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On Tuesday 4/26, we'll sit down with the team at Vrbo to discuss the intricacies of search and how you can rank higher!
Towards the end of the webinar there will be a Q&A section to answer any questions you have for Us.
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for Unlocking the Secrets of Search webinar link to register.
You can find all of our upcoming and past webinars on our Webinars page.
Wish we could have joined you, Paul! Thanks for the pics.
It was a pleasure meeting so many customers, property managers, and partners at both the NWVRP conference in Seaside, Oregon and VRMA Spring Forum in Chicago. If you made it out to either one, we hope you had a wonderful time and stopped by our bright green booth!
If you missed out on these conferences, don't worry! The OwnerRez team will be at a handful more this year, and you can find a list of upcoming events here. If you didn't get a chance to speak with us, feel free to sign up for one of our Q&A sessions or weekly demo webinars.
Here are some photos we took at the conferences:
(Greetings from Seaside!)
(OwnerRez on the sponsor sign.)
(First time putting the booth together on a show floor.)
(Opening keynote with OwnerRez as a gold sponsor.)
(Glen Ruggiero and Paul Hall all setup ready to meet and greet!)
(Paul Hall carrying the booth setup throughout the airport...we decided shipping it would be easier next time.)
(Hilton Chicago, where the conference was held and everyone stayed.)
(Entry corridor with list of sponsors.)
(Paul and Glen ready to go!)
(It's basically required to try deep dish pizza in Chicago. It was delicious! If you're ever in the area, check out Lou Malnati's Pizzeria!)
(Glen, the pool shark.)
These conference were a wonderful learning experience for us and a great way to make some new acquaintances. As you can see, we made sure to have a little fun as well!
See you at the next conference!
Very weird. Going back to the same page, now the Policy and Taxes columns are there, when they most definitely weren't moments ago, going to the same channel pages several times.
I believe the Policies tab is only visible on Airbnb and Vrbo channel integrations at this time.
I'm there and clicking on the channels and clicking on everything clickable in them, and can't find any Channel Dashboard as you have in your screenshot.
Hi Scott,
To access the channel dashboard, go to "Settings > API Integrations" and click on any channel. The new Policies tab should be visible below the channel details at the top.
Would someone at OwnerRez cared to tell us where to find this Channel Dashboard?
I've never seen the interface that you are calling the Channel Dashboard. Where do I find this? I'm not seeing it anywhere under any of the settings or tools.
It would be good to state where to find particular settings or tools when you are describing upgrades or fixes to them.
What's this-- another product update in the same week? Yeah, we're awesome like that.
Hey everybody, I'm back with another 15-update release to go through. What actually happened is that I was late writing about the last release, so the spacing got messed up. But whatever, let's get to it!
Are you one of those lucky awesome people who use our PM module? If so, you know that you can create custom statement views so that your owners get a customized layout for their monthly statements.
We occasionally look for new things to add to statement views based on common PM feedback. This past week, we added a new set of "Night" columns.
There are both "Nights" and "Nights (In Period)" columns that you can select. As the names imply, one is the full number of nights of the stay, and the other is the number of nights within the statement period. This allows you to show the number of nights that go along with the pro-rated amount you are remitting to the owner.
Remember the warnings we issued about Old Stripe being turned off and SMS messaging requiring a brand? That deadline has now arrived.
If you had an old Stripe payment method, it has now been disabled. If that was your only method for collecting credit cards, your OwnerRez account no longer has any active way to collect credit card payments.
If you used SMS Messaging but didn't have an SMS Brand on file, your SMS messaging has now been disabled.
If you were affected by either of these issues, look back at previous blog posts or the email messages that were sent directly to you with instructions on how to fix these issues.
Have you been annoyed by any door lock stuff recently? Well, we have! We've been building a list of stuff to tweak, and this past week we knocked out a bunch of it.
First, we noticed a situation where you couldn't set a manual code on a block because the door lock associated with that property is set as "bookings only". But hey, if you want to manually set a code, the system should let you set a manual code, right? It now does.
While we were there, we updated manual door codes to accept the pound sign ("#") as a valid character so that you can include that directly in the code. A lot of users need to specify "#" as one of the buttons to press because the lock requires that for starting or ending a numeric sequence. Now, you can use "#" wherever you want in the code.
Then, we changed how door codes work when moving bookings to different properties. Previously, if a door code was generated on a booking, and then the booking was moved to a different property, the same door code stayed on the booking, even though the lock was mapped to a different property. This was intentional because we didn't know if the user intended to change the code or keep it the same. After all, the guest might have already been notified about the code for their booking. However, it continued causing support issues, so we changed this so that if a booking is moved to a different property that doesn't have a door lock configured, the door code is removed from the booking. If the door lock on the new property is manual, the manual door code remains in place.
