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Get started with Florida Rentals by visiting here and checking out the OwnerRez support article for how to integrate OwnerRez with Florida Rentals.
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As we continue to work through our analysis and forensics of the December 26 outage, we are identifying single points of failure in our systems that can be altered to improve resiliency. By their nature, some of these things require the system to be offline briefly as we implement the changes.
These outages will be very brief - within the constraints of the automatic retry cycles of our partners, and often within the timeouts of your browser - so you may not even notice them. Do not be alarmed, though, if you find OwnerRez unresponsive for a short time - just have a coffee and try again.
Over time, this work will eventually eliminate the necessity for the entire system to be down even for regular maintenance and upgrades, as well as adding additional levels of failover in the case of a major issue.
We'll have a public webinar discussing our findings and plans in the near future. Thanks for your patience and understanding as we work to improve OwnerRez! 🙏
On Thursday, 1/12, join us live with the team from Ok2Charge to discuss why you should care about EV charging.
EV sales are ramping up and your guests expect to charge their electric vehicle where they stay. In this session, you’ll learn how OwnerRez in collaboration with partners like OK2Charge is preparing you and your properties to ensure that you recover utility costs for your owners and create a new amenity revenue stream for your business.
The session is free to join, but you must use the Ok2Charge webinar link to register.
You can find all our upcoming and past webinars on our Webinars page.
Every time you tear a leaf off a calendar, you present a new place for new ideas and progress. -Charles Kettering
Welcome to the first product update of the new year detailing the January 4th release with two quick fixes.
I shouldn't begin the first product post of the new year talking about resolutions, should I? Ok, ok, I'll keep it brief.
Our resolution (blog-related) is to publish Product Update blog posts more promptly. We are a wee bit behind on 2022 product posts and are working on getting those published, but 2023 Product Update blog posts should follow new releases very closely, as this one did. We'll consider you our accountability partner in meeting this goal!
I hope you've had a chance to read the December 21st email from Paul laying out the highlights from the 2023 roadmap. We're excited about where OwnerRez is headed and hope you are too! We'll be striving to accomplish as much from the roadmap as possible this year. Some of the roadmap depends on our partners (e.g., Vrbo), but a lot rests with OwnerRez's Product and Engineering teams. Things happen and plans sometimes have to change but it should be a great 2023 ahead! Stay tuned by keeping an eye out on the changelog and here with the blog.
Now on to the bug fixes, and then we'll let you go until next time!
Manually handle security deposit option on booking cancellation screen. Back in December, we added the ability to control what to do with security deposits (e.g., hold or refundable deposit) while canceling a booking via OwnerRez. Intended to be super handy, if you had selected the "I'll release or keep it manually" option during the cancellation process before this fix, it went ahead and kept the whole security deposit. Only a few bookings were affected, but we quickly fixed it so it didn't wrongly handle any others. Don't fear selecting it now; if the "manually" option is selected, it will do nothing as it should.
OwnerRez Hosted website and Portal certificates weren't canceled when no longer needed. A peak behind the curtain with this one. OwnerRez runs a behind-the-scenes check regularly to evaluate OwnerRez-powered hosted websites and portal sites to ensure SSL certificates are valid and up-to-date. Part of that protocol included that if the DNS configuration was removed or inactive for 30 days and the user had done nothing to correct it, OwnerRez would cancel the certificate. Well, that wasn't happening but all is well now.
HAPPY 2023 OwnerRez and OwnerRez users!
Thanks OwnerRez for working extra hard to get us back online and crossing into 2023 without any more outage. As mentioned in my previous comment, I am still fairly new to your platform but I must say I am impressed by the quick move to fix. Your Support team also continued to do a great job in responding to messages eventually letting us know what happened. As seemingly the "Goliath" in this space, I hope that your team will continue to invest time and brain power in actively searching for threats to your platform and jumping on them as you did this one to help minimize disruption to operations. THANKS AGAIN FOR THE TREMENDOUS EFFORTS THAT WENT INTO THIS. Oops sorry, didn't mean to yell with the all caps n' all! ;).
