Latest Activity...
As a proactive precaution. Can we disconnect our APis when Or goes down so that bookings will not get missed? AIrbnb took our properties offline during the outage. For example, can I disconnect my Airbnb and VRBO APIs then reconnect them later and all be as was prior to the disconnect?
Thank you for your communication and transparency. It is very much appreciated.
Thanks for rolling up your sleeves and dealing with an emergent database issue in the middle of vacation. Appreciate the hard work under pressure. Hope you get some downtime now.
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.
"faced not phased" sorry :)
Thanks guys!! I know last night was rough for you. You are awesome. Did the auto triggers email after the outages and catch up or should we manually send emails that may have been missed?
Thanks for getting us up and running. This was scary for me as a new user of your platform and this left me realizing just how vulnerable I am should your systems go down. They directly impact my business and while I do know that things happen, hopefully steps will be taken to ensure that we have a path forward for quick recovery should we ever be phased with a similar situation. Life is about learning from new experiences and this was a new one as it seems for OwnerRez as well as those using your platform. Looking forward to the public webinar where I hope you will discuss steps put in place to help us all pivot quickly. Thanks again to the team for your proactive response.
Our calendar allowed us to accept two bookings on the same dates and double book
Airbnb suspended some of my listing. Do I need to reach out to Airbnb or will they be automatically restored?
We have a booking missing from the calendar.
Thank you for addressing the issue during the holiday. It is much appreciated. Things like this happen.
Thanks for being so proactive and committed to excellent customer service. Appreciate the sacrifice of all employees.
God bless,
Barbara
Thanks for the transparency and for being on top of this!
Thank you for the explanation and transparency. Cheers!
Thanks very much… good efforts getting things back to normal. Appreciate it. When was the last know back up from date wise?
Thanks for all your hard work!
My booking.com booking that happened during outage, did not synch. I did a API resynch and it still is not showing up
Thank you for the update and working to correct the issues
Greetings! We lost a connection to Resort Cleaning which resulted in 2 scheduled cleanings being deleted for today.
Please share thanks to the team for abandoning their holiday to get the problems fixed!
On December 26th, OwnerRez experienced a database corruption issue with our cloud service provider.
We saw the issue right away and started working on it, but there was a domino effect that grew significantly beyond our initial expectations. Our engineering staff has been recalled from vacation, connecting in from overseas, etc. to diagnose and resolve the problems as quickly as possible.
At present, there are no indications of any hostile activity or attacks, and no reason to believe that any previously gathered data has been lost. We are currently operating on a restored system with up-to-date database backups that occurred at the same time the issue started to develop.
We will be posting information and analysis (here in this same blog post), and holding a public webinar, as soon as we have a more thorough understanding of what went wrong and future preventive actions.
In the meantime, here is a list of common questions that have been coming in. This list will grow over time as we add more.
We are still investigating all the details, and there are puzzling issues we still don't fully understand, but what we can say is this...
This past Saturday, as part of a routine update, we upgraded some database servers with a new configuration that we had used extensively for many months. The configuration was a very routine thing and, again, something that our engineers have used in their own environments (and elsewhere in testing/staging) for a while. There was no reason to believe the update or new configuration would cause anything out of the ordinary.
From Saturday until Monday, the new configuration started to corrupt data. We're not sure exactly when or why (this is the part still being investigated) but several database areas began to be unresponsive. The entire platform started to go down on Monday, and our remediation/failover processes started to kick in, but there was a domino effect, and the remediation/failover processes were affected similarly as the system bounced from up to down and back again.
The investigation into the bad database configuration is ongoing. By all accounts, it should not have happened. Our cloud provider has service guarantees with us, so we are working with them on the investigation.
No, not that we know of. This is isolated to something we did (updating a database configuration) to our database servers with our cloud provider. But the obvious question is - what about other businesses that used the same database configuration?
