Latest Activity...
Ok, did as you Suggested!
Elk Crossing Vacation rentals in Pine AZ voted. When is OR staff coming back to Elk Crossing?.....LOL
Elk Crossing Vacation rentals in Pine voted. When is OR staff coming back to Elk Crossing?.....LOL
Voted!
Done!
Thank you for the constant and great customer service!
Yesss!
Yesss!
Invaluable! Irreplaceable.
Game changer!
I just voted for OwnerRez!
I just voted for OwnerRez!
Voted!
Done! Of course, you are the best!
Yes sir, this PMS is 🔥 G.O.A.T
Done!
Done!! You deserve it!
Luty, use that link in the blog post to submit your vote.
Don't give up, Scott! We need your vote. Just put in dummy data for anything they ask that you don't want to give. We need votes from real users like you!
Was going to do this, but stopped when they kept drilling down more and more getting personal contact info.
Yes, you are the best. How can I vote.
OwnerRez has been shortlisted for Best Channel Manager in the 2022 Shortyz Awards!
This award is open to businesses which have been "providing channel management for at least one year and are able to demonstrate success in managing online distribution channels and maximizing direct sales within the short-term rental sector".
...Aka, what OwnerRez has been doing for some time now.
Now you may ask, how do I vote for OwnerRez as Best Property Management System? The short answer is you can't, at least not this year. 😜 OwnerRez was shortlisted for Best Channel Manager in 2022.
If you love OwnerRez as much as we do, vote for us by going to to this link: https://form.typeform.com/to/uaQJjF8r
Better hurry because the deadline is April 29th at 23:59 BST! Vote Now! 🗳️ Every category will be decided by a 50:50 split between judge scores and the public votes.
Voting Closes InI agree with Fabian...
Any possible way to add the "Checkmark" symbol to lock codes, similar to your "#" addition? Thanks for all you do!
The # fix was to allow that character to be set in a manual lock code -- that particular one wasn't being able to be set because it was a conflict with the HTML hash/anchor symbol. You should already be able to enter a checkmark symbol in a manual lock code.
If you're not wanting it to be manual, but want to include a checkmark symbol in your email templates because that's what the "open" button on your lock shows, there's a better way to do it: write it into your email template. For example, something like:
{BDOORCODE}✔️
If you're on a desktop it's hard to enter emojis like that but you can do it by going to a site that lets you copy emojis and copy/pasting that into the template from the site.
I agree. I have been using this function on Hospitable. They post it 1 minute before the deadline. There is a certain failure rate, but it's tolerable.
Hi Paul, thank you so much for the upgrade of the delay review!
PERSONALLY, I would prefer to send it maybe 3 minutes before the window is over. If it fails, it fails and then there's that. Let's just say for most of us, we'd prefer the risk of not getting our bad review in, over the risk of being retaliated back. We could poll, or even create a third category "last minute review" with a disclaimer that it may not successfully land, which I would still choose. Personally 20 minutes in my opinion is too much exposure.
Recently, our CEO, Paul Waldschmidt, sat down with Matt Landau to discuss Paul's 10-year long obsession with speed, performance, and building relationships the old-fashioned way.
In case you've been living under a rock, Matt Landau is a big deal in the vacation rental industry. His Unlocked podcast is the biggest podcast in the industry, but that's only one of Matt's many roles, campaigns, and multimedia outlets. Check out VRMB which is Matt's mothership for all of the community, marketing, multimedia, and resources that his team manages.
But hey, about that interview! The conversation can be listened to, in full, by using the following Apple podcast player:
If that doesn't load for you, go directly to the Paul Waldschmidt episode on Apple or visit the Unlocked podcast page.
Unlocked is a podcast series that invites you to be a fly-on-the-wall as VRMB founder Matt Landau interviews some of the world’s most innovative vacation rental professionals. The goal of this podcast series is to share best practices and to remind vacation rental professionals that we have everything we need inside of us to succeed.
Another thing that needs to be mention here is VRMB's free weekly newsletter. You may already get other industry newsletters, but this is one you've got to subscribe to and read! The content is carefully curated, relevant and managed by Matt himself. If you want to feel empowered, if you want to keep your finger on the pulse of the industry, subscribe to and read the VRMB newsletter!
