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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.
Sorry for the long delay in blogging, folks. The blog may have been quiet but development hasn't.
In fact, we've been busier than ever, figuring out the 2011 roadmap and which items to prioritize over others. We've also been gathering feedback from new users.
We released an unannounced update in December that allows users to create new merchants directly in OwnerRez (switching away from Authorize.Net or PayPal). This allowed us to work with a few users directly and gather feedback before telling everyone about it. We're going back to work on it, actually, to deal with areas that need to be improved and streamlined.
Just this morning, we released a huge update to the rate engine. I'll be discussing the new features and fixes in a set of blog posts this week.
Time To Get Official
As we burn through 2011, it's time to remove the 'beta' rubric and make this thing official.
We've come up with a set of great prices - even a free option - that we'll be discussing in a few weeks. Here's a quick teaser on that free option: if you use an OwnerRez-created merchant account, you won't pay any monthly fee no matter how many properties you have.
Here's the top items on the roadmap:
Those items are somewhat in the correct order, but things are constantly shifting as we experience new feedback and continue to evaluate our longterm goals.
We're also working on several partnerships which, depending on the urgency, may pop up and suddendly steal focus for a few weeks as we work to meet the partners' needs. For instance, we've been in talks with both HomeAway and FlipKey/TripAdvisor to integrate both calendar data and reviews. We know the importance of eliminating double-entry for users. As vacation rental owners ourselves, it bothers us too.
Continue sending us emails or posting on the forum. It's very important that you tell us what you like or dislike about the system. We know that the booking model is slightly different for each owner, so what fits our booking model may not fit yours.
We love talking to OwnerRez users so keep those requests coming!
You may have noticed that links in our emails sometimes take awhile to load. Sometimes they don't load at all. You get a nasty "Service Unavailable" blurb.
Only a few customers have noticed this, but it has definitely occured from time to time.
This isn't caused by OwnerRez but by a link redirection feature we turned in with our email vendor. Basically, when emails are sent to you by us, our email vendor transcodes all the links in the email so that you temporarily access their website before being redirected to us. This allows them to record who has clicked which links in which emails and, in turn, provides us with some flashy reports.
While the reports are nice to see, they're certainly not worth having a sometimes-slow, sometimes-unavailable click for you.
So we've turned it off.
From now on, all the links you see in OwnerRez email will go directly to our site and not through a third-party redirect. We apologize for any slow clicks you've had in the past.
Booking cancellations are a rarity for most owners, but it's important to treat them professionally so that your guest and third parties have all the information they need. You can now decide when (or if) you want to send emails for cancelled bookings.
Previously, when a booking was canceled, the system simply sent out standard emails straight away. In some cases, the guest was never notified of the booking to begin with so there's no reason to nofity them, or any third parties, that it was canceled.
Under the Email page for the booking, you'll see three new types of email to send. You'll only see these email types if the booking is canceled.
Just like the other email types on the page, if the canceled emails were already sent, it will show the last time each one was sent. You can send these email types again and again. You can also use the Preview option to see the email exactly as the receipient will see it.
The cancellation page has a new section called Email Options that is similar to the ones on the Change Dates and New Booking pages. As with those pages, you may select which emails you want sent at the time of cancellation.
If you are deleting the booking - as opposed to canceling it - the emails can only be sent at the time of deletion. This is because the deletion process completely removes the booking from the system, including all related email information.
Good email options are vital to a booking system because it's the communication pipeline between you and your guests. Our goal is to expose every email point in the system and let you configure it, choose if you want to send it and provide options to send it later. Adding email options to cancellations brings us one step closer to that goal.
It's easy to change the dates for a booking, but up until now, nothing has automatically alerted the guest that the change successfully occured. You had to send a manual email to the guest after the fact. You also had to manually email your third parties - the housekeeper, manager, etc - so that they were kept up to date. Making a simple date change meant having to remember who you needed to notify and having to write out manual emails to keep everyone on the same page.
Now, OwnerRez does all that for you.
Open a booking, navigate to the Dates page and click the Change button. Right away, you should notice the new Email Options section that shows under the calendar strip.
