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On Friday, we rolled out an update which allows owners to define custom surcharges and taxes instead of picking from a pre-defined list.
Open up one of your properties and click on the new Add-Ons tab (which replaces the old Surcharges tab). You'll see a list of current surcharges and taxes for the property instead of the old list of checkbox options.
We decided to separate surcharges from taxes (instead of leaving tax as a type of surcharge) because taxes have unique behavior that is dissimilar from other surcharges.
Click the 'Change' button and you'll get an edit view of the same page.
You'll notice that surcharges have a new "Taxable" option. This option is what determines whether tax line items, which follow the surcharge, will include tax for that item or not.
As before, all rates can be entered as dollar amounts or percentages, and they can be positive or negative. A percentage rate calculates against all preceding line-items that come before it. The surcharges and taxes are entered as charges exactly in the order they appear - first the surcharges, then taxes.
This new ability to enter custom surcharges and taxes should enable you to customize your quotes more accurately and cleanly.
No more having to use "cleaning fee" or "processing fee" as the type when adding a charge for firewood or pool heat.
P.S. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
information. Its usefulness and significance is overwhelming the way you
covered all the basic necessary information is really impressive, good work
keep it up.
There's now another way to stay up-to-date on OwnerRez updates, news and information. In addition to LinkedIn, Facebook, RSS and Twitter, you can now follow OwnerRez on Google+!
The new OwnerRez Google+ page is here: http://ownr.es/rTQ5TU
We've also updated the sidebar (right side of this page) with a button for Google+ and put a link in the footer.
Tell your friends!
Travel insurance is a great option to offer your guests because it gives them peace of mind about cancellations. There is nothing worse for the guest than having to cancel a vacation while realizing that they're past the refund period, which means that hundreds or thousands of dollars will be lost. Travel insurance takes away that worry.
That being said, there may be owners who do not want to offer travel insurance to their guests and don't want the option showing up at all.
Conversely, there may also be owners that want to require guests to buy travel insurance, such that it is automatically added to every booking.
All of this is possible. There are options both at the quote and property level to enable, disable, require or pre-select travel insurance.
Navigate to any one of your properties, click on the Billing Details tab and then click the "Change" button. At the bottom of the page, you'll see a "Travel Insurance" section with several options.
By default, the third option is selected which allows the guest to see travel insurance on their quote and optionally choose to purchase it. We recommend that you leave this option in place as it offers the most versatility without forcing the guest to do anything. With this option, you can also set travel insurance to be selected by default if you want to encourage guests to purchase it.
The second option forces the guest to purchase travel insurance. If selected, travel insurance won't appear as a selectable check-box. Instead, it's a line item charge like any other.
The first option does exactly what it says - travel insurance is completely disabled. Not only will it not be selectable on the quote, but all other marketing information will disappear. The guest will never see or hear about it anywhere.
As with all the other billing details, these travel insurance options can also be configured at the quote level. For instance, suppose that you have a guest that needs to buy travel insurance and you want to make sure they include it. Instead of leaving it in the normal optional state, you can simply set travel insurance as required on that specific quote and it will appear as a line item that they have to purchase.
We strongly recommend that you keep travel insurance enabled, optional and unselected by default. You may find that your conversion rate increases as guests now see that they have a way to mitigate cancellation problems. As always, if you have any questions or comments, don't hesitate to ask.
We here at OwnerRez have always prided ourselves on being kind and thorough with our customers. Every customer service request is not only fielded quickly, but in way that covers every part of the problem. Our goal is not only to get answers out quickly, but to provide comprehensive information. We don't want you to have to ask a third or fourth question because our original explanation is too brief.
Get-it-off-my-plate responses from customer service have always been a personal pet peeve of mine.
While designing our new travel insurance feature, we spent a good amount of time evaluating insurance companies.
We looked specifically for a provider that would treat us like we treat our customers: kind and thorough.
When your guest needs to cancel their booking because of a medical problem, we want the claim process to be easy and straightforward. We expect the person on the other end of the phone (at the insurance company) to care about the guest's problem and want to help, not throw up as much red tape as possible.
We also looked for a company whose sole focus is on travel insurance and travel related services. We wanted specialists that really understood and cared about their product.
It didn't take long to find Travel Guard as the provider of choice. Their staff was knowledgeable, helpful, kind and thorough. We asked lots of questions and they bent over backwards to walk us through the details, even when we asked them multiple times.
Several users have asked me about this so I wanted to be clear and transparent. Our decision to use Travel Guard was based solely on them being the best travel insurance company that we could find. We want our guests (and your guests) to have a solid travel insurance product that they can rely on.
To read more about Travel Guard, visit their web site directly, or ask us and we'll find the answer for you.
Use the links below to read more about their insurance product:
Yesterday, we released a major update that adds travel insurance to OwnerRez.
Your guests can now buy a travel insurance policy directly through the system at the same time they accept their quote. It only takes one click of the mouse.
Also, on the owner side, you can purchase travel insurance on the guest's behalf just as easily as you collect a payment or reserve a security deposit for them.
The next time you generate a quote, look at the payment form and you'll notice a new option showing.
On the quote email, you'll notice the same option.
There's nothing you need to do to begin offering this option to guests. By default, the option will appear on all new quotes you generate and the payment form will handle all the details. Once purchased, the guest will receive a travel insurance policy directly from the carrier, Travel Guard, and all questions or claims will be handled directly by the carrier. The guest will receive emails that explain the policy and phone numbers to call in the event they need to file a claim. Again, no interaction or extra work is required on the part of the owner to facilitate this feature.
I've prepared a screenshot tour so that users who have not yet received any inquiries can see how it looks. If you don't know how to get your inquiries to show up in OwnerRez, I wrote an article about that a few days ago.