Finally, for properties that have two or more different door lock types, we are generating different codes for each account. We don't reuse the same code across multiple accounts. If you happen to use "last 4 of phone", the codes will end up the same. If your generation strategy is random or by lock, it made sense to get a different code per door lock, so we switched to that.
Rotate images even without a file extension. Did you know that OwnerRez automatically performs several cleanup steps on every image that is uploaded to our system? One of those cleanup steps is rotating smartphone-generated photos to the correct native layout instead of keeping the original layout because smartphones use tags (known as "EXIF data") to denote which way - portrait or landscape - the image should be displayed. Lazy smartphones! We know from experience that other downstream partners (like Vrbo or Airbnb) do not always respect those tags so the image may end up rotated the wrong way on the channel listing. Recently, we noticed that some images are uploaded without a file extension (like "my-cabin" instead of "my-cabin.jpg"). When that happens, our image cleanup steps weren't being followed. We now check if it's an image and, if it is, do the cleanup steps regardless of whether the file has an extension or not.
Update booking stats after all charges have been changed. When canceling a booking, you can adjust the charges at the same time to account for any refund sent back to the guest. When charges are adjusted, the booking's stats - things like total paid, total owed, etc - are updated as well. We noticed that when adjusting the charges during the cancel process, the stats were updated every time each line item was changed. If 10 charges were adjusted, the stats would update 10 times. In addition to being inefficient, this can lead to errors because the intermediate total can go negative temporarily. We fixed this to delay the stats from updating until all the charge line items were finished.
Expense category cleanup. In the last release, we added a big category update to Expenses so that you can cleanly categorize things like supplies, lawn care, and cleaning into proper categories for downstream reporting and automation. We noticed a few things to clean up, so we jumped on those right away. We also saw a bunch of historical expenses, and expense settings on surcharges, that we could create some mappings for, so we put those in place. This will put some categories in place on your existing surcharges and expenses.
Blog menu conflicts when creating the first post. A few updates back, we updated the blog in our hosted websites builder to automatically create a blog menu whenever the first blog post is written. This helps the user instantly see where the menu appears so that they can style or move the menu around without realizing that they first need to create one. This was a great little update, but we ran into an error where some users already had blog menus in place and a conflict occurred. We now detect that situation and steer around it.
Now gaps for bookings ending today. A while back, we fixed "now gaps" to consider whether the gap included today. The fix made it so that a gap changed in size relative to today instead of when the last booking departed. Recently, we noticed a related issue where if a booking departs yesterday, it can cause gap rules to apply to today, causing today to be unbookable because the gap is in the past. We expanded the "now gap" fix to detect if the start of the gap is today or yesterday before evaluating gap rules, and if it is, we no longer apply the arrival gap.
QuickBooks customer match with empty guest names. We recently fixed how guest names match up to customer records in QuickBooks. We completely rewrote our matching code to smartly detect and use existing customer records instead of always adding new ones. The feedback has been great on this, but we noticed an issue where the name matching would crash if the guest's first name was empty in OwnerRez. This has now been fixed.
Error message with bad HTML. You won't know this bug existed - in fact, no one will - but we're happy to say it's been fixed anyway. For a few months now, our engineering team has been monitoring and tracking a very rare bug where error messages show a Yellow Screen of Death instead of the normal nicely-formatted message you're used to seeing. We thought we had fixed it a few times, but it kept coming back. We're finally happy to say we believe it is now fully fixed. Yeah okay, no one ever saw it, but it's the little things in life. 😊
If you weren't able to make it to the NWVRP conference this week, then meet us in person next week at the 2022 VRMA Spring Forum! The conference is held April 11-12 at the Hilton Chicago, located at 720 South Michigan Ave.
This event is designed to be the most interactive, engaging spring conference in the vacation rental industry. The Spring Forum provides increased ways to network with peers from across the country and more opportunities to learn through innovative education formats. You can find the conference session schedule on the VRMA website.
You can find us at booth number 425, or just look for the bright green banner - you can't miss it. Stop by, shake some hands, and grab a free OwnerRez mug!
See you in Chicago! 👋🏙
We would like to invite you to come join us at the 2022 NWVRP (North West Vacation Rental Professionals) Annual Conference coming up April 3-5 (which is this upcoming Sunday-Tuesday).
This conference is a regional favorite in the Northwest with lots of opportunities for networking, education and sharing of experiences among industry partners and friends!
Again, the conference is April 3-5, and you can find the entire session schedule on the NWVRP website. This event will be held at the Seaside Civic and Convention Center, located at 415 First Avenue in Seaside, Oregon.
Wondering how to find our booth? Just look for the bright green one - you can't miss it. Stop by, shake some hands, and grab a free OwnerRez mug!