Finally, thanks to PointCentral and Breezeway for sponsoring the Unlocked podcast. Both PointCentral (which is an official OwnerRez partner) and Breezeway are great companies with excellent teams behind them.
Thanks, Matthew! Spread the word!
Any possible way to add the "Checkmark" symbol to lock codes, similar to your "#" addition? Thanks for all you do!
Hey everyone, here's a quick run-through of a tidy little release we did last week. It contains 16 updates with a few enhancements and bug fixes.
Have you ever wondered why there is a settings button hanging out at the top of the Rates area, then also a settings button on seasons, and then also some display settings about rates over in the Account > Preferences? Confusing! We finally had enough and combined all that into one spot.
Take a look at the Settings menu, and you'll see a new "Pricing Preferences" under the Pricing section.
Drill into the new Pricing Preferences page, and you'll see all the settings from those other areas - rates, seasons, guest charges, widget charges - all gathered in this area. The settings have not changed, only their location has.
In the future, we plan on adding any other rate or pricing-related setting to this same page, so if you're ever wondering where a global setting is, try this spot!
Did you notice the new "Safeguards" menu in the My Account area?
While moving around the pricing settings, discussed above, we noticed that the "Idle Session Timeout" setting was another thing that should be moved to its own area. The Idle Session Timeout is a security thing, not a display or pricing preference. We then realized that it should be in its own new section called "Safeguards" in the Security area which allows us to add other similar settings. For instance, we plan to add multi-factor authentication (MFA) soon which will allow you to secure your account with a text message or authentication code.
So we created a new Safeguards menu and dropped the Idle Session Timeout in there.
The Idle Session Timeout works exactly the same as before. If it's turned on and you leave a window sitting idle for more than 20 minutes, the screen will automatically lock and you'll need to log in anew.
As you probably know, Form Messages are bits of introductory text that we show at the top of guest forms. We always show a default version, but you are free to override these with your own. They even support field codes, so that you can fully customize them to the guest and property. I'm talking about this box in blue:
To override them, you simply go to Settings > Form Messages and start creating your own versions. There is a giant list of named forms that you can use to quickly create messages.
A user pointed out that the acknowledgment statement on the renter agreement signature page needed to be customized and they couldn't figure out how. We couldn't either, so we created a new form message for that statement. I'm talking about these sentences in bold:
You can now create a special form message that will override this set of sentences. It's the form messages called:
If you're wondering why there are two form messages, it's because there are two places you can request that your guest sign your renter agreement - on a new quote or for an existing booking. While both forms look mostly the same, they are actually two different forms that are both hosting the signing page.
For a long time, we've wrestled with the right way to calculate month rates when rendering the rate table.
The rate table tries to figure out what your monthly rate is (unless you turn that off) so that guests get an idea of nightly, weekend, week, and monthly rates. Even if your rates are dynamic nightly rates, set by a pricing engine, you can still show a weekly or monthly rate.
But what is a monthly rate exactly? Is it just any 30 nights? If so, what about 28 or 31-day months? The rate table shows rates by season, so breaking it up by date period is already built in, but it's still difficult to know how exactly you want to calculate it. When you hear monthly rate, you could be thinking "the rate if someone booked the full month of Feb, Mar, Apr, etc" but OwnerRez is calculating 28-30 day time periods relative to your actual seasons.
We stopped guessing what users wanted and decided to put a setting on the rate widget. You can now define exactly how you want monthly rates to be calculated.
The options are very self-explanatory, so give them a look. By default, we recommend that you stick with the first option of "calculate for all days of the season for the length of the discount". This is how OwnerRez was calculating it before, so if you liked what was there, just keep it like that. If you would rather it show a monthly rate based on actual calendar months, switch it to the second option.
You can now use these settings to show your monthly rate the way you think it should be presented.
Missing security code when we already have the card on file. There was a situation where Booking.com was sending a booking with a card security code initially, but then an update with the same card number without a security code later on. That triggered our "missing card" logic needlessly. Instead, we now check to see if there's a matching card by number and expiration date. If so, we use that instead of throwing error messages.