This is a soup to nuts rundown from the first moment you get an alert to the last moment you fire off your response.
When an inquiry email is sent to you from a listing site, OwnerRez sends you an email alert.
As with all other alerts, the email message contains a link so that you can open the full inquiry and get right to work. Once opened, you'll see the overview page of the Inquiry record.
The overview page is similar in design to the quote and booking overview pages. You see the guest details, what dates were requested and any comments.
The requested dates are presented in a miniature calendar that shows what dates are already reserved. The requested dates are overlaid across the reserved dates to provide visual context.
Before answering the inquiry, it is wise to use the "Verify" link to make sure that our system parsed the inquiry correctly. While we have worked very hard on our parsing techniques, from time to time the listing sites will change their email formats which cause our parsing scripts to be off. We will correct the parsing logic as soon as this happens but it may take a few days for us to catch the change and adjust for it. You can find "Verify" links in several places on the overview page.
The verification page may look big and confusing at first, but it's actually quite simple. The blue summary bar at the top explains what's going on, and I'll reiterate those points below.
On the left, you'll see the original email message sent to you by the listing site. The message is untouched by our system - we do not change anything. It is stored exactly as it was originally sent.
Below the message, there is a "Download" link that lets you save a copy of the message to your local computer. The message is downloaded in the "MIME" format which is readable by virtually all email programs including Outlook, Thunderbird, Windows Mail, Lotus Notes and Eudora.
There is no need to download your messages. Our system has saved them using enterprise storage services and they will always be available to you online.
On the right, you'll see a set of fields that show the values we parsed out of the email message. We currently parse messages from VRBO, HomeAway, FlipKey, VacationRentals.com, Vacation Home Rentals and Perfect Places.
We've tested our parsing algorithms against thousands of inquiry emails, and we're very confident of their strength. That being said, it is possible from time to time that you may need to correct something or fill in details that are missing on the email. For instance, the inquirer may not have included the dates they were interested in but told you later on the phone. You'll want to go back to the verification page and fill in those details so that you can generate a quote based on the full information. Make sure to click the "Save Changes" button at the bottom when you're finished.
After verifying, you'll want to answer the inquiry - that is of course the whole point of the process. There is an "Answer" tab on the inquiry as well as a link on the overview page.
If the requested dates are unavailable or the inquiry is missing information, such that a quote cannot be generated, the answer page will show a simple email form so that you can reply to the guest and explain the problem. By default, message bodies are provided for both types of scenarios.
If the requested dates are available and the inquiry has all necessary information - in other words, the inquiry is "quotable" - the answer page will present you with a button to create a quote.
After the quote is created, a preview of the quote charges is shown in the same page so that you can visually review the line items before sending it to the guest. If you need to change the line items, a button is provided for you to do that.
Once changed, the quote page will return you back to the same inquiry page so that you can continue moving forward with your answer. If you didn't need to change the quote, you're already there. Click the "Answer Guest Now" button and a simple email form will appear with a preloaded message for the quote you generated.
The simple email form is the same design as other email forms in the system. You have the option to change the inquirer's email address, the message subject and the message body. What you see below the body is the reply that will be appended to your message.
After sending your email, you'll see a confirmation message telling you that it was sent. Be sure to *also* send the quote email as well.
To be clear, the quote email - the email that shows the quote charges directly in the message body - is not automatically sent when you send the inquiry email. You must tell the system to send that email separately. A button to do that is included in the confirmation message.
Yesterday, I discussed how the new inquiry management works. Today, I wanted to address a question posed to me by a user - what's with the format of the inquiry email addresses?
When we were designing the process, we wanted to make sure that the inquiry email addresses were straightforward but also mitigated a lot of different risks.
We chose "inquiryspot.com" as the domain name because it was the shortest, easiest-to-read domain name we could find that sounded similar to the inquiry process (and was available).
We were originally planning to use "inquiries.ownerrez.com" as the domain name but decided it was much too long. We shortened it to "inquiries.ownerrez.com" but that was also too long and the subdomain was confusing.
It is possible for you to dress up these email addresses with other words or characters so long as the address still ends with [your-assigned-prefix]@inquiryspot.com.
For instance, if the email address for your property is abc1234@inquiryspot.com, using acme_cabin_abc1234@inquiryspot.com would also be valid. Using acme.cabin.abc1234@inquiryspot.com would also be okay. Basically, you can put any string of characters you want before the assigned email address and it will still work - you don't even have to tell us when you do this, just so long as the assigned address is at the end and isn't changed.
As I mentioned yesterday, make sure to test everything you do. If you decide to dress up your email addresses, make sure to send some test messages so you can visually confirm that everything is going through properly.
Those of you that have already navigated to the new inquiries section have already seen an instruction page on how to get inquiries to show up in OwnerRez. While the instructions are fairly clear, I wanted to spend some time explaining how the routing works and the various fringe scenarios you may run into.
First, here's a high-level run through on inquiries and how OwnerRez plugs into the process.
When an inquirer sees your property on a listing site (VRBO, Vacation Home Rentals, FlipKey, etc) and wants to book it, he uses the inquiry form to send you an email. The listing site shoots off an email message, saying "New inquiry from Joe Blow!" to whatever email address you have on record.
Previously, that email message would go to your ordinary email inbox where you would reply directly to it, and also use OwnerRez to generate a quote manually on the side.
Once you begin using our inquiry management, OwnerRez will receive that email message directly from the listing site instead. When the message arrives, the body is automatically parsed for inquiry information (guest name, phone number, arrival date, etc) and that information is stored in a new "Inquiry" record for you to review. You receive an email alert from our system whenever new inquiries arrive and are ready for you to review and/or answer. You will no longer get the original email in your normal email inbox, because OwnerRez will have received and processed it for you; instead, you'll get the OwnerRez email alert.