Yes, indeed - we are wondering the same thing. We purposefully watch to see if software updates by third parties are stable before upgrading our server configurations. In fact, we purposefully waited on this database configuration (from back in March) because there were some known issues with it affecting servers. We skipped over it and used a different configuration that was reported to be stable and in use by others, and we used that configuration in test/stage environments for several months before moving forward. As mentioned above, we are very puzzled by why it happened and by all accounts, it should not have.
(And no, the Southwest Airlines debacle is not related to this. At least, we highly doubt it.)
The short answer is: no lost data, but we are still investigating and there may be discrepancies with third parties.
The reason we say "no lost data" is because we have data redundancies in place that save data to multiple places at the same time. When our primary systems go down, we still have access to other systems. When we rebuilt and restored the underlying configurations, we took data from secondary systems that were up to date as of the time the issue happened.
After the recovery period finished, we went back and compared the new data with the corrupted data. There were no discrepancies in terms of missing records. In other words, no records were showing in the old corrupted version that didn't exist in the new recovered version.
That being said, there are many channels and 3rd parties that we connect with that also send data back and forth and could have "sent" or "received" some data that never got through during the outage. So a channel or 3rd party might show something different than what OwnerRez does, which means the data is incorrect on one side or another (or both). Messaging could be another example of this. Gmail and other messaging services watch volume and throttle accordingly. When the final recovery effort fully kicked in, a large firehose of queued messaging went out (eg. from you to guests, or from OR to you). Gmail may have throttled or dropped some of that due to volume concerns on their side. We have not seen signs of that, but it is possible.
Also, there were intermittent "up" periods, early in the recovering period, when you (or a third party) may have changed data that ultimately did not get saved when we did the final recovery effort. So there too, data may be missing.
No. This was not the result of a security breach nor any outside influence. Nothing was hacked or stolen. This was a database configuration issue where a seemingly-insignificant update led to data corruption and then domino'd elsewhere as our fail-over processes started responding.
Yes, many. Our engineering team spends a lot of time (and on an ongoing regular basis) managing and analyzing our infrastructure. We have lots of tooling and logging in place that gives us visibility into errors, slow responses, spikes, partner issues, background queues, and much more. OwnerRez is large and full of many moving parts, and in each of those moving parts, we store data where it can be replicated and archived stably as it grows.
Yesterday, we saw the issue immediately and our fail-over process kicked into gear, but the database configuration affected every remediation effort that swung into place. We were forced to pause everything completely, get to the root of the problem, and rebuild configurations before turning the firehose back on.
The bad configuration was, itself, something we tested and used extensively for months beforehand, so we are still puzzled by (and investigating) why it happened. But we made the decision to stop the failover/automation and roll back to a configuration that we thought would make a bigger impact. We knew it would take a couple of hours, but we believed (and still do) that it was a better trade-off for a return to stability rather than fight corrupt data in rolling cycles for what could be many days.
But we clearly have work to do. We do not want to shift blame or throw up our hands here. We are committed to being your elite PMS and channel manager and that comes with certain expectations on your part and responsibilities on our part. We are taking steps to learn from this and incorporate new processes for additional redundancies and better communication. Some stark problems became very clear over the past 36 hours.
During the outage, you may have received automatic emails from Airbnb stating that your listings were disabled or hidden because your software (ie. OwnerRez) was offline. Airbnb does this as a safety precaution so that guests are not double-booking your property since Airbnb has no way of confirming with you (ie. via OwnerRez) that everything is okay.
Post-outage, Airbnb should have reactivated any hidden listings automatically, but you should check your listings and not assume this is the case. When our system started communicating with Airbnb again, we confirmed that they were turning listings back on again by checking with specific listings and seeing that they were visible. However, do not trust that this is the case across the board. Check your listings so that you know for sure. Our helpdesk has reported that some users are still seeing hidden listings. That could be for specific reasons that don't apply to you, but everyone should still check that their listings are showing and the calendars are open and bookable. We apologize for the inconvenience this places on you.