See you in Oregon!
I think that you guys are doing a fine job! I give you 5 stars every where and I'm very proud to be part of this!
Thank you for fixing the QB customer name issue!! That's a great fix and will save me a bunch of time. Plus the OCD side of me likes tidy data. Good fix!
Hi, everyone! We've got 13 updates to talk about from last week's release including some chunky new features involving Airbnb reviews and PM expenses, then some QOL on channels themes, and a handful of bug fixes. Off we go! 🏃
Have you ever wanted to write a negative review for a guest on Airbnb but were worried that the guest would see you wrote a review, pushing them to write their own negative review first? Sometimes, PMs decide to not write reviews at all as a sort of "let sleeping dogs lie" measure against getting negative reviews in return.
If only there was a way where you could write a negative review for a guest but wait to post it until right before the 14-day window expired. By the time the guest saw that you wrote one, it would be too late for them to write their own. Airbnb only lets the host and guest write reviews within 14 days from departure.
Well, now you can! We've designed a "delayed posting" feature that will take your Airbnb reviews and wait to send them to Airbnb until 20 minutes before the 14-day deadline expires.
It's very simple to use. Simply go to an Airbnb booking in OwnerRez and start writing a review. You'll notice a new "Delay Posting" setting at the bottom:
Select the "this is a negative review; delay it being posted" option and save. Our system will then wait to send it to Airbnb until 20 minutes before the 14-day review period has expired.
A couple of common questions on delayed reviews:
Quick question - if you're a PM and use our PM module in OwnerRez, how do you know what your Cleaning Fees expenses are? All the ones that say "cleaning" or "housekeeping" in them? How about something with more variety in the description like "supplies" and "toilet paper"? How do you lump these together into common expense categories for reporting?
As we prepare for better expense and year-end reporting, we've created a new feature that we think will significantly help PMs: expense categories. If you recall, we added categories for surcharges last year which has led to a lot of success. We decided to do the same thing for expenses.
To see it in action, go to the PM menu > Expenses list and open an existing expense or create a new one. You'll notice a new "Category" drop-down with a bunch of options loaded for you.
The categories list speaks for itself. We've preloaded a list of "system" categories based on research we did into the most common types of expenses - things like cleaning, supplies, and lawn care.
The system categories will always show, and you cannot remove or change them. However, we've also added the ability for you to create "custom" categories so that you can customize your own list of categories. To create custom categories, you can use the in-line "create new" option right in the drop-down list. Click that option and an input box will appear below the drop-down for you to fill in the category name.
You can also see and manage your custom categories from the Expense Categories menu that shows in the PM area. This list will show all of the custom categories you've created and allow you to change them or create more. The Expense Categories list will not show the global list of system categories, only the custom ones you've created yourself.
Note that you cannot create a custom category with the same name as a system category. For example, if you try to create a custom category called "Cleaning", the system will show an error message because a system category already exists with the same name.
Once we added categories, we knew that the first thing you'd want to do is go back and re-categorize all of your historical bookings, so we added a batch update tool to make this easy. It's right on the main Expenses list, using the standard Batch button you see in other places.
Use the Expense filters to find a list of similar items that need to be categorized. Then, click the Batch button, select the rows you want to update, click the Categorize button and a window will open showing you the list of categories. Select the category and click Assign. While you wait, the window will update the expenses right then and there.
In the above example, I selected all "snowplowing" expenses that currently had no category and assigned "Lawncare" as the category. In just a few clicks, I was able to update dozens of historical records.
If you're wondering why the category matters, this will affect how reports work in the coming months. In order to properly display and group expenses by category, we first had to create a method for categorizing expenses.
In our ongoing quest to be the continue being the best channel manager in the vacation rental industry, we do a lot of work on monitoring and improving our channel connections. While we can't work on channel stuff every week, we constantly make notes so that we can jump on improvements when the time allows. Not a month goes by when we aren't making channel updates. In this release, we hit a couple of things we've been wanting to do for a while.
First, we added a new "Policies" tab on the channel dashboard that shows all of your properties with the channel or property setting currently in place for things that can be overridden at the property level.
The five things that can be overridden are Booking Mode, Cancellation Policy, House Rules, Lead Time, and Max Days In Future. As it shows above, it will show you what the current setting is for that property and field and whether it was put there by the global channel settings or the property itself. This should help you diagnose problems you're having with why certain properties are handling bookings differently than other properties. Even if you're not having problems, you may want to check it out anyway just to remember how things are laid out.
We also spent some time cleaning up the Instructions tab and making sure that each channel has the latest round of information needed for that channel. As part of this, we provide the OwnerRez account ID for channels like Houfy, Find Rentals, and others that integrate by feed so that when they request it, you can copy it quickly.