By default, all three email options are selected since most of the time you will want to notify everyone. If you don't want an email going to the guest telling them that their dates changed - perhaps you told them already - simply deselect that option. Likewise with the third party or owner notifications.
The format and layout of the automatic emails are the same as the others you're used to seeing in the system. The guest gets a clean message that reminds them what the dates originally were and confirms that the change has been made.
Third parties get a message that not only tells them the old and new dates, but also summarizes what they are supposed to do.
As it says in the title of the Email Options section, these automatic emails can only be sent at the time the change is made. In other words, if you deselect one or more of the email options and click Save, you cannot send the automatic emails at a later time.
Scheduled payments are now smarter than ever! In Thursday's update, we released some changes that will increase the versatility of what scheduled payments can do.
If you schedule a new payment, or open an existing one, you'll notice some changes at the top.
The changes should be fairly self-explanatory, but let's take a minute to run through them anyway.
When it comes to picking the collection date for the scheduled payment, you can now select a number of days before the arrival date instead of a specific date. This is useful because it means that the collection date will automatically change if the arrival date changes. Before, if you changed the dates of the booking, you'd have to manually update your scheduled payments too or risk having the payment collected on the wrong date. Now, you only need to set "1 day before the arrival" (or whatever) and it will occur on the correct day even if the arrival date changes in the future.
The amount area was similarly updated. Previously, you could select "the remaining balance" but that only stored the total owed as it existed at the moment you saved the scheduled payment. If, sometime later on, the remaining balance changed, the scheduled payment would still try to collect the original amount. Now, when you select "whatever the remaining balance is (currently $x)" it tells the scheduled payment to collect the total owed at the point of collection.
We've also added a calendar button to the right of the date field. The date field always opened a calendar in the past but it wasn't obvious until you set focus to the field.
By default, bookings that are created via the guest form use the new options - Days Before Arrival and Remaining Balance. The Days Before Arrival value is based on your settings for the associated quote or property.
This update removes an additional step of work in your booking process. No longer do you have to adjust the collection date or amount on a scheduled payment just because the dates or charges changed on the booking.
It's been almost two months since our last update, but we haven't been sitting on our hands. We've been working on a variety of issues relating to payments, security deposits, scheduled payments, scheduled security deposits, cancellations and email.
From fixing minor bugs, like a "saving" spinner not showing, to adding major enhancements, like being able to view canceled bookings and send cancellation emails after the fact, we've completed over 60 issues on our roadmap.
We released the update a few minutes ago. Over the next few days, we'll be discussing each part of the update in more detail. If anything bothers you in the meantime, please tell us about it.
We've just released a new support area and filled it with a new list of support articles. At the moment, we're still working on writing all the articles, but we wanted to release the layout so that we could get your feedback as early as possible.
Are some of these articles more important than others? Are there articles not listed that you would like to see included? Special topics that should be broken down into more detail?
At the top you'll notice a search bar that will help you find articles that are relevant to your problem. At the moment, the results of the search aren't terribly useful because the support articles aren't finished being written. Once the articles are finished, the results will become much more relevant. Our search engine is only as smart as the content it's given.
In addition to support articles and blog posts, our search engine will return relevant results from forum discussions so if you'd like to contribute some useful information of your own, create a discussion in the forums.
Have you ever wished you could see your bookings overlayed on a calendar instead of a plain grid? So have we. While the grid is useful for scanning some of the details, 90% of the time you want a calendar view to show you where the bookings occur and which days are still open. And you want to see it right away when you login.
Welcome to the new Bookings Calendar View.
You can use this new view to quickly scroll from one month to the next and see which dates are still open and for which properties. To drill into a booking, just click on it. If the booking is too small to see all the details, hover over it with your mouse to see the rest of the text.
On the left side of the calendar, you'll notice a few other new features.
The Property Filter is exactly what it looks like. If you uncheck a property, all bookings for that property will disappear from the calendar.
The buttons above it give you quick access to the things you do the most - create a quote or bookings for your guests. These options still exist in the tab drop-down menus if you'd rather access them there.
