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When?

Portal access tab isn't visible on mobile. The only way to access it on mobile is to click the "invite staff" button and then under the warning displayed click the link to go to portal. Just FYI. 

Hi Tim - we see what's going on, thanks for letting us know. We'll get a fix out as soon as we can!

Portal access tab isn't visible on mobile. The only way to access it on mobile is to click the "invite staff" button and then under the warning displayed click the link to go to portal. Just FYI. 

As of yesterday, Portal Access is now free for all and has been moved to a new Team Access area under the account menu.  We also dropped Zapier integration (invite only) and a large Property Descriptions overhaul that allows overrides per channel.

Yes, that is correct:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/duve

It appears the name of this company/solution has changed to Duve.

Hi Melanie,

This is Adam from StayFi. Guests that log into WiFi will be synced into OwnerRez, but currently they will not be associated to the current booking at that property. But we do have that improvement on our roadmap, we don't have a timeline for when this will be completed, but we do plan on implementing it in the near future.

I am using Stayfi and integrated with Ownerrez and am happy with both.  With the integration between the two, will Ownerrez import contacts received via Stayfi back into a reservation for future inclusion with that particular booking?  Or will those contacts stay with Stayfi?

That is unfortunate. I am not seeing a strong argument to raise the subscription fees beyond 80% when the inflation levels are at 10-20% increase. Unfortunately the rental prices have only gone up by 10% on average and expecting anything more to offset inflationary adjustments are not possible in the hotel industry. The supply vs demand trends are still the same while offering hoteling services.

Expecting software based services ( that is what i see ownerez category) to keep going higher when dollar becoming stronger is counter intuitive. I expect OR to find cheaper software hosting and development options. I will start exploring other options.

Thanks.

Sad, really sad! I can see some other comments which I re-state. I chose OR for its great features but when I made my evaluations of the different system, I did not consider those that were almost twice the actual price. In that spehere of providers, I am certain that I will find a better-fitting provider among the top-rated ones. OR is great and assistance too but for what I need, if has some shortcomings too (it varies upon each one's needs of course) and to my eye is not worth the new pricing, especially that what I can see from the 2023 plans, the most improvements I was expecting / hoping for and already listed are not listed.

Yes it takes a lot of time to adopt a new management software but I didi it last year in favour of OR and it looks like I will have to do it again next year... Sad!

I’ll add this feature request in the appropriate section as well but I have seven properties all co-located under the same roof.  I’d like a shopping cart option where a guest can book 2 or more suites at the same time and only have one contract and one payment.  I’m aware of the ability to bundle units and use mutual blocking but with seven suites that would become very tedious to setup and very expensive. 

Yes, great point.  By "rare" I mean that the major OTAs (Air, Trip, Vrbo) all standardized on first and second/final payment structure years ago so the industry kind of followed that.  Back in the day, HomeAway and Vrbo had a "how much do you require up front" and "when is the final balance due".  But yes you are 100% correct that homeowners need better options than that, particularly for big properties like lodges or large beach homes where the cost may be 15 or 20k per stay.

PS. Air only recently allowed a second payment.  For a long time, it was just pay-in-full up front!

Paul,

I think maybe it is rare in the VR industry for professionally managed properties, but I think among individually owned VRs it is more common to offer more than 50/50 payments. I would expect larger PMs not to have much flexibility by nature, but for the "mom and pop" owners I think flexibility (not just on payments) is more common. As I said, I don't know what % of your customers are of the "privately owned and operated" VR type vs those that are operated by property managers at a larger scale, but I'm guessing the latter make up the majority of your customers and thus have the product geared more towards their needs.  

Tim, I agree with you on the payment schedule issue.  It's been kicked around internally for a long time.  You are correct about that being one of the older pressing issues.  I think it hasn't seen more attention because it's rare in the VR industry.  The first/second payment schedule is broadly used.  Thank you for reminding us.

Hi Luis,

Thanks for your continued feedback and ideas.  Re: training course:

could be addressed via a training course

I agree, and we started our webinar series for this reason to great success.  We do a weekly demo webinar, have Live Q&A webinars and monthly partner webinars.

In terms of deep-dive or third-party training, we already have a number of affiliates that do third-party training, but we've been slow to endorse or recommend those as our philosophy is to be careful about where we direct users.  If we don't know what is being said (which could be wrong!) we don't want to endorse the trainer.

I noticed earlier your comment here and had to address it:

Owner Rez seems to have very different growth objectives....