If you did not receive any "hidden listings" email from Airbnb, you should be fine. Airbnb only hides listings if they can't send bookings through, not for other reasons. However, if you're worried about it, we recommend that you still verify your listings on Airbnb to make sure they are showing and bookable. It could be that it happened to you, but you didn't see the email or an email was never sent.
During the outage, some users were recommending to each other to go into Airbnb and manually disconnect OwnerRez from the Airbnb side so that they could return to "platform mode" and deal with guests and bookings directly on Airbnb. If you did this, there is no way to undo it from the Airbnb side. You need to go into OwnerRez > Settings > API > Airbnb and reconnect the account from the OwnerRez side. This is safe to do, and your previous connection will reactivate and merge in changes safely.
Triggering a "full resync" for Airbnb does not happen immediately in OwnerRez, and it never has. The request for the resync is put into the queue, along with many other sync actions, and is pulled out as the queue processes every few seconds. Typically, in normal conditions, the queue is processed so quickly it can appear to be immediate, but it always follows the queue.
After the outage, the queues were filled with many waiting requests, so everything took time to process. If you were clicking the "trigger full resync" option on the channel, it was put into the queue behind other things and probably took a while to process.
Post outage, we have been monitoring all of our queues to watch many types of requests process - bookings, channel syncs, messaging, and so on. If you are waiting for a message to be delivered or channel sync to go through, make sure to give it some time to catch up. If it's been a while (ie. an hour) reach out to helpdesk, and we'll take a look.
Unlike some of our other channel partners, Booking.com does not provide an automatic method to restore lost or missed data, including booking records. Our team does have access to logs and is manually working through that information to find affected accounts and properly update calendars. This should be completed by the end of today, but, note that not all booking information can be restored. However, the calendar data will be correctly entered, preventing any double bookings.
We are seeing a relative handful of this situation - as in, a few dozen properties out of tens of thousands. It appears to be individual properties affected - that is, you might have 10 Airbnb properties in one API-connected account, 9 are working fine, but 1 refuses to come back online no matter what you do. We've tried several things to get those properties working again and haven't had success either - so, we've filed a Critical bug with Airbnb partner support. If you have properties in this condition and have not already reported it to us, either via the Helpdesk or in this thread, please do so - we'll add your information to the Airbnb bug report and track them all together.
**UPDATE** - All but a couple of the offline Airbnb properties have been restored, and those are expected to be fixed by the end of the day.
We are excited to announce our integration with ECBYO as a new first-class channel partner!
OwnerRez will be the channel manager, end to end, for your listings and bookings on ECBYO. All your content (photos, amenities, descriptions), rates, rules, and availability automatically sync with ECBYO. They will send an inquiry filled out with data into OwnerRez, which allows you to use your own credit card processing, and all guest communication is direct!
Emerald Coast By owner is a regional vacation rental listing website created in response to the ongoing changes in online travel agency policies and pricing structures. They are a subscription-based model, charge no booking fees and maintain zero control over your payment collection (and refund) process. The guest and their contact information are handed over to you at the time of inquiry. The guest books directly on your existing OwnerRez account.
Contact ECBYO for discounts on multiple listings. A single listing is $449.00 for 12 months of exposure.
Get started with ECBYO by visiting here and checking out the OwnerRez support article for how to integrate OwnerRez with ECBYO.
Are you dreaming of longer days and warmer weather? We are too! Or if you're in the southern hemisphere, maybe you're ready for colder weather? Either way, learn more about the December 16th and December 23rd, 2022 releases with eleven updates, including two (yes, two!) Florida API-Integrated First Class Channels.
Right smack dab in the middle of the last two releases (on December 21st), we at OwnerRez, and those in the northern hemisphere, experienced the winter solstice, the "year as reborn," or the gradual waning of daylight hours that are reversed and begin to grow again. Some refer to it as the "extreme of winter" or the "shortest day of the year," but it also means that your days can only optimistically grow longer from that point on. With the last two releases of the year, even with the least daylight, we managed to close out the year in an optimistic fashion! Read on to share in our optimism!