In Channel Bridge, we added some additional data to the Channel Bridge History list. You can now see all Channel Bridge files including those that weren't imported (or where we don't track the import side of it).
We added also added some additional tracking for our support team to view so that if you have questions about Channel Bridges, it's easier for us to provide answers and see what happened.
It's been a while since we've worked on Theming, and as we started poking at it recently, we noticed a couple of things we wanted to enhance. If you're not sure what Theming is, imagine that you have 5 properties in two different regions - 3 in Florida and 2 in Mexico. When you reply to guests about the Mexican properties, you don't want your Florida website or property list showing up in your email signature, and vice versa. Or you might even run multiple Property Management companies (with different logos, etc) from the same OwnerRez account. Theming makes that possible.
First of all, we now show your property theme when previewing email messages from the booking. The preview window for email templates would show the theme but not the message in the booking area. This has been updated to show the correct theme.
Then, we updated the contact info on email messages (ie. the email From and Reply-To headers) to always align with the property theme even if the "Header/Footer" selection on the email template is a different theme. This was a constant source of confusion in the past. Switching the Header/Footer branding would also change the email headers, but that's not really what most users want to have happen. You might want an email to be sent with no signature, for instance, but you still want it to use a From header that corresponds to that property.
Lastly, we added default themes for Owner Statement headers and footers.
This is similar to the "Use Default" functionality on email signatures and guest forums. We realized that owner statement themes should work the same way and put some great defaults in place to get you started.
Of course, you can always tweak or remove any of the defaults at any time. Or, if you decide your customized versions should be reset, you can use the "Use Default" buttons to put them back.
Did you know that some of our credit card payment methods allow you to run a live test to see if your credentials work? Yep, that's been the case for a long time.
However, we updated this test feature to address a common situation we see - users failing to take their accounts out of "test" mode on the payment processor side. Specifically, Authorize.Net and Bambora have account-level "modes" that can be either test or live. The entire account works the same way, but card data won't actually be settled (sent to your bank account) if the account is in "test" mode.
Previously, the user got a successful test message if the Authorize.Net or Bambora credentials were entered into OwnerRez correctly, but it didn't check if the accounts were in global "test" mode on the processor side. Now we check that too.
Your Authorize.Net account is in test mode!
How did we pull this off? We run a test credit card number that works in test mode but not live mode. If the card succeeds, we know that the account is in "test" mode and tell the user the check failed along with the reason why. Sneaky, right?
Over time, we plan to add this extra check (and others) to help catch other problems with credit card integration.
Don't quote when auto-responding to Vrbo inquiries. A long time ago, we fixed our inquiry and CRM system to stop using the Vrbo proxy email addresses (or "double-blind" email addresses) for the guest email address. However, we never noticed that our inquiry auto-responder system was still creating quotes and sending them to the Vrbo proxy email address. We updated the auto-responder code to not create quotes when the email address is the Vrbo proxy one.
Reviews metadata. I mentioned in the last product update that we tweaked the reviews metadata (ie. star count) on Google but also noticed some other things, so this was a work in progress. Yes, once again, we've tweaked the review metadata for Google on hosted sites. Unsure if this will be the last time. ⭐🤷♂️
Channel rate tester with multiple Airbnb accounts. Previously, if you picked a property in one channel but selected a different Airbnb account in the rate tester, the message was confusing. We tightened that up. Now, when generating charges, we check to see if the property is mapped to a different channel account and switch to that account rather than showing error messages. Also, when generating Airbnb charges, we clarify whether the issue is a missing versus inactive property.
Review widget average stars count. In the reviews widget, have you ever noticed that your top star count is different than the "showing" number below the filter? This can also happen on the reviews page on hosted websites.
We noticed this a few times in the past but failed to figure it out. Recently, we figured it out and fixed it.
Thank you for the update! I never tire to recommend OR!
Hi there! Welcome to a fresh new work week! ☕️
We've got 36 updates to talk about from a release we put out at the beginning of last week. No new features, but we've got a couple of great enhancements and then a large list of bug fixes to run through. Off we go!
As you probably know, we have a great website builder for vacation rentals that lets you stand up a fully-dynamic fully-functional website with your own logo, domain name, and booking engine in seconds. We call this "Hosted Website" internally to differentiate it from our widgets and WordPress Plugin.
Over time, we've watched how users configure and style their Hosted Websites, and we even offer a premium service called "WebAssist" to help you customize your Hosted Website to something that is unique to your business and brand.
One of the things we've noticed is the many ways in which users request or design background effects for their websites. We support full CSS editing, so savvy users can inject whatever backgrounds and styling they want. However, this is difficult for most users to do even if they have a rudimentary understanding of CSS.