Happy 2023!
It's technology, it happens! We appreciate your team taking action to get everything back up and running. Here's to a great 2023!
It's working now
@Ella -- Have you removed the calendar and re-imported it as Airbnb suggests?
@Dori123 -- I see a manual send of a keycodes trigger in your account, but the reason that trigger didn't fire is that it wasn't applicable to the booking's listing site. If there was a different trigger that didn't fire, please write in to the helpdesk with the details and we'll trace the reason.
Thanks for your hard work on this difficult problem, guys. For your log -- I saw Ken had commented: "Missed email triggers should have been sent, albeit late - you can confirm this in your Communication History. As noted, you can manually resend any you're not sure of in the usual ways, but we do not believe this to be generally necessary."
I can confirm that several triggers were missed and never sent until I sent them manually yesterday (12/29). Neither the original triggers were sent nor those that had the option "try to send a missed trigger up until the booking has arrived."
Still seeing on Airbnb:
Calendar sync
We’re having trouble syncing some of your calendars. Click the sync icon to try again. If you continue having problems, remove the calendar and re-import it.
OwnerREzSync failed
We have partnered with BuildUp Bookings to offer another certified WordPress design service for those looking for a custom website.
We understand that everyone's needs and wants differ, so we offer our WordPress plugin alongside our Widgets and Hosted Website options. For those looking to create a very detailed and custom website, this can be very time-consuming and takes web design skills. This is where BuildUp Bookings can help! Their team will utilize our WordPress plugin to create a beautiful custom-built website for you.
BuildUp Bookings is a digital marketing agency specializing in getting results for vacation rental businesses like yours.
Since 2016, we've worked with over 85 global vacation rental companies to build digital marketing campaigns that deliver results (aka more bookings) and have overseen over $50m in direct bookings for our clients. From single luxury villas to large 1,000+ property management companies, we know how to deliver results.
Our capabilities include WordPress website design and implementation, search (SEO/PPC), social (Facebook/Instagram/Pinterest/TikTok), email (newsletter/PMS emails/guest messaging/automations) and more.
We'd love to work with you: get in touch below, and we'll set up a call to review your goals with our knowledge of Ownerrez backed with the experience of our team.
To learn more, visit BuildUp Bookings website.
Examples of a websites they created using the WordPress plugin:
https://www.southboundstays.com/lyric-at-leipers-fork/
GuestView Guide was shut down on October 31, 2024.
We are happy to announce our partnership with GuestView Guide to offer our OwnerRez users an interactive concierge service option.
GuestView Guide is a wall-mounted interactive concierge for vacation rental properties. It enhances the experience for your guests, helps you save time, and you can earn more from every guest stay. Our OwnerRez integration makes it easy to automatically import your properties along with guest names and dates of their stay.
Monthly subscription fee, you don't buy the display! Learn more here.
Get started with GuestView Guide by visiting the GuestView Guide website and checking out the OwnerRez support doc for how to integrate OwnerRez with GuestView Guide.
We are excited to announce that we've partnered with Breezeway to offer our OwnerRez users another property care and services tool.
Breezeway’s property care and messaging app helps thousands of vacation rental hosts and managers automate operations, drive quality, and elevate the experience at every property. Their tools are purpose-built to coordinate complex work and deliver homes that are perfectly prepared to your specific standards.
Per property pricing, reach out to Breezeway to find out what you will be charged for the number of properties you have.
Get started with Breezeway by visiting the Breezeway website and checking out the OwnerRez support doc for how to integrate OwnerRez with Breezeway.
So u like kenBot sending you videos not answers? I can google myself
Just a quick note to people upset that you don't get good "live call" service from OR - I prefer contacting them by email with issues - and they get back very quickly and concisely.
And in those emails I have had support pointing out things on my account that could make OR easier.
Very happy with the timeliness and accuracy of support.
