A2P 10DLC Explained: What Venues Need to Know About SMS Compliance

A2P 10DLC stands for 'Application-to-Person messaging on 10-Digit Long Codes' — it's the framework U.S. wireless carriers use to regulate businesses sending text messages from a regular-looking phone number. If your venue sends SMS confirmations, reminders, or promotions, this is the system your messages get filtered through before they ever reach a guest's phone.

Before A2P 10DLC, spam and scam texts from regular-looking numbers were common enough that carriers started aggressively filtering unregistered business traffic — sometimes blocking legitimate messages along with the spam. Registering your business and your messaging use case with carriers is what keeps your confirmations and reminders from getting silently filtered as spam.

Two things get registered, and it's easy to conflate them: a Customer Profile (verifying who your business is — EIN, address, contact info) and a Campaign (describing what kind of messages you send and why — reservation confirmations, appointment reminders, etc.). Carriers review both before your number is cleared to send at full volume.

For a platform working with multiple separate venues, each venue often needs its own registration rather than sharing one — carriers want to know the actual business behind each number, not just the software vendor routing the message.

Reviewers consistently flag the same handful of issues, so it's worth getting them right the first time: a clear description of how guests consent to receive texts (including a verbal script if you take reservations by phone), an opt-in checkbox on any web form that is unchecked by default and never required to submit the form, and a clear explanation of the business relationship if a software platform is sending messages on a venue's behalf rather than the venue sending them directly.

Carrier review isn't instant — it commonly takes anywhere from a few business days to a couple of weeks, and rejections with specific, fixable feedback are normal rather than a sign something's fundamentally wrong. Building in a buffer before you're relying on SMS for a launch is the safest approach.