Yes, that is correct - very different growth objectives indeed. 😊  We don't believe in growth at all costs, we're not seeking to sell out or merge.  We are happy with our model, have zero debt and zero outside investors, and we plan to keep it that way.  We're here because we want to be here, in this industry, building this software with our team.

Hi Mark,

Regarding the live phone calls:

What is frustrating is that I/users cannot just pick up the phone and talk to someone then and there. Sometimes I require an immediate response, and a call back days later, when I might be out, doesn't cut it.

The reason we don't do this is because it would not add anything in terms of quality.  You would get an immediate voice but not a quality answer. OwnerRez is a wide and deep software platform (8 verticals) with many different support areas and many thousands of customers.  If we staffed a live call center that answered immediately, all you would get is a friendly immediate voice asking for a time we could schedule a time to put you in touch with our Tier 2-4 or engagement specialists who can walk through a 15-30 minute call about the issue.

Backing up, our focus in support is providing correct thorough answers, as well as go over other issues/questions you might have while on the phone. Hiring more bodies would not immediately help that. It can take 6 months to a year of training and ramp-up before our customer success team is able to provide deep knowledge about individual accounts and give valuable help.  And we would still have to schedule calls out because of tickets requesting calls and time zone issues

Across the software industry, this is pretty common.  Even huge companies like Intuit don't really provide great live support.  You get a live voice, yes, but it can take 30 minutes on hold or a scheduled call-back if your question is anything beyond a very routine issue (eg. how do I pay my invoice).  Try asking an actual accounting question like why your balance sheet is off....

I'm not trying to be defensive here but show a peak behind the curtain.  More videos and support docs are part of the solution as well, and we are working towards that as well.

To be sure, we are continuing to staff up our Engagement team so that the time between your request and the live phone call is shorter. It used to be "in a few days or later this week" but has recently gotten down to a day or two typically. We are working towards making it same day or next day at latest.  At some point, we might be at the point where there is enough slack in the Engagement team to be able to answer live.

I see a lot of complaints here, which were probably expected, so thank you for giving us a forum to communicate our frustrations. It goes a long way to adding to the feeling that Owner Rez is a good partner in our businesses.

That said, It seems like some of the complaints about "not needing XYZ" or n"not happy to pay for XYZ widget/integration/plugin" could be addressed via a training course. I have used these to great success in other software companies. How it works is by making a course that helps all of us owners be more successful, and at the same time, addresses the #1 issues that the price increase brings being that many people are upset and may want to leave. Considering the time it takes to set up owner rez I bet the churn rate is not too high... but no one else in the industry has their own training course so it would help you to stand out and honestly make us a lot more dedicated when everyone understands why they do need that "XYZ" thing that right now they do not want to pay for.

Feel free to email me for more details if you would like to see some examples of how we have saved other software companies and helped them 10X their growth. 

I have been paying for QuickBooks integration for 6 months and it has NEVER worked. Is anyone on this blog actually having success with this feature? I have asked several times for help and Owner Rez support has refused to help. I was actually told that “we are not accountants so we can’t help with QuickBooks”  I don’t need help with QuickBooks I need help with syncing QB with OR… What good is a software if it doesn’t help you with accounting? Also, how can you charge someone for a premium feature and not help them use it. FOR SIX MONTHS!? 

I'm out of here. This is ridiculous!!! Smoobu, Hospitable... all better "bang for the buck" now. OwnerRez will slowly lose a lot of people and a lot of money. 

I would like to have Quickbooks integration included in the normal subscription, as opposed to an additional fee. 

Paul, you write:"We actually do have a fulltime Engagement Team that does in-person phone and video calls every day of the week.  Send in an email and we'll get you on the call-back schedule for sometime this week or early next.  Our Engagement Team is expanding and we look forward to doing a lot more phone/video support in the future."

I think that you are missing the point. What is frustrating is that I/users cannot just pick up the phone and talk to someone then and there. Sometimes I require an immediate response, and a call back days later, when I might be out, doesn't cut it. Therefore I always use email and the response time is pretty good; but knowing that someone will pick up the phone if I feel that the matter is urgent enough to warrent a call, would be refreshing. 

Ken,

1. With regard to the rent, yes you can combine the rental lines but you can't combine any other fees INTO the rental line. You can only group surcharges together, discounts together and rents together (and taxes)....but you can't combine different categories. I think a lot of people have a number of "per stay" fees that they would like to wrap up into the rent total but that cannot be easily added to a nightly rate. Cleaning fees being the primary one. My cleaning fee is $150 whether 1 night or 14 nights so I need it to be added as a per stay surcharge but I don't want to display it.

