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Us too! Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to pass along this info. OR, by a long shot, is the best software to manage our business. It continues to advance (thank you engineers), the support team is so professional & responsive. And all those in between, doing hard work, has not gone unnoticed! Keep up the good work!
I agree with the others, thanks for the transparency and thanks for not selling out! Great products are never the same once they are sold to the big guys and that would be a sad day indeed if OR sold.
Paul - Thank you for this information. I love OwnerRez and l have seen it grow over the last few years. I am extremely happy with the customer service I receive, even when I ask the same question twice! You have a lot to be proud of and I appreciate you not selling out to the big guys. Keep up the good work.
Thank you Paul. Understand completely as we have grown right there with you over the years and there are times we feel like we don’t have the time to check out and understand all of the updates you do. Your commitment to hold your values is why we love OR. Thank you for taking the time today. We appreciate it.
Thank you Paul and team!
I’m thankful for not just this candid email but the teamwork and help I’ve received over the years. I will be a die-hard OR user for as long as our property is rented.
Hi everyone, Paul here from OwnerRez! From time to time, I feel like there is something in the air that I need to sit down and discuss with you directly. 🧘♂️
Lately, there's been a lot of buzz in the air about OwnerRez's size, specifically about our ability to keep up. You're not wrong - we are growing hand over fist and have been for a long time.
Over the past year, that growth has not let up; in fact, it's increased! This is the part where I usually like to go down a rabbit trail explaining why we've grown so much, pointing out our trophies and medals, but I'll resist that urge and focus on what we're doing to address the growth.
First, as our Careers page shows, we are continuing to hire across multiple areas of the company. Our Customer Success position has never come down - we read resumes, ask questions, and conduct interviews on a constant basis. That has been a constant state of affairs for almost a year.
However, we are slow and deliberate with who we hire because we want our People-First culture to be preserved as we grow. The longevity and happiness of our team matters as much as the happiness of our customers.
Baja Fresh (are those still around?) used to have a sign on the wall that said: "good food cannot be made at microwave speed". Some of our competitors have built their teams at microwave speed, and the results are clear. We are working to expand the team quickly, but not at the expense of what matters to us.
We also examine and reorganize our team, based on company needs and team members' strengths, every so often. You'll note that we're also looking for a back-office administrator, and that's because our current guy (Michael, who is awesome!) is moving into data analysis to help our engineering, sales, and marketing teams with their data needs. Michael is knowledgeable on many fronts, so we're going to let him focus on more advanced areas and hire someone else to do the back-office stuff. This kind of role change has happened several times over the past couple of years.
Last year when our pricing increased, I shared how being Financially Responsible is a core part of our company values.
Not a week goes by when I am not hounded by outside investors wanting in, promising big pots of gold and guidance on how to travel the yellow brick road. Chris and I do not want that kind of future and have taken steps to avoid it.
One of those steps is to make sure we hire for pain points, not as a projection of future growth. Investor-led companies hire to meet the needs of where they want the company to be, at some point in the future, which means they "hire ahead". They build up teams and then give those teams missions, and hopefully, it all pays off. The strategy is growth at all costs. Bigger teams, more leads, more sign-ups, project a giant image, then cash out based on that image.
While we certainly spend time looking ahead, we make sure to hire only where pain points are beginning to emerge, and only after we (the OwnerRez leadership) have been directly part of managing that pain ourselves. That's why Chris and I continue to answer tickets on a regular basis, post in the forums, design new features, and meet with our onboarding team about pain points. This creates a much higher rate of success with new hires, while also being careful to consider the current and future needs of our existing team.
Expanding the team is not the only way to strengthen our support. We've recently focused a lot of engineering time on creating better internal support tools so that we can track, measure, and become more efficient at the support process itself.
We recently built an internal interface that shows ProConnect status to our new users what their status is, in detail, while allowing them to submit files and comment on the work being done. Instead of sending giant emails back and forth, we've built a process specific to the needs of ProConnect. We are about ready to release several updates that will increase this functionality once again, including showing our "queued" ProConnect users where they are in the pipeline to get them ready.