We're working hard on making the calendar do other things. For instance, we'd like to be able to click on an open day and create a booking (or quote) in place without navigating away to a different page. Please share your thoughts on what you like or dislike and other features we should add.
For your custom renter agreements, two new fields are now available in the 'Insert Fields' drop-down list: booking arrival date and booking departure date.
These options are exactly what they sound like - the arrival and departure dates for whatever booking the agreement is generated for.
How is this useful?
Suppose you want your renter agreement to specify a certain condition for only the period of time when the guests will be at the property. You can use these two fields to do that - "Guest may do blah between [ArrivalDate] and [DepartureDate]".
What other fields are you dying to have?
On Monday, we commented about adding new page numbers to the renter agreement PDFs. In the same update, we also released a significant set of improvements for security deposits. You can now schedule security deposits for future collection or reset security deposits that have already been collected.
After navigating to one of your bookings, click on the Security Deposit link and you'll see where the changes begin.
That 'Schedule It' button at the top right is the new guy on the block. If a security deposit has already been scheduled, the button will be called 'Change Scheduled One' instead, which will allow you to edit the scheduling details. If a security deposit has already been reserved, no schedule button will be displayed. Bookings can only have one security deposit so if one is already reserved, any scheduled ones disappear.
Click on the Schedule It button or Change Scheduled One button and you'll see a new page layout with scheduling options.
The options are very straightforward. You can either have your security deposit collected on a specific date, or you can schedule it for a certain number of days before the arrival date. In either case, the collection date must be in the future. Most of the time, you will want to use the 'days before' option so that if the booking changes dates, the security deposit will move right along with it. When a booking is created by the guest and a security deposit is automatically scheduled by the system, the 'days before' option is always used.
The bottom portion of the page, which allows you to pick or enter a credit card for the guest, is exactly the same as the billing sections you've seen elsewhere in the system such as for collecting or scheduling payments.
The system will not allow you to schedule a security deposit if one has already been reserved. Occasionally, if the security deposit was already reserved and you need to schedule one for the future - perhaps the current one was collected prematurely - you need to release the current one and do a reset. We added the 'reset' option in the latest update which allows you to start over, essentially. The Reset button will only appear after a security deposit has been reserved and released.
On Reset, any existing security deposit or scheduled security deposit will be removed from the booking.
With these new scheduling and reset options, you should now be able to control security deposits much more completely. We already have a lot of ideas about how to enhance these options, but please give us your feedback so we know what you like or dislike about what we've done here.
About a month ago, one of our users brought up a great point. The user pointed out that when a renter agreement is turned into a PDF, at the time of booking, the PDF has no page numbers.
At first, this seemed like a relatively minor thing. But as we continued to think about it, the more it bothered us. Technically, legal documents are supposed to have page numbers so that no additional pages can be inserted into the middle or appended onto the end of the document after the document has been signed.
Not wanting our users to have legal issues with their renter agreements, we made this a priority. Today's update includes a fix for this. When renter agreements are turned into PDFs by the system, they now contain page numbers at the bottom of each page.
We also changed the digital signature block so that the guest's full name is used instead of just their initials. We believe that the full name is more clear and accurate for everyone involved.
We recently discussed the new rate categories that were added to OwnerRez. In the same update, we also added overrides.
The steps for working with rate categories, discussed in the last post, can also be set up for different time periods throughout the year. For example, many owners have different rates between the on and off season. Many OwnerRez users in Florida have higher rates during the last three weeks in December.
On the Rates overview page for your property, you'll notice a lower section called Rate Overrides. Click the Add New Override button and you'll see a rate layout that is similar to the Default Rate page.
At the top, you'll notice an Override Type field that allows you to specify either Seasonal or Specific Dates.
A seasonal override is an override that only has months and days, not years. Seasonal overrides repeat every year. This is the type of override that you would use for off-season/on-season rates.
A specific date override is an override that only occurs once - you specify a hard start and end date. The guest's dates have to fall within those dates. You can manually enter a date or select from the calendar that appears next to the text box.
Overrides should be the exception to the rule. If you have an on-season and off-season, make your Default Rates the on-season and create an override for the off-season.