In order for OwnerRez to receive your inquiry emails, all you have to do is change the email address on file with the listing sites to one that we assign you. That's it. No other actions are required.
Two Kinds of Email Addresses
Listing sites are not all created equal.
Some listing sites allow you to specify a custom email address for inquiries for each of your properties. Some only allow you to specify one custom email address for all listings (a different email address than the one you use to login). Some only let you change your login email address and all inquiries go to that.
Because of this, we had to come up with two different types of email addresses for you to use so that all scenarios could be covered.
Per-Property Scenario
The first type of scenario is per property. This scenario covers listing sites that allows you to change the contact info per property.
VRBO, HomeAway, Perfect Places and VacationRentalPeople.com are examples of listing sites that allow this. Vacation Home Rentals allows you to have a unique email address per property as long as you have two or more properties.
To change your listing on these sites, login and then navigate to the property you wish to change. Go to the "Contact Info" section (sometimes it's under the "Listing Details") and put in the email address that we've supplied you for that property.
To find the email addresses we've supplied, visit the Inquiries instructional page. The instructional page is what you see by default under the Inquiries menu until your account has started receiving actual inquiries. Once your account has inquiries, the overview page (or the "grid" page) will contain a "How do I get inquiries to show up here?" link at the top right, above the grid. That link takes you back to the instructions.
Account-Level Scenario
The second type of scenario is account level. This scenario covers listing sites that only allow you to have one email address no matter how many properties you have listed.
FlipKey, VacationRentals.com and GetAwayDigs are examples of listing sites that fall into this scenario. Vacation Home Rentals falls into this scenario if you have only one property.
To cover this scenario and make sure that your OwnerRez account could receive inquiries without assigning them to the wrong property, we've supplied each user with a single account-level email address that you can use for these listing sites.
To change your listing on these sites, login and then navigate to the account or profile area. Look for a field that is called something like "email address for inquiries". If you can't find a field by that name, you'll need to change the email address associated with the account/profile since that it probably where the inquiries are sent.
You can find your account-level email address by pulling up the instructional page again (see above) and looking at the last paragraph, under the table of per-property email addresses. In that paragraph, you'll see an email address in bold.
Test, Test, Test
We've designed an inquiry management process that is very easy for users to implement, but there is always room for mistakes. For instance, when copying the per-property email addresses to the listing site, you may assign the wrong address to the wrong property.
Please send yourself a test inquiry from every listing that you switch over. It's trivially simple to do, and it will give you visual confirmation that the tracking is working as it should. It will also let you see how the inquiry management works and play with the verification and answer pages.
Be patient! Most of the listing sites do not send inquiry emails immediately; instead, they send a batch every 15 minutes or so. It may take a while for the OwnerRez alert to finally end up in your email inbox, even as long as thirty minutes; this is normal. We are working on ways to speed this up where possible, but most of the latency is on the listing sites' end, not ours.
If you'd like to see what happens when a non-inquiry message is sent to your OwnerRez email addresses, you can test that too. Simply open your personal email and fire off a message and you'll see what happens.
As always, please send us lots of feedback. There is a lot of room for improvement here and we are already hard at work with fixes and enhancements. We appreciate any comments or suggestions you have, whether they be positive or negative.
Thanks - the requests keep coming only because you folks have such a good product and are spoiling us with great features :)
David
Hi David,
At the moment, there is no way to do that automatically but they're both on the developer roadmap,
Thanks,
Michelle
I see. Both of those things are coming in future email updates. Sent email will be stored and tracked, and you'll have the ability to see if a guest "clicked" or "opened" it as well. At the moment - no, there is no way to create custom templates for email. But they're coming, I promise. :-)
Thanks for the quick reply - I should have made my questions clearer. Is there a way to edit the reply template, like the booking response template - this would be nice. As for viewing the response, I do send a copy to myself, but I have already found it would be more convenient to be able to see an archived copy of the email sent within Ownerreservations.com
Thanks,
David
Good Morning David,
DPVR.info said:
Is there a way to edit the standard inquiry response?Absolutely. The "answer" page looks very similar to the email page for quotes. You can edit every part of the response including the subject, body and even the to name/email address.
By default, we supply a standard template message (just like with quote email) for various scenarios.
For instance, if the dates are already taken, the message defaults to:
Thanks for your inquiry. Unfortunately, those dates are already taken. Are you able to move your dates at all?
Thanks,
-[Your Name]
Again, you are free to edit this before sending. We are planning on adding a lot of email options in upcoming sprints so that you can define your own email templates with rich text, mail merge fields and tracking.
DPVR.info said:
Also can you view the email that was sent as part of the response.Yes. As with quote email, there is a "Send me a copy" check box that is selected by default.
Sam will be blogging about all this in detail over the next few days.
This is nice - two questions. Is there a way to edit the standard inquiry response? Also can you view the email that was sent as part of the response.
Thanks,
David
We just released a major update that includes, among other things, our first attempt at inquiry management and tracking.
The next time you login, you'll notice a shiny new menu called "Inquiries". Click on it, and you'll see an instructional page that talks about routing inquiries into the system.
Over the next few days and weeks, I'll be discussing all of the new inquiry features, how they work, answering some of your questions and talking about the future of inquiry management.
From the very first moment I started getting inquiries from listing sites I always wondered which site gave me the best ROI. VRBO sends a lot of inquiries, but do those inquiries convert into bookings as well as inquires from Vacation Home Rentals? If so, who's better and how much better? This new inquiry tracking will allow us to generate reports and charts that answer these questions in future updates.