Florida Rentals is not a stranger to OwnerRez, but they updated their integration to support not only inquiries but the full booking experience. Your content (photos, amenities, descriptions), rates, rules, and availability automatically syncs with Florida Rentals. You can receive bookings using your credit card processor, and all guest communication is direct!
Learn more from the FloridaRentals.com Setup & Connecting support article! (Update: check out the Updated Florida Rentals First-Class Channel Integration formal announcement blog post!)
Emerald Coast By Owner (ECBYO) is a regional vacation rental listing website for the Gulf Coast of Florida and Alabama, created in response to the ongoing changes in online travel agency policies and pricing structures. They are a subscription-based model, charge no booking fees, and maintain zero control over your payment collection (or refund) process. The guest and their contact information are handed over to you at the time of inquiry. The guest then books directly on your existing website.
Learn more from the ECBYO Setup & Connecting support article! (Update: check out the formal Integration with ECBYO partnership announcement blog post!)
Creating your Property Description is key to marketing your vacation rental! Crafting your Property Description is your opportunity to "sell" your vacation rental to potential guests by highlighting the unique amenities that your vacation rental offers.
If you missed the news, OwnerRez's Property Description feature allows users to customize property headlines and descriptions depending on the API-Connected Channels!
As a rapid follow-up to the release of the property descriptions overhaul, we needed to improve several things post-release.
One of the most visible and helpful updates to Property Descriptions (Properties > Description) was the default description area now includes all channel listing icons. When users hover over each channel listing icon, helpful tooltips will appear showing the channel's character count limits, as shown below. It's a lot to look at, and in a future release, we'll enhance the display but it was necessary to indicate which fields map where at a glance.
Learn more using the Property Descriptions support article.
OwnerRez users can grant access to Staff Members or Portal Users (owners, cleaners, maintenance staff, etc.) to view calendar availability and perform actions like blocking off time or viewing owner statements. Each user gets a separate login, and OwnerRez Users can configure a variety of access to one or more properties, including the ability for a single property to share multiple owners.
After the release, we determined Team Access needed some necessary tweaks. Those improvements included:
Interested in learning more? Review the Team Access - Overview support article to get started.
Allow Users to Retry Deposits. A couple of OwnerRez users encountered an error when they attempted to retry to record a deposit following a deposit error. We have resolved this bug.
Bookings Starting on the Last Day of the Month Were Not Visible on iPhone Month View. Bookings scheduled to begin on the last day of the month were not visible on the Month view on iPhones only. This bug has since been resolved.
Fixed Issue Where the Trigger Month of the Year Wasn't Wrapping Around December to January. When field criteria were set for greater than December (month 12) and less than July (month 7), the system evaluated the criteria independently and never matched since those are mutually exclusive criteria. Now, such criteria will be detected and evaluated together so they wrap across January.
Email List Report Column Corrected. We corrected a column in the Email List Report that displayed incorrect date formats for inquiry contacts.
Prefill Stripe Account Email Address When User Clicks on the Reconnect Button. If your Stripe account email address is different than your OwnerRez account email address, the OR Stripe reconnect button was prepopulating the email address with a user's OR account email address rather than the user's Stripe account email address. This was causing problems for the user because Stripe did not recognize the user's OR account email address and instead prompted the user to create a new Stripe account. We have resolved this so that users that need to reconnect their Stripe account will have the correct Stripe account email address prepopulated.
Send Travel Insurance Payment Transaction Failure Message to Guest. When guests purchased travel insurance and had the Rental Guardian travel insurance portion of the payment method declined, guests were not receiving an email alert from OwnerRez notifying them. We have released a fix to have the alert go out in those instances again as it should. All future travel insurance purchase payment failures will send an email alert notifying the guest about the Travel Insurance payment failure.
Unique Field Definition Index Addition. We discovered it was possible to get duplicate field definition entries for the same field when a user made simultaneous requests. No longer!
There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.