Rate categories and overrides are here! We've added significant functionality to the rate engine, based mostly on your feedback.
You can now specify a rate for weekends, specify the number of nights that a week or weekend has and define the day types (Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc) that are valid for a category.
You can also choose not to split up adults and children - charging only for a total number of guests.
Let's See It
To see the changes, navigate to your property and click the Rate link. You'll notice a new page layout that shows the default rate at the top and the override rates at the bottom.
The "default rate" is the rate that is used most of the time. Think of it this way - if no override rate has been specified for the dates in question - the dates of the booking or quote - the default rate will be used.
We'll get into the overrides in a later post. For now, click the Change button to drill into the default rate. You'll see a completely new page layout with six rate categories that can be filled out.
The only category that is required is Any Night because there must be some basic 'per night' charge that is used if no other category is met for a given date. As you will see, all other categories are unused until you specifically mark them as used by selecting the Use This Rate option. Once selected, the rate will open so that can fill in the rest of the details for that category.
As you'll notice, every category has the same basic options with a few additions.
First, each category asks what the rate amount should be for that category. You should enter the entire amount that should be charged for the entire category. For example, if the category is week, enter an amount that encompasses all 6 or 7 days for that week, not just 1 night.
The other thing that every category has is the Guests breakdown.
The Guests breakdown allows you to specify what kind guests are included for the specified rate and how much more is charged for extra guests. If you charge only for total guests (instead of a adult/child breakdown), select the "Do not differentiate between adults and children" option which will change the display. If you do not specify a value for one of the Included text boxes, that is interpreted as allowing an unlimited number when calculating the total rate. If you charge extra for all guests, you would need to put "0" in the Included text box.
All categories, except the Any Night category, include a Valid Days field which allows you to select which days of the week participate in the category.
This allows you to specify when, during the week, the category is active. For instance, the Weekend Package category is usually only used on Friday, Saturday and Sunday night. If a guest requests 3 nights during the middle of the week, you may not want to give them a weekend-specific rate just because the number of nights is the same. The Valid Days field is interpreted by the rate engine inclusively, as opposed to exclusively. This means that if any one of the selected days of the week is in the requested dates, the category is valid. If you want any day of the week to be valid, select all of them.
The Week and Weekend Package categories also include a Nights field which allows you to specify the number of nights that are part of that category. For example, some owners prefer using a 6 night week; others prefer a 7 night week.
Next time, we'll discuss the overrides and how to use the above options for a specific season or set of dates.
Custom renter agreements are here!
We've just released an update that lets you create your own custom agreement, directly within the system. You can copy in any text you want, including from any MS Word document, Outlook email or web page.
Let's get started. Navigate to your property, select the Legal link and click the Use Custom Agreement button. You'll notice a new page that opens with a large editor area for entering text.
If you don't know where to begin, you may want to start with the text that the auto-generated agreement uses. At the bottom of the editor, on the left side, there's a link labeled "Prefill with auto-generated agreement".
Starting with the auto-generated agreement will give you some valuable text from which you can add your own bullet points or move things around. It is certainly not necessary to use the prefill option, but it may be helpful.
As you'll discover, the editor is very strict in terms of what kind of formatting it allows and what kind it does not. We have purposefully restricted some formatting options like colors and font styles. The reason we did this is because we believe that those formatting options tend to make agreements look less professional to guests. When copying from MS Word documents, for instance, bits of color and font will persist after the text is pasted into the editor. Our editor cleans out those custom colors and styles so that the text you edit, from that point forward, is clean and valid for the web.
The editor does support several formatting options that will make your agreement look professional. It supports bold, italic and underlined font as well as multiple title/subtitle text sizes. You can change the horizontal alignment of your text and create bullet or numbered lists. You can also create hyperlinks around text if you need to link to a different location.
The editor also supports custom fields or "mail merge" fields. You'll notice a drop-down list in the menu called Insert Field. This drop-down list contains a set of fields that you can insert into the editor - wherever the cursor is currently located - that are automatically converted to a real value when the agreement is displayed.