Inquiries management and tracking has really been an exciting area for us to work in. We have a lot of great ideas, and we're already hard at work on the second pass.
It took me a while to see this one :) but I really like it. I choose to use the FlipKey widget on the property website, so the sync feature if awesome for me.
Thanks and keep up the good work!
David
Last week we released an update that allowed users to keep their HomeAway and VRBO calendars up to date. Right on the heels of that release, we've decided to push out an update for FlipKey and TripAdvisor too.
If your property is listed on FlipKey or TripAdvisor, OwnerRez can now keep it up to date.
How Does It Work?
The integration for FlipKey is much more straightforward than HomeAway Connect. There is no separate technology or website to register with. You simply enter your FlipKey credentials and Property ID and you're good to go.
Open one of your properties in OwnerRez and click on the Calendar Sync tab. You'll notice a new sync for FlipKey.
Click the "Set Up Now" button and you'll get a page that will ask you for your FlipKey info. This is the email address and password that you use to login to the FlipKey website. The Property ID is the number listed in your FlipKey account after you've logged in. I'll talk about how to find this information later on.
You'll notice an option for testing the settings. By selecting that option, we take a few seconds to check the FlipKey website before saving your information. That ensures that you've entered everything correctly.
Once activated, the Calendar Syncs page will show it as successfully running.
Under the covers, our system will begin verifying your existing bookings and updating your FlipKey calendar as needed. Every time you change your sync settings, we do the verification process all over again. The verification process only checks bookings from the current month forward so if you add the sync today, only bookings from June 1 forward will be added or updated.
As with the HomeAway Connect integration, the FlipKey synchronization process runs in "near real time". The longest it should ever take for your OwnerRez changes to appear on your FlipKey calendar is about 10 minutes.
Where Is My FlipKey Property ID?
The "Property ID" that we ask you to supply is the one that FlipKey assigns when you create an account with them or add a new listing to the same account. Each FlipKey account can have multiple listings so it's important that we know which one you want to sync.
Login to the FlipKey website. Once inside, you'll see your property listings on the "Dashboard" page.
On the bottom half of the page, you'll see a "Properties" section with your properties listed. The title of each property listing will show the ID.
If you click the "Switch to Summary View" link, the Property ID will be displayed in the second column under the "FlipKey ID" header.
What other listing sites do you use? What other calendars would you like to see kept up to date? What other integration types should OwnerRez support other than calendars? We have our own list of course, but we hope you'll let us know what tools you use so we can factor that into our decision making process.
Over the past year, one of the most requested features has been calendar integration for VRBO and HomeAway. The request usually varies in style, but the end result is always something like "I hate doing double entry. Can't you keep my VRBO up to date?!" Until now, our reply has always been "Sorry, but no."
Today our answer changes to "Sure, no problem!" OwnerRez can now keep your calendar up to date if you have a listing on any of these websites:
There are dozens of other lesser-known vendors that will also be updated because they integrate with the same technology.
How Does It Work?
All websites within the HomeAway family (VRBO, HomeAway, VacationRentals, etc) use a single calendar technology called "HomeAway Connect" which was formerly known as Renters.org. At the HomeAway Connect website you can read more about the unified calendar that is used on your listing across all HomeAway websites.
If you have a listing on any HomeAway website, a HomeAway Connect calendar exists for you. Under the covers, VRBO and all other HomeAway websites use it so that listings remain in sync for owners that have listings on multiple HomeAway websites.
It is this HomeAway Connect account that we integrate with. All you have to do is enter your email address and password that you login to HomeAway Connect with and the Property ID that you want to sync to your OwnerRez property.
Open one of your properties in OwnerRez and click on the Calendar Sync tab. You'll notice a new sync for HomeAway Connect.
Click the "Set Up Now" button and you'll get a page that will ask you for your HomeAway Connect info. Again, this is the email address and password that you use to login to HomeAway Connect. The Property ID is the number listed in your HomeAway Connect account after you've logged in. I'll talk about how to find this information later on.
You'll notice an option for testing the settings. By selecting that option, we take a few seconds to check the HomeAway Connect website before saving your information. That ensures that you've entered everything correctly.
Once activated, the Calendar Syncs page will show it as successfully running.
Under the covers, our system will begin verifying all your existing bookings and updating your HomeAway Connect calendar as needed. Every time you change your sync settings, we do the verification process all over again. The verification process only checks bookings from the current month forward so if you add the sync today, only bookings from June 1 forward will be added or updated.
Our synchronization process runs in "near real time". In other words, when you add, update or delete/cancel a booking in OwnerRez, the changes are reflected on your HomeAway Connect calendar within minutes. Many vendors only do synchronization once per day or even once per week. We've architected a solution that keeps your listings accurate as you make changes. The longest it should ever take for your OwnerRez changes to appear on your HomeAway Connect calendar is about 10 minutes.
What is the Property ID and How Do I Find It?
The "Property ID" that we ask you to supply is the one that HomeAway Connect assigns when you create an account with them or add a new listing to the same account. Each HomeAway connect account can have multiple listings so it's important that we know which one you want to sync.
Login to the HomeAway Connect website. Once inside, you'll see your property listings on the "Member Home" page.
Immediately under the title of each property listing, a "Property ID" will be displayed. That numeric value is what we need in order to keep the calendar for that property listing up to date.
If you use the public year view for your HomeAway Connect calendar, you can also see the Property ID in the URL.
I Only use VRBO - I Don't Have a HomeAway Connect Account!
VRBO.com uses the same calendar technology under the covers. Even though you may have never logged into HomeAway Connect, an account exists there for you if you have a listing on VRBO.com.