- Ken Olson, President, Chairman and Founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977
Olson wasn't psychic or very forward-thinking because most of us cannot imagine NOT having personal computers, or other devices, in our homes today. Even though it's 45 years later, and everyone was speculating that we would have flying cars by now, Olson was a little off the mark with that quote.
While his statement was made when personal computers were still a very new and emerging technology, the widespread adoption of computers has changed how we live, work, communicate, and operate our vacation rental businesses today. After you finish shaking your head over Olson's quote, read about our December 15th release with 17 updates.
OwnerRez Vrbo API-integrated users that are on the pay-per-booking (PPB) model are charged booking commissions at the end of each month. In the past, users had to manually enter each Vrbo booking fee commission as an expense for each booking, property, or owner. What a hassle!
Since this info is unavailable via the Vrbo API, we developed the next best thing... an import tool to make that process much more manageable. The Vrbo Commission import tool assists users in importing those Vrbo booking fee commissions. A Comma-Separated Values (CSV) file is a delimited text file that uses a comma to separate values. Each line of the file is a data record consisting of one or more fields, separated by commas.
Vrbo provides the CSV files on the first of each month detailing the previous month's Vrbo booking fee commissions. You can find those CSV files and download them by logging into your Vrbo Owner Dashboard, clicking on your profile link in the upper right-hand corner, and selecting Booking Statements.
On your Booking Statements page, download your monthly CSV file as shown below.
To import your Vrbo CSV file, you will probably have to "unzip" or extract your file. Users can accomplish that by right-clicking on your downloaded file and clicking on Extract. You will be asked to Select a Destination and Extract Files. Again, click on Extract. The extraction process will create a folder in your selected destination with the same name (unless you named it something else during the extraction process) with the downloaded CSV file inside.
Head back to OwnerRez and navigate to Tools > Import/Export > From a Listing Site > Import Vrbo Commissions.
And to make it even easier, OwnerRez added the steps to complete the process on the import page.
Click the Choose File button and select the CSV file you downloaded from Vrbo to import your commissions. Hint: you may have to choose All Files from the drop-down list as shown below. Click on Open.
If successful, you will receive the "Import Successful" message. If not (and we hope that is not the case), there will be a list of CSV rows that were not imported with expanded information.
OwnerRez users should rarely have to cancel a booking (at least, we hope that is the case!), but life happens sometimes, and guests may be forced to cancel their vacation due to life circumstances. When the OwnerRez user initiates the booking cancellation, it is pretty straightforward, but we don't want you to forget about scheduled security deposits!
We have added options regarding security deposits on the booking cancel page to help users remember to cancel any active or scheduled security deposits that may be in place. Underneath the "How will the refunds be sent?" section, users now see the following security deposit messaging displayed directly on the cancellation screen.
Users can release the security deposit or keep the entire or partial amount by selecting "I'll release or keep it manually."
When users select "I'll release or keep it manually," they must manually handle the active or scheduled security deposit on the booking transactions page.
Want to learn more? See our Canceling a Booking and Security Deposits Overview support articles.
Location, location, location! The location is important when buyers are purchasing real estate; location is just as crucial for vacation rental guests. Guests often make their decision based on the location, and we are committed to helping guests better understand where your property is located.
OwnerRez Hosted Websites Maps have always shown property locations based on the user's location settings. Whether you had a single property or multi-property site, it wasn't always easy to tell where the properties were located. The Map page (or section) on your OwnerRez Hosted Website now has the city and state (or city, province, country for non-U.S.) displayed below the map. This change reflects on a single property and multi-property hosted websites.
Interested in learning more about Hosted Websites? Read our Hosted Websites Overview support article to begin.
Do you have a long list of quotes from listing sites that have incomplete names, masked emails, or otherwise useless contact information? While OwnerRez doesn't like to delete data, we understand how frustrating having unworkable contact information can be. Users can now delete channel-linked quotes (as displayed below) if the guest/contact never booked.
Read our Inquiries, Quotes, and Bookings Overview support article to learn more about Quotes.