We are expanding our phone support as well by engaging in a wider degree of phone calls and measuring the time required and the needs of the team members who do those calls. This was just started a few weeks ago and we're already seeing interesting results. Again, our engineering team has spent time helping us track those calls, in and out, and see where the needs are strongest.
We are also working on dozens of other internal tasks to streamline support and create happiness, both for our team and customers alike.
As our systems (the actual app and databases and supporting technology) expand to deal with the growth, we've had to take a step back and make sure those systems are designed correctly for the future.
Over the past year, our monitoring tools have turned into fire hoses, blasting us with information. We've had to re-design some of those monitoring processes to help us increase transparency while not being distracted by all the noise. This has taken extra time, but we are committed to making it work correctly so that our engineers are not overburdened but have exactly what they need to make good decisions.
While doing that, we've noticed places where we can extend additional transparency to users (you!) so that you can make use of some of the same tools we use. Again, this has taken extra time, but we are committed to getting it right.
We now have more than 50 support videos in our Video Center and are continuing to add more each month. At the beginning of 2022, we freed up some team resources so that we could double our efforts on making videos throughout the coming year. As I write this, there are more than a dozen new videos that have been scheduled to be worked on.
Our Weekly Demo webinar has been a big success. We started that last year and went from a dozen attendees to now around 30-40 attendees every week. Some weeks, we have more than 50. For our existing veteran users, we have added a Live Q&A webinar that will be one or two times per month. You can use the Live Q&A to ask any question about OwnerRez you want. As always, check out our webinars page to stay up to date.
In all of this, there is a consistent theme - the willingness to evolve so that our values remain strong.
Our People-First philosophy itself has not changed, but everything we do (hiring, tooling, webinar'ing) is constantly evolving to meet the needs of that philosophy. We believe that evolution is a key ingredient to success, and so we are committed to changing even if that change makes us temporarily uncomfortable.
Could you do me a favor? If you feel like OwnerRez is not the company it once was, check in with us and get a fresh look. Reach out and talk to us. Attend a webinar, and ask questions. Meet us in person at an upcoming conference. We know that rumors will swirl from time to time, but internally, we are as committed as ever to building the same quality product with the same quality support as we always have been.
Got a case of the Mondays? Grab an extra coffee, and hopefully, this little product update post will clear that up for you.
Today, we have a final warning about Stripe/SMS Brands and then a couple of bug fixes to discuss. ☕️
When some of you logged into OwnerRez a few days ago, you started noticing some persistent red alerts screaming at you from the top of every page. No matter where you go in OwnerRez, the alerts follow. We call these "global alerts", and they are used to show you really important things you need to take action on in your account.
You might have global alerts about other things, but the two I want to discuss today are about old Stripe connections and using SMS Messaging with a "Brand" on file. We have emailed and blog-posted about these topics numerous times before, but a deadline is now looming that you need to take seriously.
If you don't have any global alerts showing in your OwnerRez account, you can skip on down to the Bug Fixes section. Nothing for you to see here. For those of you that do see them, sit up and pay attention - there's work to do!
If you see the following red alert at the top of OwnerRez, this Stripe issue applies to you.
Attention needed! You are using an old version of Stripe. Your credit card processing will stop working in [x] days if you don't upgrade your Stripe connection.
The fix for this is very simple. It will take you no more than a few seconds. Go to your Stripe payment method and click the Upgrade button at the top. That will take you to a Stripe login page where you will authorize Stripe to work with OwnerRez, circling you back into OwnerRez.
It really is just a few seconds to complete, so take care of it today.
As mentioned above, this warning is serious and final. Looking back, we have reached out to (ie. email-blasted) old-Stripe users at least half a dozen times. This Stripe upgrade first entered the conversation back in August of 2021, so it's been more than 6 months since we've asked you to upgrade. This will be the final warning before your credit card processing stops working.
The other big one is SMS Brands. As announced recently, SMS Brands are now required across the board. If you haven't submitted one, or you have but it was rejected, you will see the following global alert in your account:
Attention needed! SMS Brands are now required to use SMS messaging. Your SMS messaging will stop working in [x] days if you don't submit a Brand.