In order to use this new sync, you'll need to create a HomeAway Connect account which should only take a few minutes. First, go to the HomeAway Connect website and register for a new account. Once you have done that, you'll need to find the current HomeAway Connect Property ID being used by your VRBO listing and ask HomeAway Connect to link it to the new account you just registered.
Login to your VRBO listing and click on "Edit Listing". Then click the "Availability" tab. This will open a calendar for you to edit. At the top of the calendar, you'll see some text showing what websites are linked to this account. In that text, you should see "HomeAway Connect: " with a numeric value next to it. That numeric value is the HomeAway Connect Property ID for your listing.
You'll need to send an email to VRBO or HomeAway Connect, asking them to make that Property ID show up in your new HomeAway Connect account so that you can manage it there.
As confusing as this might all sound, the bottom line is this: you must have access to a HomeAway Connect account in order for OwnerRez to keep your bookings up to date on VRBO and HomeAway websites. The HomeAway support personnel are very helpful and will generally put you on the correct path if you explain what you need. Simply tell them that you want to use HomeAway Connect to manage your VRBO calendar and they'll help smooth things out behind the scenes.
We know that a lot of OwnerRez users have been waiting for this integration for quite some time. We've purposefully held off implementing it until we were sure we had a solution that met our standards - clean, stable and scalable - and that's exactly what we've released. If you encounter problems using this new calendar sync, do let us know. We'll be monitoring it closely for a few weeks and making adjustments as needed.
A month ago, we posted an article on why it is bad to reserve a security deposit way in advance of the guest's arrival date. In the same article, we mentioned that some gateways have an automatic release period that is so short (Sage Payments is 7 days) that we at OwnerRez were devising a solution to fix it.
A few weeks we quietly rolled out that update. We didn't blog it right away because we were watching to see the effects on a large scale, looking for unintended consequences. So far the solution is running smoothly.
Some of you will have already noticed the new "Security Deposit Successfully Reauthorized" emails that are part of this feature.
Basically, our system now monitors security deposits for age and asks the bank to reauthorize old ones (those with a reserve date a certain number of days in the past) to keep them fresh. Technically speaking, we void the original security deposit and reserve a new one.
This all happens transparently to you. You do not need to confirm anything or press any buttons. You'll get a morning email when a reauthorization occurs letting you know.
If you look at a security deposit in the system, you may notice that the reserve date now shows two values: First Reserved and Reauthorized On. These two dates only show if the security deposit has undergone reauthorization.
As mentioned on the email, I want to reiterate one warning about this process. In some cases, your guest may notice an extra temporary hold (or "pending charge") on their bank account for the new authorization. This new authorization may show up before the old one expires. Some banks do not release the old hold immediately upon request. When that occurs, two holds are visible at the same time. If your guest complains about this, you will need to explain to them that you voided the old hold and created a new one, and that the bank failed to release the first one. You should assure them that in this situation old holds disappear within a day or two.
We've been asked two primary questions about refunds other than the "overpayment balance" message that was covered in the last post.
Those two questions are:
What is a "linked payment"?
Why is my refund request being denied by the bank?
Linked Payments
All refunds sent through OwnerRez must be associated with a previous payment. When you open the Send Refund form, you'll notice this requirement right away.
The form will show all previous credit card payments on the booking and ask you to select one to "link" to the refund you are about to send.
This is required because the banking system (known as "interchange") requires it. There are some payment gateways that allow you to send unlinked refunds (i.e. a refund of any amount sent to any credit card at any time) but you have to comply with certain rules and undergo a much more rigorous underwriting process. The vast majority of merchant providers and gateways do not allow unlinked refunds.
To make this process easy for you, OwnerRez records links between payments and refunds and shows you, at the time of refund, the refundable balance left on each payment.
When the refundable balance of any payment drops to zero, that payment is no longer available for refunds and will no longer display in the Linked Payment list.
Why Are Some Refunds Denied?
When sending refunds, some OwnerRez users have discovered that the bank doesn't always accept a refund request. Sometimes, even when everything appears to be in order, you still end up with the cryptic "refund request denied" message.
Unfortunately, the gateways rarely include a reason in their response when a refund request is denied. We spent some time researching the issue and found that most refund rejections occur for one of the following two reasons:
The length of time between the current refund and when the linked payment was originally made is too long.
The credit card used for the linked payment is no longer valid. The guest may have cancelled their card between then and now.
The length of time is set by the gateways. Authorize.Net allows 120 days between the original payment and refund. PayPal only allows 60 days between the original payment and refund. Sage Payments and our internal processing allow for 180 days. If you're trying to send a refund past that many days, it won't work. You'll have to send the guest a check in the mail.
After we recently announced the new refund feature, I expected a lot of questions about the "overpayment balance" message. So far, it appears that no one has been confused because we haven't had any questions (even though refunds have been issued).
Still, I'd like to explain the message in more detail by discussing the accounting rules that we go by.
Abstractly, there are only two ways that a booking can account for its charges and payments:
A booking can collect payments and send refunds no matter what charges have been entered.
A booking can keep track of its charges and only allows payments to be collected up to the total amount. Similarly, refunds are only allowed if the guest has paid more than the total charges. (ie. If there is an "overpayment balance")
In the first model, how much the guest owes isn't relevant when collecting payments. You can continue to collect payments no matter how little or much the guest owes. Refunds can be sent no matter how little or much the guest has paid.
In the second model, collecting a payment or sending a refunds depends on how much the guest owes so the booking keeps track of the running balance.
Some time back, after careful review and consideration, we decided to go with the second model. We could have implemented either model but not both.
We decided the second model was better because knowing for sure if a booking is paid in full, needs payment or has been overpaid is crucial to the booking process as we continue to add new functionality.