Of course, we love new users! But our welcome email format was tired and not all that welcoming. We spent a great deal of time and effort revitalizing our sign-up and onboarding pages that, include a revised Setup Checklist page with a printable PDF. And it was time to show our welcome email some love too, with all kinds of fancy formats and links. Something for us to continue building on to make onboarding with OwnerRez easier.
Want to share your love of OwnerRez by recruiting others...and be rewarded too? Consider signing up for the OwnerRez Affiliate Program!
It was confusing to guests who purchased travel insurance to receive branded emails from OwnerRez users when the purchased travel insurance coverage was from Rental Guardian, not from the OwnerRez user. So we removed that alert from going to the guest. Don't worry; guests that have purchased travel insurance will continue to receive an email confirmation of their purchase through Rental Guardian with all their travel insurance policy details.
Instead, OwnerRez users will receive an email system alert when their guest purchases travel insurance (including insurance type, trip cost, premium, and certificate/policy number). Below is an example of the standard travel insurance system alert.
And below is an example of the Cancel for Any Reason (CFAR) travel insurance system alert.
Learn more by reviewing our Travel Insurance Overview support article.
Allow Team Staff Members to Change Pricing Preferences. Team Staff Member access was not allowing Team Staff Members to make changes to pricing preferences (under Settings > Pricing Preferences). We have fixed their ability to make changes to pricing preferences.
Don't Allow Taxable Refundable Damage Deposit Surcharges. According to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), refundable damage deposit surcharges are not taxable. When attempting to add a refundable damage deposit surcharge, OwnerRez users will not be able to make the refundable damage deposit taxable and will see a corresponding tooltip if attempted.
Display Correct User When Sending Third Party Alert Messages. When Owners/PMs, or Team Access users, were making changes to $0 bookings or blocks, the third-party alerts were sent but the email sender was displayed as the primary OwnerRez user, not the staff/portal user that made the initial changes. We have corrected this bug.
Display Manually Entered Reservation Number on Bookings. Manually entered reservation numbers were not displayed on the bookings list view when a listing site was not selected after the booking was created. This bug has been fixed.
Fixed Existing "Blog" OwnerRez Hosted Website Custom Pages. A dozen or so OwnerRez users created custom pages on their OwnerRez Hosted Websites with a slug of "blog" before we released blogs for hosted websites. This was causing problems if they attempted to try to save the menu order or edit that page. We have updated those dozen or so custom pages and notified the affected users.
Fixed Issue Where Property Custom Field Files Could Appear as Property Photos. We found an edge case where a property custom field file could generate a property photo if the property had no images. This issue has been corrected.
Keep History of Custom Files Uploaded. We deleted existing custom files if a new file was uploaded for a given field, which was confusing. Custom field files will now include a history of files, and users will be able to see all custom field files with the oldest file type names having a strikethrough or cross out of the file type name.
Make Non-Card Payments Searchable. We recognize that not every guest pays by credit card. However, searching for non-card payments such as checks, bank transfers, or other offline payments was difficult for our users. We have now optimized non-card searching to produce search results for non-card payments.
Populate Payment Type Merge Field Properly. Email receipts only displayed the following types; CC, PayPal, and Check. This was challenging if payment was a bank transfer or some other form of payment. We have improved the Payment Type ({PAYTYPE}) field code to populate more payment types.
Simplify Unread Message Counts and Optimize Other Queries. If you have been an Ownerrez user for only a little while, you may not realize how often we update our system. If you are now starting to wonder, it's a lot! And no, it's not a race. We want OwnerRez to be the very best. That's why we continually update things that are "under the hood." Such updating with this one included simplifying the unread message counts and optimizing queries, which translates to an easier and faster system for you, our users.
Timezone Added to OwnerRez API v2. As part of the OwnerRez overall Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) conversion, the OwnerRez API v2 now includes the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) time format.
I really appreciate your thoughtful explanation of what your team is working on. We're happy to pay more for the constant upgrading and support that you provide. Your team is top-notch. Keep up the good work!