Communication history SMS tab verbiage. When our fabulous channel management became a built-in feature for everyone (and SMS stayed a premium feature), we missed a spot when updating verbiage. It incorrectly mentioned Airbnb when asking if you wanted to turn on SMS messaging. We fixed that, and while we were in there, we updated some of the other words around it to be more specific to SMS.
Airbnb cancellation policies drop-down. The drop-down that shows Airbnb cancellation policies was getting super wide because we were showing really detailed descriptions for each policy. We shortened the drop-down list by showing a summary of each policy instead of the full description. The full description is still used in other places.
Weekend setting for minimum weekend rules. A long time ago, we added a setting to determine which days were weekend days and applied that to seasonal rate calculations. Later, we changed the label on the "Minimum Weekend Nights" rule to show the weekend days setting, but the system was actually still hard-coded to Friday and Saturday under the covers. We fixed it so that the weekend days setting is actually used when calculating the Minimum Weekend Nights rules.
Better totals on property search results. On hosted website and search widget results, we show a rate. If there are no dates, it'll show the nightly rate, but if dates are entered (and the widget is set to calculate exact rates), we switch to showing the total for the stay. That can be jolting, so we fixed it to always show the "xxx/night" rate if it should be displayed. If it's set to calculate totals for dates, we then tweak the display to show a total or "xxx/night" based on the information that is available.
We think this is more intuitive for the end-user and similar to how channels present total amounts on their search results.
Last Access time for portal users. Did you know that you can see when your portal users last accessed OwnerRez? Yep! It looks like this:
But we noticed an issue. Previously, we were not updating the Last Access timestamp if you (as the account owner) were using the "Log In As" button to go into the portal user's account. After all, you want the Last Access to show the actual time that the portal user was in there, not yourself. The problem is that in recent times we've updated our portal system so that portal users are just like account owners except that they are in "login only" mode so that they don't get billed. We did this to expand the ability to grant access and, in the near future, to release tiered access for your staff and third parties. So we had to go back and check ourselves here and fix it so that other users who are using a portal account do update the Last Access timestamp if they are not the account owner.
e-Signature "Current Time" timezone. We recently noticed an issue where the renter agreement signing form, for both quotes and bookings, displays the "Current Time" in eastern time, regardless of the user's timezone settings. The signed and archived PDF was getting the correct timezone but the signature form still showed eastern time. This has been fixed.
"Book Now" system alert. Each system alert in OwnerRez has a certain category in our system so that we can communicate clearly about alerts. We noticed that the "Book Now process has started" alert was showing up with the "Inquiry is created" category on it in the communication history.
This has now been fixed.
Email history system alert filter. Speaking of system alerts, we noticed that the system alert filter on the Communication History > Email list was broken, so we fixed that too. You can now filter all of your email history based on alert types.
Monthly rates for 28-day seasons on widgets. If you set up a season that has 28 or 29 days (e.g. Feb 1 - Feb 28/29), that equates to 27 or 28 nights, so our widget logic will never show the "Monthly" price for that season unless you require a minimum of 28 nights. To fix it, we did two things. First, we changed our minimum and maximum month calculations to look at full months and not days. Second, we corrected the multiplication by 28 in our charge engine to be the correct number of days all the time.
Bookings with no charges on Line Item Pivot report. Our Line Item Pivot report is a powerful report because it breaks out numerous items about the booking into separate side-by-side columns. However, our Line Item Pivot report was too stingy. If the booking has no charges, it wasn't including the booking at all, even though the booking had many other columns of important data to report. This is now fixed. The Line Item Pivot report will now show all bookings that match the report criteria whether the bookings have charges or not.
List pop-over cards. Have you ever noticed how difficult it is to close the pop-over cards on lists in OwnerRez? I'm talking about these things:
Yep, those things. And yes, we've known about it too. To make matters worse, as you keep clicking stuff, new pop-over cards would open even though the old ones didn't close. You had to click on the same link as before to close a single card. We finally had enough and fixed this. It is much easier now to open and close pop-over cards when clicking on information in OwnerRez lists.
Thank you very much for the "Delay negative reviews" feature. I've been waiting for this for a LOOONG time. This was the only feature that was keeping me with Hospitable/SmartBnb. Now I can switch 100% to OwnerRez.