For instance, say you need to create a custom agreement that two properties will use. If you need to reference the property name in the agreement, you'll need to use a custom field. Otherwise, it would not be possible to write a sentence (such as "this agreement is for Acme Cabin") that serves two different properties. You can easily do that by setting the cursor to the position in the agreement where you want the property name and then selecting the "Property Name" field from the drop-down list. You'll see a yellow box, with the field name in red, drop into place.
Saving the custom agreement requires that you enter a name. The name is not used anywhere in the interface, nor is it shown to guests. It is only displayed for your conveniece so that if you create multiple agreements, you can quickly tell them apart.
You can create as many custom agreements as you want. If you do have multiple agreements and you click the Use Custom Agreement button, a grid of all your agreements will be displayed so that you can select from them before adding a new one. The grid will show you which agreements are in use and allow you to edit or delete them.
Wasn't it possible to upload a custom agreement before? What's the difference?
Previously, we allowed users to have custom agreements by uploading their own file. You could upload your own MS Word or PDF file, and it would be displayed when the user viewed the Terms and Conditions. The problem with this approach is that is lacked uniformity. Since users could upload any file format they wanted, it was hard to guarantee what the file would look like. Also, it wasn't possible to sign the file with a digital signature at the time of booking so no uploaded files ever got signed. The new process keeps all the text inside the system in a clean, uniform way that permits us to render and sign all agreements, whether they are custom or not.
This is the first version of our custom renter agreements so there will be things you like and things you don't like. If there are options you would like see, please let us know. Use the forum or send us an email.
Last Saturday's update added several new features like being able to disable security deposits at the property and quote level. Another new feature in that update has to do with booking confirmation email.
We heard from users that it was annoying to have confirmation emails sent - to the owner, guest or a third party - every time a booking was created or time was blocked off.
Sometimes, you just want to block off time or create a quick booking without telling the whole world. You might just be doing testing. You might be creating a reservation that you've gotten through a partner but you don't want the guest or anyone else being alerted. You can now do all these things.
We've also added an area that shows you what emails were sent for a booking, when they were sent and a preview of what the email will look like for recipient.
The new time you're creating a booking in the system manually (or blocking off time), you'll notice a new set of email options.
The options do exactly what they say - whichever email option you check will be sent and the ones that aren't checked will not be sent. By default, only the owner notification email is selected. This is because the majority of the time, if you are creating a booking yourself, manually, you probably don't want the guest or a third party getting email until you've had time to make sure the charges and billing details are correct.
Once the booking is created, click on the new Email link. You'll notice several email types enumerated along with their status, a preview option and a Send button.
The preview link will open a new window (or tab, depending on the browser) that shows you the exact email the recipient will get. It's useful to check the preview after you've updated charges so you can see exactly what the guest will see.
To send the email, click the Send button. If you've already done so - or if the email was sent at the time the booking was created - the email type will show the date and time of the transmission and the Send button will change to a Send Again button.
You can send each email type over and over again, as often as you want. So if the guest tells you that they never received the booking confirmation email, just send it again. The date and time will only show the most recent transmission.
In the future, we'll be adding more email types to this area including types for payments and security deposits.
Saturday's update gave us several new features. Among them, you can now disable the security deposit for your property or a specific quote.
To disable the security deposit, navigate to your property, select the Billing Details link and click the Change button. You'll notice a new set of options in the Security Deposit section.
Select the 'Never reserve a security deposit' option and click Save. Future quotes and bookings will no longer create security deposits or tell the guest about them. The public quote form, where the guest accepts and finalizes their reservation, will tell the guest that no security deposit is required.
To disable the security deposit for a specific quote, navigate to the quotes, select the Billing Details link and click the Change button. This area is similar to the billing details on the property only whatever you set here only applies to the specific quote in question.
Why would you want to disable it for a specific quote?
Say you have a friend that is renting your property, and you trust them and don't want to impose a security deposit on them. Instead of turning it off at the property level, thereby turning it off for all quotes and bookings for all guests, you can just disable it for your friend's quote. Your friend will never see it when they're accepting and finalizing the quote online and no security deposit is ever scheduled or reserved.
Thanks for posting that information.