As with Stripe, this is final. All of your SMS messaging will stop working in a couple of weeks (end of March) if this is not taken seriously.
Please understand that our hands are tied here. The mobile carriers have had to create and adopt better sending practices to reduce spam to their recipients. As part of that, "applications" like OwnerRez that send SMS messages must include brand information so that sending reputation can be monitored over time. For more information about this, check our SMS Brands - Common Questions.
Unlike Stripe, this requirement sprang up on us a bit more quickly, so we apologize about that. It's only been a few weeks since we announced the change, but it's an easy change and only takes a few seconds, so please take the time to resolve it right now today.
Regression in renter agreement URL cleaning. In a recent release, we did some URL cleaning to handle the case where the ?a= parameter was doubled up in renter agreement links. However, we cleaned too much and were just removing the parameter entirely in many cases. We fixed this so that we now take the first value if the parameter is doubled up and leave it alone otherwise.
Held dates should still use quote rules. Previously, we were not applying the rules from the quote to the booking if the quote was in "hold dates" mode. That has now been fixed to work like any other quote and booking.
Vrbo review format for Channel Bridge. Do you use our Channel Bridge tool to import Vrbo reviews to OwnerRez? If not, you should - it's awesome! We recently noticed that Vrbo updated its review format, matching parent-company Expedia's review format, which made Channel Bridge miss some of the review data it looks for. That is now corrected, and everything works again.
HomeAway still hanging around. Speaking of Channel Bridge, we noticed some places where "HomeAway" was still showing up where listing sites are shown. Last year, we announced that we were removing all references to "HomeAway" in our main app as Vrbo was the name of the future. Evidently, "HomeAway" was still hanging out like a stowaway in Channel Bridge. All gone now!
Security deposit dates off by a day. We noticed that in some very rare situations, the security deposit "Reserved" date was using an Eastern US time zone which was being converted to UTC (London) and then back to the user's preferred time zone. This was making it appear like the security deposit was off by one day. This has been fixed.
PM Lock and scheduled payments. Previously, if you attempted to PM-lock a booking that had scheduled payments, the check-box was disabled with a tooltip saying "There are still some outstanding scheduled payments" even if all the scheduled payments were processed. This has been fixed. The PM Lock screen will now check if the scheduled payments are pending before showing that disabled message.
Updating multiple QuickBooks accounts. Do you use OwnerRez to sync to two or more QuickBooks accounts? If so, you might have noticed that the QuickBooks > Batch Update page wasn't showing your other QuickBooks accounts. If you tried to run the batch update, an error would come back asking for you to pick a QuickBooks account since you have more than one. This is now fixed. If you have more than one QuickBooks account, you'll see a neat little drop-down selector asking you to pick the account you want to use.
Half baths on Airbnb. Airbnb supports half baths in terms of what they show on their live website. We do too, but, we noticed that we weren't always passing that information correctly. This is now fixed. Your half bath counts should be showing correctly on Airbnb.
Double stays or double vision? We recently noticed that the Stays Daily Checklist report showed duplicate rows when blocked-off time is included. This is now fixed.
OwnerRez is excited to participate in the third annual #VacationRentalWeek! The point of this week is to spread awareness and educate people on the positive impact that professionally-managed vacation rentals have on guests, property owners, and local economies.
Compared to hotels, vacation rentals offer much more for your money, including privacy, convenience, additional space and amenities. Vacation rentals also offer a cleaner, more socially-distanced experience, with less outside interaction compared to hotels. Create a more personalized, memorable vacation experience with the practical comfort of an actual residence, the ability to explore the neighborhood, and the opportunity to discover aspects of your destination you might not encounter when staying at a hotel. When planning a vacation with family, vacation rentals are an excellent option, typically offering multiple bedrooms, kitchens, laundry rooms, and easy access to local entertainment.
Using an "Elite" vacation rental property management software such as OwnerRez, allows you to transform your home it into an asset that offers a significant return on your investment. You’ll also be able to use the property when you choose, while renting it to guests the rest of the year.