To help with this, we've added some built-in background settings to the Theme / Layout page on Hosted Websites.
You can now select how you want the background to behave - scrolling, fixed, or tiled. Here's what those options do:
You can also change background settings per page, not just on the website overall. If you have a specific page that needs a different background effect, go to that page and click on the "Background" tab. You'll see the same options there.
And if you're looking for a more customized experience with your Hosted Website, reach out to us about our WebAssist premium service. Our WebAssist specialist will help you come up with a look and feel that is unique to your company.
Do you use Google Analytics to monitor your OwnerRez website or guest form traffic? If not, you should! It's easy to use and completely free.
We recently noticed that the data we are sending was a little bare in terms of names or information. For instance, you can see that your guests are starting a "Book Now" session, but not what property it's for. Google Analytics has the ability to pass labels and attributes when events are recorded, so we updated our code to pass along additional information.
You can now see which properties your guests are trying to book by looking at the "Event Label" parameter in Google Analytics. Here's a quick example:
In the above Google Analytics accounts, I drilled down into the Behavior menu > Events > Top Events and then clicked on "BookingStarted" events. I then selected "Event Label" as the value to see at the bottom. Those "ORPxxxx" numbers are the property IDs from OwnerRez. We are using the ID instead of the name because the name might change over time, whereas the ID will never change.
As you can see in the above screenshot, property # ORP136811 was the property that guests were mostly trying to book during the time period. If you're curious, the "(not set)" value at the top represents all of the bookings that were started during this time period before this update went out. These code changes only happened in the past few days, but the screenshot shows traffic going back a month.
At times, calendar imports/exports (iCal) can be a frustrating beast to work with. The iCal standard tends to be loosely followed which means that different platforms have a "lowest common denominator" implementation - ie. they only create and remove calendar events; they don't define those events or use cancellation and contact information to flesh out the events.
We've spent a lot of time building the best iCal engine available for the vacation rental software world, and we continue to refine our iCal engine every few months as we notice things that can be improved. In the past few weeks, we've made another great improvement - you can now specify exactly what you want the calendar import engine to create - bookings, blocked-off time or detect and match what was in the iCal feed.
Previously, our calendar import (iCal) engine would create blocks or bookings only, based on your settings, but there are times when we detect bookings and blocks in the same feed. This can happen for sites like Vrbo or Airbnb where we detect certain indicators that we use to determine that the calendar event is a booking while other events are mere blocks. The new "detect and match" option will allow you to have both at the same time.
You might notice that the entire "What to Import" section has been re-written with clearer options and help text. We felt like we could make that area a little clearer to understand.
We recently overhauled the Affiliate Program area to show you referrals, payouts, W9 status, and much more. The response has been positive, but we noticed a few things that we wanted to improve, so we jumped back in there and enhanced it a bit more.
Some of our affiliates have racked up quite a few referrals, so we added a filter that you can use to quickly search through your list to find accounts.
You can now search by name, account status, or earning amount. Account status lets you select active, in-trial, or closed as options. Earning amount lets you select None, 10%, 20%, or 30% as options.
We also added the PayPal email address to each payout (on the Payouts tab) so that if your PayPal account changes over time, you can see where an old payout went.
We upgraded the W9 options as well, and we added a template for non-US users so that non-US users can quickly submit a statement without having to spend a lot of time coming up with their own.
Ok, so this one is basically just a shameless plug to show you all the good things that people have said about OwnerRez. But it's technically an enhancement, so I'm going to mention it anyway!
As you might already know, we host a What Our Customers Say About Us page which is a dynamic page of aggregated reviews from other websites (eg. Capterra, Facebook) so that you can see the live testimonials of what OwnerRez users say as they come in. They are updated every week or two, so it stays pretty fresh! We recently started tracking reviews on the G2 reviews website as well.
And hey, if you'd like to leave us a testimonial, you can do that. Go to Capterra or G2 and write your own. We'll notice it and pick it up just like all the others. But hey - only write good stuff! No complaining! 😂
Auto-create blog menu. A few months ago, we added a blog feature to hosted websites so that you can create a blog in a few clicks and host it entirely within your own domain and hosted website. We recently noticed a situation where users were creating blog posts but not creating a blog menu so the blog wasn't showing up anywhere. Confusing! We fixed this so that the first time you create a blog post, we are now creating a blog page and menu for the website so that you don't have to go hunting to figure out how it is wired together.
Blog Post Published date. While we were looking at blogs, we noticed another error - the "Published" date was off by one day. This was happening because the Published date was being stored in UTC (London) time but displayed in the user's time zone later. We fixed this to show the date only and ignore the time zone.