OwnerRez is all about facilitating travel by assisting owners and property managers in operating their vacation rentals, but did you know that today is Pretend To Be A Time Traveler Day? 🕰️🧳
We don't anticipate working with vacation time travel operators any time soon, but who knows where the future will lead us? We foresee that we will continue to be the long-term vacation rental management platform for your vacation rental business...no matter what. Because OwnerRez is constantly evolving, updating, and improving.
So buckle up and get ready to pretend to travel through time with us as we unveil the ten updates from our December 8th release!
Over the past decade, after many high-profile and widespread major data breaches occurred on the internet (via phishing, etc.), many people have come to understand more about password security and the fact that a password alone can't keep their online profiles safe. That has led to the rise in the popularity of two-factor authentication (2FA), an additional layer of security that helps keep online accounts secure. Two-factor authentication ensures that people trying to access an online account are who they say they are.
We're very excited to announce that OwnerRez now offers a robust two-factor authentication setting that all users can add to their accounts. Both master logins and team access (staff member) logins can use two-factor authentication at any time.
We now require that all new user accounts (i.e., users that joined after today - December 8, 2022) use 2FA.
Read the full details in our Two-Factor Authentication support article.
Another feature to announce is our Custom Message Templates now include a Guest type option. Custom message templates are messages (whether emails, SMS, or channel) you send to interact with your guests at various points in the rental journey.
What makes Guest templates unique is that they can be used directly in the conversation view before any booking or booking-related trigger but are also available during and after (well, up to 30 days post-departure). The critical thing to remember is that Guest Type Templates won't be able to include any property or booking Field Codes to add to your Guest Templates. Guest Custom Message Templates allow for more universal email communications between you and your guest, but a guest custom message template can still be used from your specific bookings; it just won't be able to reference the booking.
To create Guest Type Templates, navigate to Settings > Messaging > Templates.
You can do the same for SMS or Airbnb templates.
In the text editor, display potential Guest merge fields by clicking on the Insert Field Code as shown below.
The Field Code modal will open allowing you to select your desired field code. Note that three tabs at the top of the Insert a Field modal enable users to select between Account, Contact (Guest), and Utility (Date) field codes. Users can select and insert the desired field code by clicking on the left button, as shown below.
Learn more by reading our Email Templates support article.
Maybe you are working with a repeat guest or want to mimic another Quote or Booking. Well, you've been able to 'Copy To' a New Booking or New Quote for a while, as shown below -- but the devil is in the details.
When copying a quote or a booking to a new quote, you can now choose whether to create it with default charges (i.e., pull the charges from current settings/rates) or copy the charges as-is from the quote/booking.
Learn more at our Inquiries, Quotes, and Bookings Overview support article.
Airbnb Channel Bridge Errors. Airbnb was passing passthrough taxes as taxes remitted by Airbnb and determining wrong totals in some instances. We updated Channel Bridge import with a new "update charges" option for "Only bookings where charge total has changed" when "recalculating charges and/or overwrite transactions and fees."
Airbnb Host Fee was Split into Two Fields. While not documented in their API version document (so we were unaware of it), Airbnb's new reservation API splits the host fee into two fields: base price and VAT. We released an update to handle the new fields and corrected the affected reservations.
Converge Payment Method and Lynnbrook Group Language Tweaks. We improved the Converge Payment Method edit page by changing the form's field labels to what Converge refers to them. Additionally, we clarified the language in the Get Started with Lynnbrook Group section for uniformity.
Expense Category Wasn't Reseting When Bookings are Updating. We tracked down a bug where the Batch Update wasn't resetting the expense category for existing expenses to match the surcharge expense category after booking changes. That's now fixed.
Fixed Double Header on Import iCal Once Screen. The header, "Import blocked-off time from iCal," was duplicated at the top of the Calendar Import/Export page. This has been corrected and relabeled as "Import from iCal once."
Portal Favicon Redirects. Some browsers returned a 404 error (i.e., page not found) due to attempting to locate the OwnerRez portal custom favicon icon. We resolved this bug by redirecting the favicon.ico on portal sites to the real favicon icon.