Consider export functionality for QuickBooks. The export process has to create invoices in QuickBooks that correspond to bookings in OwnerRez. Then, QuickBooks payments are created to match OwnerRez payments. This makes sure that your accounting records are always correct. As you change your booking, the QuickBooks invoice is changed. If, however, your booking charges weren't changed in OwnerRez but you collected a new payment anyway, your QuickBooks records would show an overpayment that would be uncomfortable to deal with.
Consider the emails that your guests receive when a payment is collected or a refund is sent. Those emails show the financial history of the booking including the charges. Suppose you collect two payments for $500 each but the booking charges were left at $800. The second email receipt would show total payments of $1000 against charges of $800. These types of inconsistencies would create confusion.
But I Have To Send A Refund!
Just because you get a message saying "this booking has no overpayment balance" does not mean that you can't send a refund in OwnerRez. You can send as many refunds and collect as many payments as you like.
You just have to adjust the booking charges first.
That's the key. If the system is telling you that payment or refund functionality is limited, you only need to go to the charges page and give yourself more room to work with.
If you need to collect a payment but the booking shows as paid in full, adjust the charges to increase the total and then collect the payment.
If you need to send a refund but the booking isn't overpaid, simply adjust the charges to decrease the total and then send the refund.
Adjusting charges seems natural when collecting additional payments because it's natural to have to increase the charges before expecting more money from the guest. But refunds work the same the same way in reverse.
Here are some typical refund examples.
Refund Due to Cancellation
Suppose a booking is fully paid when the guest calls you with a sob story. They need their money back. You agree and go about canceling their booking.
The first thing you do is refund what they paid. When you try to send a refund you get the "no overpayment balance" message.
Go to the Charges tab, and add a new line item for every existing line item you see. In each new line item, add a description and a negative amount canceling out previous line items.
If the original line items looked like this:
Then the final line items might look like this:
Since the guest already paid $525 but the charges are now $105, an overpayment balance of $420 would appear.
Now, when you go back to send a refund, you'll be allowed on through.
Refund Due to Unhappy Guest
For partial refunds, the process is exactly the same. Suppose the AC conked out during a booking and, though you tried to get it fixed as fast as possible, the guest spent several very hot nights in misery. You agree to send them back $100 as a sign of good faith.
Before attempting to send a refund, hurry over to the Charges tab and adjust their line items.
If the original line items looked like this:
Then the final line items might look like this:
As soon as you save those new line items, the booking will show an overpayment balance and you'll be free to send refunds.
Hopefully, this should shed some light on the messages you see when collecting payments and sending refunds. As we build new features, and refine old ones, it is our intention to make the booking process as easy as possible. Sometimes that means having to be careful about how the numbers work under the hood.
In the future, we plan on adding a simple refund wizard that will help you adjust charges and send a refund all at the same time. That should make the refund process even easier.
Yesterday, we released an update that added refund functionality to OwnerRez.
Before, you had to send refunds offline via check or cash or with your PayPal account. Now, you can send refunds directly through the system.
First a quick peek at how it all looks. Open a booking and click on the new Refund tab.
You'll see a standard box showing the refunds that are associated with the booking. If you've never sent or recorded any refunds, the box will of course be empty.
After you've sent or recorded refunds, the box will show the ones for that booking just like you're used to seeing with payments or security deposits.
If you click the Send Refund button, you'll probably see a message informing you that you can't send a refund because the booking has no "overpayment balance". I'll explain what this message means in a later post. For now, let's assume that the booking has an overpayment balance and you see the Send Refund page.
You only have to enter an amount, select a previous payment that the refund should be linked to and press the Send button. That's all it takes to put money back on the guest's credit card. Emails, similar in format to the payment emails, are sent to both you and the guest.
If you've already sent a refund via check, cash or a different credit card process, you can record those too. You'll notice links for "recording manual refunds" in several different areas under the Refund tab. When clicked, you can fill in the relevant fields and bring your booking up to date.
Emails are sent to the guest when manual refunds are recorded too.
In the next few posts, I'll be discussing some of the more specific nuts and bolts of the refund process that may be confusing. We've tried to make refunds as easy and straight forward as possible, but there may be some wording that you don't understand. Please send us feedback.
Even though sending refunds is a rare occurence for most owners, we wanted to build a quality refund feature to round-out the full booking lifecycle. Those times when you do need it, you'll be glad it's just a few clicks away.
@Dave
World's fastest comment!
We don't have a link exposed for owners to send that form around. We could - it looks just like the quote payment forms - but it doesn't just let the guest change their billing info. It also actually reserves the security deposit at the time they submit the form. It's designed for the collection day.
For the time being, you'll have to change the billing info for the scheduled security deposit manually on the booking.
We have designed some upgrades to the quote payment process that will allow the guest to enter different cards at the acceptance point. We're also going to have links in the confirmation email that let them do the same, and a reminder email the day before payment collection/security deposit reservation that reminds them of what's coming and asks if they want to switch cards.
Great write-up on the process. I changed mine to 5 days (I use Authorize.net) which I feel is good. On occasion I have customers question the security deposit. I let them know that this method is much preferred to other methods (see below) and is what hotels and rental car companies use. If the continue to have an issue I point out that this is much preferable to what some people do. I have rented a house in the past where the management company *charged* my card for a $1000.00 deposit 30 days prior to the rental and then refunded it 10 days after the rental. This meant that in order to avoid a finance charge from my CC I needed to pay the $1000.00 and then end up with a credit on my next month's bill. Also they got the float of my money for 30+ days.
I do have on question on the posting, you mention... "we send the guest a detailed email which tells them what happened and provides them a custom payment form in which they can enter new billing info."