Keep watching or watch anew? We recently changed some wording on the forums where you go to post a new topic or reply to an existing topic. There is an option there to watch the topic, and we recently changed the wording to "keep watching" when you already had a watch in place. However, the "keep watching" wording was too aggressive and was showing all the time. We fixed this to detect the right scenario and show the right wording.
Grandfathered referrals. When we overhauled our Affiliate Program area, we updated our code to store better affiliate earnings on each user invoice. However, some of the grandfathered amounts weren't stored correctly which led to too-low affiliate earnings. This has been fixed. If your payout was low in a previous month because of this, it will be corrected this month or next month when the next payout time occurs.
PM or Owner Payout? We noticed a typo on the Record PM Payout screen where some help text was referencing the owner. Fixed!
DP Batch Update for 'On' dates of stay. Our Damage Protection settings page has a Batch Update function that you can use to quickly fix pre-existing bookings when you add or change your Damage Protection coverage levels. That Batch Update function allows you to specify bookings that arrive "on or after" a certain date, but it wasn't working correctly. For last-minute bookings (eg. bookings that arrive tomorrow), it wasn't matching the arrival date even though "on or after" was using today or tomorrow's date. We fixed this, so it should now work as intended.
Show 0 as the amount on disabled security deposits. Previously, it was confusing if the security deposit rule was disabled on a property but the security deposit amount was still showing in a field code. Even if the security deposit is disabled, it's possible to show a field code in a renter agreement or email template for the security deposit amount. We tweaked the field code to check if the security deposit is disabled and show "0" instead of the actual amount.
Email options on Channel Bridge import. For a while, we've been debating the "Send Booking Confirmation" and "Send Create Trigger" options on Channel Bridge import. They seem to do more harm than good as users typically want to check bookings manually before emailing or have already sent confirmations in other ways. We went and removed the "Send Booking Confirmation" option and changed the "Send Create Triggers" option to default to no.
Review reviews. Back in the fall, we updated our hosted websites to support Google review/star ratings so that when your website appears in Google search results, it shows the review/start rating of each property, the reviews page, and the website overall. Since that time, we've had to make some tweaks to how it works based on user feedback and what we've noticed on Google itself. This past week, we made another tweak. Hopefully, this will stop Google from sending you webmaster emails about problems with your "product" reviews. That being said, in the past few days, we noticed a few more things to tweak, so you'll probably see a bug fix showing up about this in the next couple of weeks.
QuickBooks invoice due dates. Since the beginning of time, our QuickBooks Integration has created invoices in QuickBooks with the same "Due Date" value as the Invoice Date. Whatever the Invoice Date was, the Due Date is automatically made the same. However, the invoice date can be different things including the initial booked date of the booking. When that happens, the invoice appears to be fully due (in QuickBooks) as of the initial booked date. This was frustrating for QuickBooks users and for good reason. We fixed this to detect when the invoice date is before the final payment date and switch the due date value to match the final payment date. If your invoice dates use the booking's arrival date, the due date will continue to use the arrival date.
Enable cancellation fee when canceling a booking. Do you have a cancellation policy that includes a flat fee? If so, you might have noticed a peculiarity where your fee shows in the list of new charges, but the "No fee" option is selected above and disabled. We noticed it too, and it's now fixed.
Don't re-sync QuickBooks payments if nothing has changed. When you change a booking's financial information in OwnerRez, we also update QuickBooks so that the corresponding invoice and payments on that side are kept the same. Only sometimes, the payments have already been marked as deposited. When payments are marked as deposited in QuickBooks, they cannot be removed or changed. OwnerRez sometimes runs into this situation when trying to change a payment that was already marked as deposited. Conflicts ensue and email alerts are fired off. However, we noticed that many times we were trying to update the payment when the payment itself did not actually change. The booking's charges would change, and we would re-sync everything. We updated our sync code to detect if the payment itself had changed and, if not, keep that the same even when changing the invoice.
Airbnb LOS discounts less than 1%. Question: what is a 0.5% length-of-stay discount? Answer: 1%. We no longer allow any LOS discounts of less than 1%. We noticed that in certain situations, discounts that were less than 1% were being rounded to 0% and, thus, eliminated. Airbnb rounding is just like that. 🤷♂️ We are now detecting this and auto-rounding any LOS discounts that are less than 1% to 1% even. This isn't really a "bug fix", is it? Well, not an OwnerRez bug anyway.
Clarify the reason for rate calendar gap rule. Our new rate calendar is pretty sweet, and the hover cards that show above each day provide a lot of information about the season for that day, minimum night restrictions, and other things like gap rules. If arrival or departure isn't possible, we provide specific reasons as well. We noticed that the "required gap" rules were not showing a specific-enough reason, so we updated that to be more clear. Now, instead of saying "No arrival (seasonal)", we say "No arrival (seasonal gap rule)" so that it's clear which part of the seasonal rules is kicking in.