2. Multiple payments only exist as a manual workaround.....and one that requires the guest to agree to terms that you are then going to change. I don't want to tell my guests, "yeah the agreement says you have to pay the entire balance in one lump some but after you agree I will change it to two payments." No, that's not reasonable. Owners should be able to have multiple payment options....whether they choose to split it into 4 payments, or a $500 deposit and then 2 payments of 50% each. That's what OR should offer and what many people have been asking for since about 2017. Also, OR offers no ability to set dates that payments are due, only dates based on the stay. Many seasonal rentals will have a payment due by say January 1st, then the balance 60 days prior, or even on a second set date. Right now that's not an option so I have to manually send out payment reminders in November.

@Nona - you can control your Premium Features here:

https://app.ownerrez.com/account/billing/premium

@Tim it is possible to set up multiple payments for an individual booking, has been for a long while:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/multiple-payments

And, you can indeed combine the various Rent entries onto one line - that's controlled in your Pricing Preferences under "How Guests See Charges":

https://app.ownerrez.com/settings/pricing

Paul,

As others have mentioned, I just have one duplex that equates to 3 listings (A,B A&B) so I'm looking at a significant increase in cost. I started at $22.99, then last year it jumped to $42, now next spring it will be $88!

Perhaps most egregious is the pricing for the Wordpress plugin. I can't begin to understand how that pricing is reasonable....everyone might as well have the full hosted website feature for $5 more. $18 a month for a calendar widget and booking form? I'd love to hear the justification for that. 

Primarily my complaint about missing features is the multiple payments (n payments as you guys called them) and the ability to create payment schedules and set due dates. It has been on the roadmap for probably 4+ years now and it seems like a pretty common practice in the industry.

Another missing feature is the ability to "bundle" all the surcharges/fees into one "price". With all the media attention on cleaning fees and other fees being charged it would be nice if on quotes and bookings there was the option to just display everything as "rent" rather than breaking it down. I know you can manually do this on quotes but it would be a useful and time saving feature. At a minimum I don't want my quotes to default to this giant mess that I have to edit each time. I can't imagine people wanting to send out a quote that looks like this....

How about the option to combine select charges into a simple "Rent" line...

I barely book with VRBO so that integration isn't worth my time and it seems from owner reports that the AirBnB API integrations are still not perfect. AirBnB via iCal is working fine so I'm not sure I want to deal with switching to API if it potentially brings me headaches. I'm not convinced that any of the newer features are of use/interest to me and it seems like a lot development work is spent on integrating partners that I have no use for. I read through the blog and it is new integration after new integration....mostly of services I've never heard of. Meanwhile I'm stuck here waiting for improvements to basic functionality.

How do I remove PM?

Reading through these comments above, I would like to 2nd the opinion that yo should offer yearly pricing discounts. Rentals are my side gig, but software consulting is part of my main consulting business. Owner Rez seems to have very different growth objectives than most software companies, but traditionally, ANY TIME my clients call me and tell me that they need a bunch of cash for development, I recommend offering yearly pricing as the fastest way to get all your money upfront so it is available to be used for growth.  Ultimately, a webinar that pitched owner rez to the rental owner audience and had a special one-time offer for a discount on your first yearly subscription could very well lead to the sort of revenue growth needed to support your development goals. This is how I have grown software companies in the past that did not have access to VC funding or did not want to take on more debt. Ultimately, getting owner Rez more exposure could help since I was lucky to stumble on this platform since I had never heard of it spoken about on any podcast or social media. 

 I have been on this platform for a month and spent a TON of time setting this platform up. If I had any idea that my bill would almost double I would have NEVER signed up to begin with. The decision to switch to a different platform that is far more intuitive will not be nearly as difficult after finding out that Ill be spending $600 more next year...

Kudos, I absolutely love seeing all the new updates. The price increases seem fair especially compared to competitors and the amount of features you all provide and always updating/changing/growing. I love that you have rolled out portal access into all accounts and don’t have to have PM. 

However, I am looking forward to all the pm features updates, especially YTD reports. 

Absolutely love seeing OwnerRez blossom! Thank you! ☺️ 

Hi Paul,

I took a look at their website and I have asked for someone to call me tomorrow to discuss. 

Thanks very much for suggesting.  Lets see where this goes.

Suzy

I didn't hear of them, Paul, but could look into them.  We certainly need a solution.

I'll get back to you.

Suzy