I'm a software engineer and have been on the other side of outages like this. I want to commend you guys on your quick response, your diligence to make sure there weren't any data corruption issues, your ownership of the outage, and the transparency of this write up. Genuinely, I see few public postmortems that describe as thoroughly what went wrong and right from a technical perspective, and I think you should be commended for it. Few end users truly understand the fragility of large, complex software systems and how difficult it is to build true resiliency. I am sure you will take your learnings from this issue and incorporate them into an even more resilient system.
And kudos to all of those who responded to the outage. Getting a page about a primary db corruption during a work holiday does not sound like a good time to me.
Apartment 230 is available for the month of February. But when i search, it does not come up. When I search with no dates, and look by the map, none show up...
@Jonelle - I just checked and I can see them on Airbnb just fine. But you have a lot and I didn't check them all. Please write in to the Helpdesk with specific examples of properties that are not appearing on Airbnb so we can investigate.
I just double checked add none of my properties are no won AIRBNB...
I still have one apartment, summer sea 230, where I changed the calendar to show February available but that is not reflected in Airbnb or VRBO. I have set full sinc a few times but no change. Please help!
Thank you. We appreciate the effort to recover as well as the transparency, and time spent to write such detailed explanations.
Taking screen shots of the monthly calendars.
Thanks for sorting this out! I’m taking screen shots from now on every two or three days. Was the outage on Amazons side?
We are pleased to announce that Florida Rentals has updated its first-class channel API connection with OwnerRez to allow a seamless booking process.
OwnerRez will be the channel manager, end to end, for your listings and bookings on Florida Rentals. All your content (photos, amenities, descriptions), rates, rules, and availability automatically sync with Florida Rentals. Also, you can take live bookings using your own credit card processing, and all guest communication is direct!
FloridaRentals is trusted by thousands of Florida’s top property managers and owners. They specialize in finding Florida-focused travelers who are booking their vacation rental for their next trip. Their Florida-only marketplace drives over 8 million traveler visits annually, and has generated over 210,000 vacation bookings and over 22,000 traveler reviews.
Free 60-Day Trial! There's no risk and no obligation. Take a look at their listing plan comparison sheet here.
Get started with Florida Rentals by visiting here and checking out the OwnerRez support article for how to integrate OwnerRez with Florida Rentals.
Thank you and your entire team. At first I was panic stricken but soon realized your team was on it and working hard to resolve the issues. We have 100% faith and confidence in OR. Wishing you many blessings and no hacks in 2023! LOL!!
We have partnered with Hudson Creative Studio to offer another certified WordPress design service for those looking for a custom website.
We understand that everyone's needs and wants differ, so we offer our WordPress plugin alongside our Widgets and Hosted Website options. For those looking to create a very detailed and custom website, this can be very time-consuming and takes web design skills. This is where Hudson Creative Studio can help! Their team will utilize our WordPress plugin to create a beautiful custom-built website for you.
Hudson Creative Studio is a boutique web and design agency based out of New Orleans, LA. With over 10 years of experience, we specialize in direct-booking websites for vacation rental property managers, helping them to effectively establish their brand, showcase their properties and generate more bookings.
At Hudson Creative Studio, we pride ourselves on our personalized approach and ability to work closely with our clients to understand their unique needs and goals. Whether you're a small vacation rental property owner or a large property management company, we're here to help you succeed.
To learn more, visit Hudson Creative Studio's website.
Example of a website they created using the WordPress plugin:
Thank you to the entire crew for getting this resolved as quickly as possible and so sorry vacations had to be disrupted!
I am thankful to the staff at OwnerRez, you all are the best! I'm so sorry this situation affected your team's holiday but am grateful for your dedication and support. I have full confidence in you and your handling of this situation and continue to champion and support your product and your team.
It's technology. Shit happens. The best you can do is the best you can do. We all know you wanted the system up as fast as we did. Thanks for being on top of it. Non-IT type people don't understand that even in redundant environments a database problem CAN replicate to redundant systems. Just look at RAID puncture and you'll see that all the failover, fault tolerant replications in the world won't save you from it as the bad block iteself replicates its state.
