new bookings and cancellations arrive by push rather than a polling delay. A reporting layer inherits whatever reliability the PMS underneath it has.

Preferred versus Preferred+: the difference in one line

Preferred partners meet Airbnb's requirements. Preferred+ partners exceed them and occupy the top tier of the programme. Airbnb has used almost identical footnote wording for three years running, which is unusually stable for a vendor programme.

The benefits attached are concrete rather than cosmetic. Airbnb has said partners get fast-tracked and dedicated technical support from its API support team plus the ability to feed back on API features. The 2025 announcement put the cohort at 32 partners and repeated the eligibility bar: a data security and API quality review before a partner is even considered.

For a host, the practical read is narrower than the badge suggests. Tier tells you how well the software talks to Airbnb. It says nothing about pricing, support response times, or whether the product suits a 4-door portfolio rather than a 400-door one.

Preferred+ is a statement about API reliability, not about value for money. A tool can hold top tier for three years and still be the wrong tool for six doors.

The 2026 Preferred+ list, with Airbnb's own grades

19 partners hold Preferred+ as of 24 August 2026, and 14 of them score Excellent on both published measures. Every grade below is read straight off Airbnb's Preferred Partners directory, which is the primary source and which no aggregator reproduces.

• Excellent integration quality and Excellent feature offering: Airhost, Beds24, Channex, Guesty, Hospitable, Host Platform, Hostaway, Hostfully, Kross Booking, Lodgify, OwnerRez, Rentals United, stays.net, Uplisting.
• Very Good integration quality and Excellent feature offering: Hostify, Octorate, SuperHote, Tokeet, TRACK A TravelNet Solution.

The Preferred tier holds 21 partners: Avantio, Avaibook, Bookingpal, CiiRUS, Cloudbeds, Eviivo, GuestWisely, Homhero, Host Tools, Hostex, Icnea, iGMS, NextPax, RentalReady, Resly, ResNexus, RoomCloud, Smily, Smoobu, Streamline VRS and Yanolja Cloud Solution.

One number in that list is worth pausing on. Icnea carries a Good integration quality grade, the lowest shown anywhere on the directory, while every other partner sits at Very Good or Excellent. Icnea also publishes its own guide to choosing the best Airbnb PMS. Both things can be true, and a host reading that guide has no way to know the second one.

The six tools most 2-to-20-door operators are choosing between

Same five dimensions, same order, taken from Airbnb's directory on 24 August 2026 and its 2024 and 2025 cohort announcements.

• Hospitable. 2026 tier: Preferred+. Integration quality: Excellent. Feature offering: Excellent. 2025 tier: Preferred+. 2024 tier: not listed.
• Hostaway. 2026 tier: Preferred+. Integration quality: Excellent. Feature offering: Excellent. 2025 tier: Preferred+. 2024 tier: Preferred+.
• Lodgify. 2026 tier: Preferred+. Integration quality: Excellent. Feature offering: Excellent. 2025 tier: Preferred+. 2024 tier: Preferred+.
• OwnerRez. 2026 tier: Preferred+. Integration quality: Excellent. Feature offering: Excellent. 2025 tier: Preferred+. 2024 tier: Preferred+.
• Guesty. 2026 tier: Preferred+. Integration quality: Excellent. Feature offering: Excellent. 2025 tier: Preferred+. 2024 tier: Preferred+.
• iGMS. 2026 tier: Preferred. Integration quality: Excellent. Feature offering: Excellent. 2025 tier: not listed. 2024 tier: Preferred+.

Five of the six have held top tier without interruption. Hospitable arrived straight at Preferred+ without ever passing through the lower tier, a route only SuperHote has also taken across the three lists. iGMS is the outlier in the other direction, and its Excellent grades on both current measures suggest the 2025 absence was administrative rather than a technical collapse. Airbnb does not explain removals, so that reading is inference, not fact.

Tier is one input. What the software costs at your door count is a different question, and our guide to what an Airbnb channel manager does and whether a 5-door operator needs one works through the point where the subscription stops paying for itself.

What changed between the 2024, 2025 and 2026 cohorts

The programme shrank then grew: 34 partners in 2024, 32 in 2025, 40 on the directory today. The churn underneath that is larger than the totals suggest.

Comparing the 2024 cohort of 34 against the current directory, five companies named in 2024 no longer appear at all: e4jConnect, Guesty For Hosts, HotelRunner, IdoBooking and vOffice. e4jConnect is the awkward one, because it was promoted to Preferred+ in the 2025 cohort and then vanished from the directory entirely. Eight names on the list today were in neither earlier announcement: Avaibook, CiiRUS, Eviivo, GuestWisely, Host Tools, Hostex, RentalReady and SuperHote.

Movement between tiers is the more useful signal. Rentals United and Tokeet both sat at Preferred in 2024 and 2025 and hold Preferred+ today. NextPax went the other way, from Preferred+ in 2024 to Preferred in 2025 and Preferred again in 2026. NextPax announced its 2026 status publicly and the headline says "Preferred Connectivity Partner" without noting that this is the lower of the two tiers and a step down from where it was two years ago. The announcement is accurate. It is just not the whole shape of the thing.