This week, we are hosting a live Q&A webinar! If you have any questions about OwnerRez, or vacation rentals in general, come join us live. Make sure to write in questions prior to the webinar so we can start off by answering those right away. Register for this webinar here!
Be sure to join the conversation this week on social media using #VacationRentalWeek.
Happy Thursday, everyone! The weekend is closer than you think, so hang in there!
This blog post covers a release we did a couple of weeks ago - a monstrous 42 update release which includes everything from new features to a new video - so let's get started! 🚀
A couple of months ago, we updated portal users to be "login-only users" which set the stage for additional stuff coming in the future. Now you get to see why that update mattered.
Previously, if someone else's OwnerRez account had already granted access to a person you want to grant access to, the person had to use a different email address to access your account. So the same housekeeper or maintenance person would have to have two different OwnerRez logins, with different email addresses, just to see two different owner's properties. Now, when you grant access to a portal user, that person can access multiple OwnerRez accounts from the same login without running into conflicts on which OwnerRez account is their parent or "master" account.
In this release, we added multiple-account switching directly in the menu bar. When the portal user logs in, they will now see all the accounts they have access to and be able to switch to the account directly.
The portal user can see all of the accounts they have access to, what kind of access they have (limited or full), and switch to the one they want.
Then, from anywhere in the app, they'll be able to see and switch accounts again using the "Switch Accounts" button on the top menu bar.
Simple, easy, and your cleaners can see both of the PMs they work for in the same spot.
This is a great new feature that will solve a common problem some PMs have.
Previously, if you mapped an expense to a surcharge, the expense would be created with an expense date that was the same as the booking's arrival date. For instance, let's assume that you have a cleaning fee of $100 that also creates a cleaning expense to the owner of $100 on the booking. The cleaning expense would always have an expense date that was the same as the booking's arrival date.
That made sense in a lot of situations but was not always what PMs preferred, or it needed to be different on a case-by-case basis. In some cases, PMs want the expense to be dated the same as the initial booking date. In other cases, PMs want the expense date to be the same as the booking's departure date. This helps owner statements pick up expenses that align with the PMs' statement generation process.
We are happy to announce that you now have those options!
Anywhere you can configure an automatic expense to be created, you can now select what the date should be - the booking's initial booked date, arrival date, or departure date.
To be clear, there are currently two places where you can configure automatic expenses to be created:
Both of these sections now have the "Date To Use" option.
In the near future, we are planning to add an "Automatic Expenses" feature that will allow you to create automatic expenses for a variety of scenarios, including based on calendar time (weekly, monthly expenses). When that comes out, it will have a Date To Use option as well. That work has been tasked but not yet scheduled.
Did you know that you can record multiple owner payouts in one click? And then, send them all into QuickBooks (as checks or bills to pay) in one click? Yeah, it's pretty sweet!
Unfortunately, we've noticed that a lot of PMs didn't use this feature, and often the reason for that is because they tried to use it once and couldn't move forward because there were too many historical payouts to deal with. Previously, the way the page worked is that all of the payouts showed together and you either selected the owner (with all their unpaid statements) or not. There was no way to select just some of the owner's statements to fix previous payouts.
We updated this page so that you can now select specific statements to match the payouts you want to record. And we added a "Specific Statements" selector to target the "earliest" or "latest" statements for all owners to make this easy.
In the above example, it is showing all statements for all owners, just like before, but now you can quickly grab just the earliest or latest statements (for each owner) to record payouts that match your actual records.
Use this to quickly catch up recording your payout history, and then you can move forward, recording payouts for new months in the future. And after that, give the "Send to QuickBooks" button a try. That's a great way to move your payouts over to QuickBooks in bulk for fast check printing or ACH transfers.
We've supported HomeToGo as part of our channel management system for more than a year now, but we recently noticed that there were no property-specific override settings for HomeToGo like there are for Vrbo, Airbnb, TripAdvisor, and Booking.com.
This past week, we released an update for the property > Channel Rules tab that includes HomeToGo under the Cancellation Policies and House Rules sections.