Is there a current way for me to send a payment form from within the system? I have a situation upcoming where they client wants to use a different card for the deposit then the payment. I was going to take the payment over the phone, but would prefer to use a form.
David
We've recently noticed that quite a few owners have configured their security deposits so that they are reserved far in advance of the guest's arrival. In addition, many release reminders are configured to go out long after the guest has departed.
For instance, it's not uncommon for many owners to set the reserve to 10 or 15 days before arrival. A few even set it at 20.
This means that the guest's security deposit - say $500 - is being held on their credit card several weeks before they arrive at your property.
Except in certain rare circumstances, this is a very bad thing to do.
We highly recommend that your security deposits be reserved only a day or two before arrival. When you add a new property in OwnerRez, we set the reserve and release reminder days to be 1. This is not by accident - we think that 1 day is appropriate.
What Is a Security Deposit
As most owners know, a security deposit is a "hold" on the guest's credit card for a certain amount of money. While that money is not transferred to the owner's checking account (like a payment is), it is also not available for the guest to use.
Many banks now show "temporary" charges on a consumer's online credit card statement. So your guest can clearly see what amounts are being held when they login to online banking. Even if they can't see the actual hold, they can definitely see that their "available balance" is much lower than it should be.
The Purpose of the Security Deposit
The purpose of the security deposit is to provide:
peace of mind for the owner assuring that if damage occurs, the owner can easily collect payment for it without going through a difficult collection process, and
peace of mind for the guest that they are dealing with a reputable owner who cares about his property.
Given these two reasons, there is nothing to be gained by holding the guest's money weeks before they arrive. A hold of that long only serves to frustrate them and tie up their available funds.
Defeating the Purpose
The second reason you should reserve security deposits right before arrival is because long-held security deposits may expire before you can collect on them thus defeating the original purpose.
The length of time that a security deposit can be reserved (i.e. the amount of time a credit card "hold" stays held) is determined by the card-issuing bank and, secondly, by the payment gateway you use.
Authorize.Net owners have the longest reserve limits, usually out around 30 days. If every security deposit was guaranteed to be available for 30 days, this would rarely be a problem. You could reserve a security deposit 10-15 days before arrival, the guest could stay for a week, and you'd still have another full week to release it.
But a 30 day expiration is not guaranteed. Only a few OwnerRez owners use Authorize.Net as a payment gateway. Most others use our internal Cornerstone/Sage payment processing or PayPal. For those owners, the expiration times are much shorter.
For instance, Sage defaults all holds to 7 days which is also the default limit for the banking system at large. Some exceptions are available, but they are rarely given or used.
If a security deposit expires before you have a chance to collect on it, you have no other automated mechanism by which you can collect payment for damages. At that point, you have to contact the guest directly and ask for their permission to collect a new payment. Obviously, such a situation adds tension.
OwnerRez to the Rescue
We have designed a software fix for this expiration problem which will allow security deposits to be automatically renewed over and over again after they expire. This will ensure that any security deposits that expire before the owner has a chance to release them are automatically reauthorized by the bank.
However, this software fix has not yet been released. It has been placed in high priority on the development roadmap and will be worked on shortly.
In the meantime, if you start the clock rolling 15 or 20 days before the guest arrives, it is very likely that you are not going to be able to collect on your security deposits.
Failing Credit Cards
A common reason many owners like to reserve the security deposit that far in advance is because they're worried that if the guest's credit card fails a day before they arrive, there won't be time to correct it.
We have found that, the vast majority of the time, this is not the case. When a security deposits fails to be reserved, we send the guest a detailed email which tells them what happened and provides them a custom payment form in which they can enter new billing info. In addition, we remind them that their renter agreement mandates that a security deposit be reserved and, if not, that their reservation may be canceled.
Most of the time, this automatic process is all it takes for the guest to scare up new billing info, and the owner never has to lift a finger. In those rare exceptions when the guest does nothing, it's easy enough to give them a call late in the day - or even the next day as they arrive - and reserve the security deposit over the phone.
Be Careful With Your Guest's Money
Regardless of how smoothly your booking process has been running, please take a minute to review your security deposit settings and think about how you are tying up your guests' money.
Again, we highly recommend that you set both your reserve and release days to 1 so that the security deposit is held for as short a period as possible.
How To Change It
Navigate to one of your properties, select the Billing Details menu and click the "Change" button. In the bottom section, you'll see your options. Remember, the "Days After To Release" field does not imply that the system automatically releases your security deposits. Instead, a reminder is sent to you, once per day, with one-click instructions on how to release it. All releases must be done by you, the owner.
Any changes done to the billing details on a property will only apply to quotes and bookings that are created after the change. To change existing quotes and bookings, you'll need to navigate to those and change them individually.
As you may have noticed, holidays are now set on the rate period as a fixed amount, to be charged per night or per stay, over and above the regular charges that occur.
The reason we moved to this model was because the previous structure created logical ambiguities. Previously, holidays were their own charge type called 'Single Holiday Night' which acted like the 'Single Night' charge type. Suppose a guest booked the week surrounding a holiday - a very typical scenario. Should the system calculate all the days in the week as individual holiday nights? Or should a regular week be used with a single holiday night tacked on for the specific night which is a holiday? And what if you want to have different holiday charges, depending on length of stay, as you do with regular charges?
Now, holidays are simply an extra charge, layered on top of whatever your current rate period/charge types generate.
If you open one of your rate periods and click the Change Details buttons, you'll notice a section at the bottom titled "Holidays". By default, it isn't selected which means no extra charge is added.
If you select it, a few more options will appear which allow you to enter the extra charge amount and whether you want to bill it per night or per stay.