Quickbooks Sync Realm Error. In rare cases, OwnerRez users that use the Quickbooks Integration premium feature may encounter the following error, "Please correct the errors below. Unauthorized Request: User is not a member of the specified Realm" when attempting to sync OwnerRez and Quickbooks. Now, if users receive this error, they will be directed to disconnect and reconnect their Quickbooks connection.
We are pleased to announce our partnership with Rented to offer our OwnerRez users another great dynamic pricing option.
Rented is a team of dedicated vacation rental professionals with over 100+ years of combined experience in managing, marketing, and pricing vacation rentals. With diverse backgrounds and unique skill sets, they're passionate about helping clients grow their business by offering revenue management services and an Automated Rate tool to enable every property management company to benefit from dynamic pricing, maximize revenue, and Relax. It’s Rented.
“With this partnership with OwnerRez we are looking forward to putting our industry leading technology, tools, and services into the hands of even more amazing managers going forward.” - Rented’s Founder, Andrew McConnell
Their Automated Rate Tool starts at $14/listing per month, with specific pricing based on the total listing count.
Rented also offers Full-Service Revenue Management Services, pricing is generally as follows:
Get started with Rented by visiting the Rented website and checking out the OwnerRez support doc for how to integrate OwnerRez with Rented.
It was great seeing the OwnerRez team again.
Brad den Dulk
getawayGoGo.com
We are happy to announce our partnership with Folio to offer our OwnerRez users another fantastic digital guidebook option.
Folio lets you create stylish digital guidebooks that proactively answer your guests' questions, saving you time and money. Use your guidebook to share property information (including photos and videos), recommend local activities, and promote your brand to drive repeat bookings. Share with guests before they even arrive by including your guide's link in pre-arrival messages - no app downloads are needed!
Our integration with Folio allows you to sync your OwnerRez listing data into Folio, where it will then be used to generate digital guidebooks quickly and easily. Once the guidebooks are ready to go, Folio will automatically sync the guidebook links to OwnerRez, where you can input them as a field code into your already existing messaging templates.
Pay a monthly subscription fee based on the number of guides published. More details can be found here.
Folio also offers a free service to translate an existing guidebook into a Folio guidebook!
Get started with Folio by visiting the Folio website and checking out the OwnerRez support doc for how to integrate OwnerRez with Folio.
Our team had a wonderful time exhibiting at the ExpoRV International Conference in Cancun! We enjoyed meeting so many new property managers and sponsors who we plan to partner with very soon.
This was our first time sponsoring ExpoRV, and we plan on coming back next year. If you didn't get a chance to speak with us, feel free to sign up for one of our weekly demo webinars.
Here are some photos we took at the conference:
(Paul, Steve, and Jen soaking up the sun on the beautiful beach nearby the conference center.)
(Paul H, Steve, and Paul W setting up the booth lightbox.)
(Paul H and Paul W having a very important discussion about lighting.)
(Finished booth set up in record time! Paul H was starving.)
(Team photo in front of the holiday Cancun sign.)
(The OwnerRez crew in front of the list of sponsors on the first day of exhibiting.)
(Paul W, Paul H, Jen, and Steve with Manuel, aka the guy that made this all possible.)
(Paul giving an in-depth demo of OwnerRez to interested property managers.)
(Busy show floor on the first day.)
(Paul showing off our hosted websites to prospective property managers.)
(Steve explaining the power of OwnerRez to a large group.)
(Paul holding the best margarita we could find in Cancun. Shoutout to Casa Tequila, we'll be back!)
(Late-night shopping, we found some interesting items.)
(Cancun at night is similar to a mini Vegas strip.)
(Dinner with our friend from KeyData, featuring our waiter.)
(All packed up, Paul H not looking forward to bringing this on the plane with him.)
This event was a lot of fun, and we thank Manuel and his team for all the hard work they put into this to make it a success. We look forward to meeting more property managers and making some new acquaintances at our upcoming conferences.