Using these new options, you can now select a unique cancellation policy and set of house rules for HomeToGo that is different for one property than another and only on HomeToGo.
Do you use OpenEdge? If so, you might have noticed some strange behavior when it comes to security settings when processing guest credit cards. We noticed this too, and so we dug in and studied what was going on.
What we noticed is that OpenEdge has an "Auto-Decline Security Settings" area in their control panel where users can define when they want credit cards declined. For instance, you might want a higher or lower level of verification when it comes to the guest's billing address or security code. Previously, we were forcing a high level of verification that some guests were running afoul of even though their billing address and security codes were good.
We changed our integration code for OpenEdge to no longer require a high level of verification. Instead, as an OpenEdge user, you now have the ability to control the level of verification on your own. Find the "Auto-Decline Security Settings" section in the OpenEdge control panel and select the options that you want to require.
A while back, we did some maintenance work on our payments and refunds (and hundreds of other record types) to update the payment and refund times to UTC (London) time zone. UTC time zone is under the covers of course. What you see in the interface is based on your own personal time zone preferences. And by the way, if you didn't know about that, go to the Settings > Check-In/Out page to see your account and property-level time zone preferences. You can set an account level time zone and a different one for each property, though the property one is only used for guest-related details. This is useful for PMs that own or manage properties in different regions (such as a house in Mexico and also properties in Florida or the Carolinas).
However, we recently noticed an issue with manual payments and refunds. When automatic payments and refunds are created (such as when a channel or direct booking comes in, or when you run a credit card) the time is recorded as of the time the payment or refund was made. But what about manual payments, such as when a check or cash payment is recorded? Previously, our system would lop off the time and just record a date value, but that really meant that the time was stored as "00:00:00" which is the same as 12 am midnight. After the system was changed to store dates in the UTC time zone, that 12 am midnight time was being displayed as the day before for all users in the western hemisphere (because UTC time occurs several hours before the time zones of the western hemisphere).
To fix this, we updated the payment and refund areas to allow the time to be set when entering manual payments and refunds. By default, the Collected date defaults to the current time so that you don't need to set anything unless you want to.
Then, if you need to change it, click the "Change" button, and you'll see both the date and time available to set.
If the payment came in a few days before, no worries. Just set some time in the middle of the day like 12 noon. It's really not a super important detail, but we wanted to upgrade this to help our users that enter a lot of manual payments.
Deleted bookings with Damage Protection making invoices crash. When user invoices (the invoices that you see when you pay your monthly OwnerRez bill) include Damage Protection policies, we make sure to show the specific bookings that are related to those policies. We recently noticed that if a booking is referenced on an invoice, then the booking is later deleted, the original user invoice fails to load in the future. This could happen for a number of reasons, so we fixed it to detect if the booking is gone and not crash. If you're curious, later invoices will always return the Damage Protection credit back to the user whether the booking exists or not.
Spaces, please! The category on the surcharges list was showing a typo (no spaces) for the following categories: Baby Bed, High Chair, Hot Tub, Property Fee, Water Craft, and Water Craft Mooring. The words were running together. We fixed this so that they now display properly.
Be professional even when closing. We hope you never see our Close Account screen, but if you do, we want to put our best foot forward! We noticed some stuff that needed to be cleaned up like a few typos and a broken link. All fixed now. But again, you should never go to that screen. 😇
Images sent via Airbnb messages should not include bb code. That was a relic of a forgotten past. So we removed it.
Unsupported characters gotta go. Do you know what a "control character" is? If you studied computer science you might. For everyone else, it's a character that you can't see on the screen but can technically be copied/pasted or inserted if you copy the wrong bit of text. Sometimes, when computers encounter these characters and have to display something, you see these on the screen: ���. We noticed that occasionally, characters like this were showing up in prominent places like property descriptions or headlines, so we now check and remove those characters before saving property data.
Rounding error on HomeToGo rate adjustments. HomeToGo notified us that in certain (very rare) situations, quotes were not coming back correctly from OwnerRez to HomeToGo. We dug into this and found that there were rounding issues with the first-payment amount that was causing the quote to think there was an extra amount due beyond the first payment. This is now fixed.