That pattern is the reason to read the directory rather than the press releases. Every vendor on the list has a blog post about the list. None of them has a reason to publish the year-over-year table.

What the badge does not tell you

Integration quality is a 180-day rolling average of a partner's API success rate, which means it is a lagging measure and an aggregate one. A partner that broke for a week in June still shows Excellent in August if the other 173 days were clean.

It is also a measure of the partner's connection to Airbnb, not of your account's connection to your partner. Your listings can stop syncing because of a mapping error, a revoked authorisation or an expired token while the vendor's programme grade stays perfect. Airbnb's own connectivity steps put listing ID mapping as its own numbered stage for exactly this reason.

Which is why data age deserves to be visible rather than assumed. MagicBNB puts a Freshness pill on every numeric surface reading "Live · 14s ago", "Syncing", "Stale · 4m ago" or "Offline". Airbnb grades your PMS on how reliably it talks to Airbnb over six months. The pill answers the narrower question you actually need answered before you act on a number this morning.

One more thing the badge does not cover, and it costs money right now. Airbnb's single service fee of 15.5% is mandatory for hosts who connect through property management software, and software-connected hosts were migrated well ahead of the September and October 2026 deadlines that apply to everyone else. Connecting a Preferred+ tool changes your fee structure. No partner page mentions that.

If your tool is not on the list

Absence from the directory does not mean a tool is broken. It means the vendor either has not applied, has not passed the data security and API quality review, or was removed and Airbnb did not say why. Plenty of usable software sits outside the programme, and 40 partners is a small slice of the category.

The practical test is narrower than the badge. Run four checks against your own account: does a rate change in your tool appear on Airbnb within a few minutes, does a booking on Airbnb block the dates in your tool, do cancellations flow back correctly, and do payouts reconcile to what the tool reported. A tool that passes all four is doing the job whatever tier it holds.

For calendars specifically there is a fallback that needs no partnership at all. MagicBNB supports iCal calendar import from Airbnb, VRBO and Google Calendar, which keeps availability visible across channels and prevents double-booking even when a property sits outside your main PMS connection. It is a slower feed than an API push, so treat it as coverage for the edge of a portfolio rather than the backbone of it.

If you are choosing between two Preferred+ tools rather than worrying about the tier at all, the feature-level comparison is the one that decides it. Our Lodgify versus Hostaway breakdown covers pricing, channel coverage and where each one starts to strain.

FAQ

Is there such a thing as an Airbnb certified channel manager?

No. Airbnb runs a Preferred Software Partner programme with two tiers rather than a certification. 40 companies hold Preferred or Preferred+ status as of 24 August 2026, and the tier is reviewed and republished annually rather than granted permanently.

What is the difference between Airbnb Preferred and Preferred+?

Preferred partners meet Airbnb's technical, foundational and performance requirements; Preferred+ partners exceed them and hold the top tier. 19 partners are at Preferred+ in 2026 and 21 at Preferred. Both tiers require passing a data security review and an API quality review to be eligible at all.

Which channel managers are Airbnb Preferred+ in 2026?

Nineteen: Airhost, Beds24, Channex, Guesty, Hospitable, Host Platform, Hostaway, Hostfully, Hostify, Kross Booking, Lodgify, Octorate, OwnerRez, Rentals United, stays.net, SuperHote, Tokeet, TRACK A TravelNet Solution and Uplisting. Fourteen of those score Excellent on both integration quality and feature offering.

What does Airbnb integration quality actually measure?

It measures a partner's success rate connecting to and communicating with the Airbnb APIs, averaged over a rolling 180 days. It is a reliability score for the vendor's connection to Airbnb, not a score for your individual account, and a partner can hold Excellent while your own listings are mis-mapped.

Does using a Preferred channel manager change my Airbnb fees?

Yes. Airbnb applies the single service fee, 15.5% for most hosts, to every host who connects through property management software, and that structure is mandatory rather than optional. Hosts who do not use software have until 15 September 2026 outside the European Economic Area and 13 October 2026 inside it before the same fee reaches them.

Should I switch channel managers if mine dropped a tier?

Not on the tier alone. A drop from Preferred+ to Preferred means the partner still meets every Airbnb requirement and simply no longer exceeds them. Test your own sync first: rate pushes, calendar blocks, cancellation flow-back and payout reconciliation. Switch on evidence from your account, not from a badge change you read about in a press release.

A Preferred+ badge grades your PMS on how well it talks to Airbnb. It says nothing about whether the payouts arriving in your bank match what that PMS reported. Reconcile your PMS against your bank in MagicBNB →

About MagicBNB

MagicBNB is the portfolio intelligence layer that sits on top of whichever channel manager you chose. Today Pulse merges every check-in, check-out, cancellation and new booking into one live feed, so a sync failure surfaces as a missing arrival rather than a month-end surprise. Channel mix runs through every view and report, showing what Airbnb, VRBO, Booking.com and direct each actually contributed. Portfolio Overview holds occupancy, ADR, RevPAN and net payout in one KPI strip on a shareable URL. See what your portfolio earns at magicbnb.io.