When holiday charges occur, the quote (and/or booking) will reflect a new line item that shows the guest the extra charge.
Holiday List
The question we get the most about holidays is the obvious one - When do they occur? Since our support documents are not completely finished, I wanted to provide those details here.
Starting with 2011, here are the holidays, and the specific day on which they occur, for the next five years:
| Holiday | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 |
| New Year's Day | Jan 1 | Jan 1 | Jan 1 | Jan 1 | Jan 1 |
| MLK Day | Jan 17 | Jan 16 | Jan 21 | Jan 20 | Jan 19 |
| President's Day | Feb 21 | Feb 20 | Feb 18 | Feb 17 | Feb 16 |
| Memorial Day | May 30 | May 28 | May 27 | May 26 | May 25 |
| Independence Day | Jul 4 | Jul 4 | Jul 4 | Jul 4 | Jul 4 |
| Labor Day | Sep 5 | Sep 3 | Sep 2 | Sep 1 | Sep 7 |
| Columbus Day | Oct 10 | Oct 8 | Oct 14 | Oct 13 | Oct 12 |
| Veteran's Day | Nov 11 | Nov 12 | Nov 11 | Nov 11 | Nov 11 |
| Thanksgiving | Nov 24 | Nov 22 | Nov 28 | May 27 | Nov 26 |
| Christmas | Dec 25 | Dec 25 | Dec 25 | Dec 25 | Dec 25 |
As you'll notice, our list is similar to the official list of US "major" holidays which can be found on a variety of other websites.
We know that many owners don't follow some of these holidays, or may have others that they want to add, so we plan on adding a lot more functionality. Eventually, all major and minor holidays will be programmed into the system, for the US and other countries, allowing owners to follow all, only major, only minor or a custom list of their own. For the moment, if you don't want to charge extra for a particular holiday, simply remove it from the quote before sending the quote to your guest.
Before our recent rate engine update was rolled out, a common problem that users complained about was the inability to control what happened to extra nights on a quote.
Say a guest asks for a 4-day weekend, but your standard weekend package is only 3 days. OwnerRez would put the 3-day weekend on the quote and then add another regular night at the full 'single night' rate. But most owners would want that 4th night to be at some slightly lower rate - a prorated amount for the weekend. Those owners had to manually edit the quote to fix that 4th night.
Now you can specify directly on the charge type exactly how much you want to charge. For charge types Weekend, Week or Custom, you'll notice a new section titled "Extra Nights" with a single checkbox.
Leaving the checkbox selected keeps the functionality the same as it's always been: it will use other charge types to add regular night rates on. If you want to specify a specific charge, uncheck the box, and you'll see a text box appear in which you can enter the amount.
On the quote, the text of all extra nights has been changed slightly to draw attention to the fact that the charge is a prorated part of a weekend, week or custom charge.
While it's simple to edit quotes in OwnerRez, it has always been one our highest goals that owners should never have to manually edit anything. We want owners to be able to create rules one time that will produce quotes exactly right, based on a wide variety of factors, every time thereafter. Special holidays, discounts, add-ons - doesn't matter. Eventually, you should be able to program in your booking model and never have to manually edit quotes again. We know that's a lofty goal, but we continue to get closer and closer.
As part of the rate engine overhaul, several old features have been expanded to offer more flexibility. One of those expanded features is the 'Days of the Week' selection.
If you view one of your charge types (that isn't a single night), you'll see three new options per day of the week.
Previously, each day was simply enabled or disabled which meant you could include that day into the current charge type as allowed or not allowed, but that left a lot of gray area. What if you wanted to require that all the selected days were booked in order for that charge type to be valid? Or what if you wanted to require some, but then not allow a specific day? Now you can do all of that.
When you select a different charge type from the dropdown box, you'll notice that the Days of the Week are preselected. We've set the most likely options for you, but you're free to change them.
Again, you are free to change the preselections to anything you want.
On each rate period overview page, the table of charge types shows a legend for the Days of the Week. This gives you a quick visual indicator for which days are allowed, not allowed or required.
As you play with these options, remember that all 'required' days are cumulative. If you set multiple required days for a single charge type, the guest's desired dates must include all of those days.
We tweaked this feature quite a few times to make it as intuitive as possible. If it doesn't make sense or you have a gray area that this doesn't cover, let us know.
As we mentioned two days ago, an update was just released that brings a lot of new fixes and features to the rate engine.
We did a large overhaul of the rate engine last year, but there were still a few scenarios it didn't accomodate (and a few pesky bugs that remained) so we spent the last month overhauling it again.
Before going over the specific details, I'd like to first give a high level walk-through of the new look and how the features are organized.
An entirely new design has been created that will, hopefully, make rate periods and charge types much easier to understand and use.
The overview page now shows all your rate periods together in one simple table.
You still have the option of using a 'default' period, but it won't be called out as something more important (or more often used) than any other period. Like before, 'default' periods simply run if you have dates that fall outside of all other periods.
If you click through, you'll notice that each rate period now shows their charge types and details in a nice summary page.
A 'charge type' is the unit of measurement by which you bill a guest for rent. Common charge types are Single Night, Single Weekday Night, Single Weekend Night, Weekend and Week.
From the period summary page, you can either change the period details, add or view charge types or delete the period entirely. The options are laid out in a way that is easy to follow.
If you click on a charge type, you'll notice all the details for that charge type and options for changing or deleting them.
The details that are shown, whether on the view page or add/edit page, depend on what kind of charge type you're looking at. For instance, if the charge type is 'Single Night', the number of included nights isn't shown because that number would always be 1. However, if the charge type is "Week", the number of included nights is showing because you may want to specify a 6-night week versus a 7-night week.