Clarify that virtual cards are virtual. If you use Booking.com as a channel, you already know what a "virtual card" is. For everyone else, a virtual card is a credit card that is passed to our system that looks and acts like a credit card but only works for a specific period of time and specific amount. Booking.com uses them to limit the amount of fraud that can occur by third-party partners (vacation rental homeowners and PMs) who have not established a high degree of trust with guest credit cards. We noticed some places where we were showing part of the credit card on guest receipts (like "Visa ****1234") even though the guest has no idea what card that is since it was provided by Booking.com. We now detect if the card is virtual and show a special description instead of the number.
User invoice currency. Do you live and operate outside of the United States? Even though OwnerRez is an American company by birth and operation, we have picked up users in many countries over the years. In fact, we now have users in 190 countries! Recently, we realized that our own internal invoicing (ie. the bill that you get from OwnerRez each month) was a bit confusing because it showed a USD dollar sign ($) but that currency symbol applies to other countries. There are more than 20 countries in the world that use a dollar sign ($) as their currency symbol including Canada, Australia, and Hong Kong. Some of those users thought we were billing them in their own (ie. Canadian, Australian) dollars when our billing is always in USD dollars. To clarify this, we detect now if you're a non-US user and show "USD" in several strategic places in the billing area and on invoices.
Travel Insurance unavailable error message. For a long time, we've gotten reports from users (and their guests) that travel insurance purchases would sometimes be denied with this error message:
Unable to Locate an active product with the Product "TI" for the Reseller (*CDDJD8-DK29D-E3F4250AC93DDF) while attempting to open the Coverage.
Yep, it really said that, and yep, we really left it that way for a long time.
As ugly as that error message is, it's really pretty simple. It just means that the person attempting to buy Travel Insurance lives in a geographical area that our insurance carrier does not support. That's the "product" they are saying they "cannot locate".
Well, we finally had enough. We now detect that message and replace it with this more-intuitive one:
Unfortunately, we don't have a Travel Insurance product that applies to your geographical region or type of trip.
Better? We think so!
Withdrawn Property Share requests. Previously, if someone asked to join a property share, but then withdrew the request, the request would vanish entirely, leading to confusion and support tickets. We now display withdrawn requests, but we show a strikethrough, indicating that they are no longer active.
Handle line breaks when importing Vrbo listings. Our property import tool uses the public information we see on live Vrbo and Airbnb listings to bring in the headline, description, and amenity data. We noticed that certain types of line breaks (the whitespace between paragraphs) were not being handled correctly, causing some paragraphs to run together. We updated our import code to detect and clean up those line breaks.
Extra sentences in cancellation policy description. We support complex cancellation policies where you can define many different types of refund scenarios. Previously, you could define policies with multiple refund periods that didn't make sense (like "time before arrival" periods that overlap each other). We also noticed that the long auto-generated policy description would sometimes show extra sentences. All of this has been fixed.
Line Item Summary report not factoring Discounts in Total. A while back, we enhanced the Line Item Summary report to break out positive and negative amounts into more intuitive columns. We noticed that the discount total is was not being subtracted from the final total on the right, So the final total ended up being too high. This has been fixed. To be clear, no actual booking charges were adjusted. This was simply a problem with how the report presented the total on the far right.
QuickBooks customer name matching. This is a long-standing bug that we're happy to have finally fixed. If you use our QuickBooks integration, you may have noticed extra empty customer names showing up in QuickBooks over time. This was caused by our sync engine looking at the current list of QuickBooks customers and trying to be careful about the customer we selected to go with the invoice. If we didn't see a detailed match, we would simply create another customer in QuickBooks on the fly. Over time, this led to a proliferation of extra empty customer records because a booking might start out with only a first name for the guest, and then later fill out with more name information, which in turn would create additional new customer records in QuickBooks. We hunkered down on this and re-wrote the customer find-or-create code to re-use existing customer names better. This should lead to better customer records on the QuickBooks side.
Booking.com sending bad characters in email. We noticed a situation where sending email messages to guests with special characters in the name (like "Teresa O'Neal") would cause it to choke. We dug in deeper, and we saw it was how those characters were encoded by Booking.com in the billing info when getting bookings from Booking.com. We now detect this and clean it out of the billing info correctly before the billing name can be used.
Stuck suppressed email address. A while back, we introduced a Suppressed Email Address feature that keeps track of and alerts you about email addresses that are bouncing. This includes your own account email addresses. Recently, we noticed that sometimes the global alert sticks around even after you've reactivated the suppressed email address. We found and fixed the problem.
Date pickers in Firefox. If you use Firefox, you may have noticed that date pickers occasionally look weird - specifically, too short. For instance, the Damage Protection Batch Update page looks like this for the "On or after" date option.