"Guest Paid" percentage. If you use our PM module, you know that we track a "Guest Paid %" number so that the owner and PM's earnings can be adjusted to a point in time. In the days before the security deposit overhaul, the Guest Paid % number had to look at the booking's security deposits and include extra for the amount kept. During the security deposit overhaul, we changed security deposits to update the booking's charges and payments when any money was kept from the security deposit. When we did this, the Guest Paid % number was not adjusted so the number was higher than it should have been. This has now been fixed. To be clear, your owner and PM statements would not have included extra money because of this. Statements never remit more than 100% of the booking's earnings regardless of any pro-ration calculations.
No owner, no problem. We noticed and fixed a bug on the Excel export for owner statements where a booking that didn't have an associated owner was making the export crash. Wondering how a booking can be on a statement even though it has no owner? Yes, that does seem strange, but the answer is simple - because it used to have an owner, and then the owner was removed. When that happens, the previous owner statements stay like they are, showing the original owner, and any new statements will show the same booking because the owner's earnings have to be negated to take the money back.
Bathroom spacing on hosted sites. After some recent website tweaks, we noticed that the bathroom count and wording on hosted websites would sometimes display bathrooms with numbers running together like "5 bathrooms(4 full, 1 half)." We fixed that. But also, we removed the part in parenthesis if there are no half bathrooms.
Fee and Net totals on security deposit payments. Now that we record Stripe fees on security deposits (thanks to this bug fix a few months ago), we noticed that we're not updating the fees section of the associated payment and showing the true "net" amount as we should. When you keep part of the security deposit, there is an associated payment that is collected from the guest. That payment was where the fee and net amounts were not updating. This has been fixed.
Don't use the rental agreement when composing an email to request a signature. This one is rather convoluted, but the outcome is that in some rare circumstances, using the "Compose Email" button on the "Request e-Signature" page would request the signature on the wrong agreement template. We've added extra safety checking to prevent that.
Character counters that don't count. When you type in a comment next to an amenity, under a property's listing content, there is a little character counter that shows you how many characters you have left as you type. Or at least it's supposed to. We noticed that in some cases, it wasn't updating, so we found and fixed all the places where this was happening.
If you're curious, we found this happening under the Accommodations, Amenities, Health & Safety, and Location tabs. All better now!
Offset blue banner. When you "login as" a portal user, there's a blue bar at the top that tells you you're logged in as someone else and gives you a link to go back. We noticed that in some places inside the portal account, the blue bar was offset with a bunch of white space to the left of it, so we fixed it.
Cancel button to nowhere. There are two really-useful Batch Update features in the PM menu. However, when inside those batch screens, the bottom "Cancel" buttons were redirecting to the top PM overview menu instead of going back to the previous batch options page. We fixed this.
Sites referencing old storage areas. We've been working on updating our content storage areas for a while, so this is basically just a continuation of that. Recently, we found some code in our hosted websites that was still referencing the old content storage areas, so we upgraded those places. You would not have noticed any broken images or content because the old storage areas are still up and running. This update was purely under the covers.
"Automatic" Security Deposits. In our property rules area, we provide options for the type of security deposit you want to charge. The options you can select are Hold, Refundable, or No Security Deposits. But that one isn't quite accurate. After all, you can still put a security deposit in place manually, and many users do just that. We added the word "Automatic" there so that it's clear that the rule only limits automatic security deposits, not manual ones.
Global alerts design. While the design of our user interface hasn't changed in a long time, we do endeavor to keep it consistent and clean as we make updates and add new features. One of the things we changed last year, design-wise, is how alerts look. Alerts were changed to be clean, flat, and condensed. We recently noticed that our global alerts (the ones that show at the top of every page if there's a serious problem) were not following the latest design so we upgraded those to match.
Guest wasn't deleted, what happened?! Previously, if there was an error while deleting the guest from the "Delete Guest" tab on the guest sidebar menu, the operation just fizzled with no indication of the error. Now, we show the error in the same window where you confirm that you really want to delete. And we also show proactive (ie. early) warning messages in the same window if the guest cannot be deleted.
Message "sent on [date]" but disabled. Recently, we noticed that the booking > Messages tab shows "This email was successfully sent ..." even when some of the alerts are disabled. This was based on a bug that was created when we transitioned to the new Messages design on bookings. We fixed this to show an accurate label depending on the status of the alert or the message that was sent.
PM Lock on security deposits. Our PM Lock feature prevents bookings from being changed financially, in any way, after a booking has been fully remitted to the owner. This prevents accidents from happening where a booking is changed and then shows up again on a future statement for the same owner, leading to confusion and frustration. However, in the case of security deposits, we were allowing PM Lock to be ignored (ie. bypassed) when an active security deposit was being held. This is because the booking is sometimes already fully remitted to the owner before the security deposit is released. Typically, the bypass works fine because most security deposits are returned in full. However, we noticed a bug where a kept security deposit was creating a payment that would half finish and then crash when trying to update some of the booking's financial stats. We fixed this. Now, if you try to keep money from a security deposit on a booking that was PM-locked, the system will first warn you about PM Lock and ask you to remove it before even attempting to collect the money.
Reviews for all. Did you know we have an awesome reviews feature in OwnerRez? Yep! And not just direct reviews. We also integrate with Airbnb and support Airbnb reviews for both guests and hosts. Previously, the Reviews tabs were hidden if you didn't have Airbnb integration in place. That's because the "Host" side of reviews isn't possible without Airbnb integration. So we were hiding both tags and just showing the guest reviews by default. However, our normal design pattern is to show users all available features but disable them when they aren't available with a message showing why. This makes it less confusing when you read support articles or watch support videos about a particular feature. We updated the reviews section to do just that. The Guest and Host Reviews tabs now show all the time. If you don't have Airbnb channel integration configured, the Host Reviews tab will tell you that.
Where is the "Location Type" section? Answer: nowhere. We noticed that our Listing Quality Analyzer tool was recommending a change in the "Location > Location Type" section, but that no section longer exists. We changed this to be "Location > Setting & View".
Rate table for 7 night season that overlaps the current month. This is an interesting one that will make your head spin thinking about it! If there was a recurring season that started last month and finished before today, and that season had a 7-night minimum requirement, and that season length was such that there were less than seven nights in the current month, then the property rate table wouldn't show the weekly rate. Confused? Heck, you can't even see it happen unless it's a certain day of the month! Well, it's fixed.
Monthly rates on rate tables. If you only allow monthly stays (eg. a minimum night requirement of 30 nights), do you have a monthly rate? Well sort of. Maybe you didn't actually specify that anywhere, and maybe you have "Show Monthly" turned off on the rate table. But we realized that you still have a monthly rate - after all, no other types of stays are allowed! So we fixed the rate table to now detect if your rate requires a monthly stay and if it detects that, force-show the monthly rate column.
LOS and monthly rates for February. Every year during February we see a couple of new February-related bugs in OwnerRez - things that normal months don't show. Well, last month was February, and it happened again! We noticed that we were calculating 28-night LOS (length of stay) discounts based on 30 night months which would sometimes leave out February. It depended on where the booking stay dates started and ended, particularly if it started on February 1. We fixed this to check for a couple of things when the stay dates are around February, so this shouldn't happen again.
Go by listing active for Vrbo push. A while back, we switched out Vrbo channel property mapping code to update listings to "active" status automatically. Recently, we realized that this "active" indicator is a better way of knowing if a listing can be pushed to Vrbo rather than when a booking comes in. So we switched those push processes over to check the active indicator instead.
The review's source. Have you noticed our awesome What Our Customers Say page? It's full of awesome reviews and testimonials that our users have posted on various software websites. When copying the review content to our website, we also make sure to credit the original place it was listed so that anyone can verify the authenticity of the review. However, we noticed that the source was not linking across, so we fixed it. You can now click on the source (eg. Capterra, Facebook) and see the original review yourself. And hey, if you love OwnerRez, why not leave us a review yourself?