This was only happening in Firefox (not Chrome, Edge, etc), and it is now fixed.
Action menu edit words. On all of our lists (ie. grids), there is a little edit option on every row with a drop-down of options. The top option is almost always the "edit" option which acts the same as if you clicked on the row itself. It drills into the record. We noticed a bunch of places where that edit option had the wrong words showing.
This was happening because the edit option uses words that are automated under the covers. Sometimes, those automatic words are not the best choice. We corrected 18 lists to use a more appropriate edit word.
Hosted sites inside closed accounts. When you create a hosted website in OwnerRez, we do some checks to make sure that no one else is using that same domain name. But what happens if you close your account after setting up a hosted website? What happens if you come back 6 months later and want to create a new account? Or what if you bought a domain name that used to be owned by a different OwnerRez user? Previously, the old domain name would be locked forever in the old (closed) account, never to be used again. Now, when you close your account, we disable the website domain names too and check for that when other users create new websites.
Clean Airbnb account names. Like Booking.com, Airbnb sometimes sends special characters or HTML characters in names, and we found a spot where that was showing up. Fixed!
Clean billing info. Like the Booking.com one above, we found more places where billing info names and addresses were having special characters show up, and we fixed those too.
Portal users shouldn't be able to delete. Keyword "delete". You can give portal users the ability to cancel blocked-off time, but we noticed that portal users could also fully delete blocked-off time. You don't want that because there's no history for fully-deleted blocks. We changed this to be cancel-only. The user experience is the same, but now when portal users remove a blocked-off time, you'll see it as a cancellation.
Thank you, Paul, for this candid and insightful message. It's one of the things that I love about using OwnerRez: all of the transparency and information shared with us by your team. Having been the Customer Support Manager of the original team that built Vrbo I know exactly the kind of growing pains you describe...and I appreciate your commitment to your staff, your clients and to your product. Thanks to your customer support team for always being quick to respond to my many questions, I appreciate it!
Sweet!
Congratulations! You deserve it!
You guys are great! Thank you for your continued growth!
Today, we're happy to announce that we have once again earned the Elite Connectivity Partner status for 2022 with Vrbo! We were already an Elite partner, so this is a continuation of that status. 😎 Only a small handful of companies qualify for Elite status out of more than a hundred integrated partners.
As mentioned in previous years, this recognition underscores our focus on building and maintaining a high-quality software connection that empowers you to serve guests better and grow your business on Vrbo’s global travel platform. You can count on our high-quality software connection to take you to the next level this year. We qualified for Elite Partner status because of our commitment to:
To be clear, Elite status is not a list you can pay to be included in. Vrbo constantly measures partner performance across many metrics - server up time, speed of responses, booking quality, listing quality, error rates, etc - and meets with our team regularly to discuss. Only those that meet the highest quality across all those metrics, across a long period of time, are given Elite status.
We'd like to say a big thank you to Vrbo for all the work they've done with OwnerRez and their commitment to the vacation rental industry. To: Shelby, Trilok, Lee and the gang - a big thank you!
We have been very happy with everything your team has provided and staying focused is extremely difficult during growth stages. As both a user and a portfolio manager if there was ever the opportunity to invest in your company we would like to be first in line as one of your customers of OwnerRez.
Cheers!
Thank you do much guys. I appreciate all that you do. I will be an OR user for life. I love that you are not giving in to the corporate greed.
I love you candor here. I know it's tough running a growing business but you all are doing amazing! OwnerRez is still by far one of my favorite tools/ vendors/ support teams to work with for my rentals and I feel like all I have seen are continued improvements from taking something great to greater. :) Keep on keeping on!
Thank you for your candor and commitment to doing the right thing. Always wonderful to see the slew of updates the OR puts out regularly.
Thanks for your continued dedication and transparency. OR is so ingrained in our STR business it would be a sad day if sold, or allowed outside investors.
Dave & April
Peaks & Palms Vacation Rental Group
https://peaksandpalmsrentals.com
Smokies multi-owner "Property Sharing Widget" (powered by OwnerRez)
https://www.smokymountaincabinsbyowner.com
Unofficial OwnerRez Support Group on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/groups/702265430182289
Paul, growth and scale is never easy.
Warren Beach Rentals growth and success is largely a result of our partnership with Ownerrez.
We truly value our relationship with you and are committed to continuing growing, together.
Mitch Warren
www.WarrenBeachRentals.com
Transparency and communication are the two vital keys to success in any business, and we (speaking for the community) very much appreciate your willingness to engage and set proper expectations with us. Thank you for all you've done and continue to do to make our hosting businesses stronger, more scalable, and most importantly, more profitable!
I appreciate y'all and all your hard work!!!