Damage Protection for last-minute bookings. Our Damage Protection program is pretty awesome, and after users turn it on, they realize that they need to use the batch update tool to update all their pre-existing bookings to have the same coverage. We noticed that the batch update tool was excluding last-minute bookings that were still eligible for coverage, so we changed that to validate based on arrival date instead of departure date.
Is "up to" more than or less than? A savvy user pointed out that our cancellation descriptions (ie. the long-form sentences that are rendered in renter agreements) use "up to" wording even though that is grammatically incorrect. For instance, saying "up to 30 days before arrival" actually means anything 30 days or less since it's "up to". That would mean a cancellation at 15 days is valid since 15 is "up to" 30. We fixed this by replacing "up to" with "at least". So the same example would now say "at least 30 days before arrival" which means 30 days or more.
Decouple "watch topic" from alert. Have you enjoyed our new forums? We noticed that there was some confusion between the system alert setting that sends you an email message when a thread is replied to versus the "watch this topic" button. You might want to watch a topic but not get the alert. In the near future, you'll see your watched topics appear on your forum profile page.
We fixed the "watch topic" part to not care about the system alert so that you can now continue watching topics without being automatically emailed for them. To be clear, any watched topic will still send you an email message unless you turn off the system alert.
Max nights rule on taxes. It's rare, but there are situations where users have to set a maximum night setting on taxes. In other words, tax should not be charged if the booking is longer than [x] nights. This mostly happens with long-term stays like a 30 days. There are jurisdictions where tax is not required if a stay is 30 days or longer because it's considered a long-term residential-style rental. In OwnerRez, you make this work by simply changing your tax to have a "Max Nights" setting of 30.
We recently noticed that some users had really low numbers in that Max Nights field, like 2 or 3 nights. When asked, the user admitted that this was a mistake. Further complicating the situation, Airbnb does not allow less than 10 nights when it comes to Max Nights settings on taxes, so these users had channel integration problems as well. To fix this, we now require that the Max Nights for taxes be 10 or greater.
Rate Calendar link on property loads the wrong property. On the property's > General Info tab, the "Rate Calendar" link is supposed to load the calendar for the property, but instead, it always loads the calendar for the property at the top of the drop-down list. We fixed it!
We thought that we should do a Houfy support video on how to setup & connect. So we did! Houfy is a great channel for you to list your properties on (and completely free) so if you're wondering how to get started, check out this video.
Thanks for all your work, updates, and added features!!!
It could maybe be FB groups?. I am in many and Owner Rez is touted often. Myself included. Raving fan !
Hey all,
I would say to be targeted like this is a sign of success of your business! Thank you all for what you do and rise to new challenges everyday.
You can’t eliminate all those scammer calls and phishing emails out there but at least now we are aware, so thank you!
I am grateful for your response and dedication to all of your customers. Today it is hard to find a company willing to stand firm to protect the little guy and the big guy.
Thanks for the update and the passionate response!
How about making the app developers sign a written agreement that, in order to use the OwnerRez API - OAuth Apps, for OwnerRez to test their apps, and to get your feedback and the "integrated partner!" blog post, they will not send marketing emails to any of your users unless they first received permission to do so from individual users?
Most companies sell your information, even if you opt-out. I was in the business, on the side of buying lists for clients. The auto industry was devastated when the state files no longer sold auto registration lists based on a law passed by Congress. But where there is money, there are workarounds. Pretty soon the insurance companies, repair shops, anyone who came in contact with your car -- were giving up customer data-- which proved to be much more reliable that state records!!!! It's double or triple verified (supposedly) before they sell the record. I found the data extremely reliable.
I think it's banking or credit card related as well. The big corporations all send you "what you can opt out of and what you can't" bullshit letters. Most people don't know they can opt out. If anyone in the credit pipeline, even credit score like Credit Karma or Experian, get the information than it keeps on flowing through getting copied over and over. Lead lists is a huge business and people spend millions researching it. I doubt it's even search spiders. I bet it's financial.
I suspect they simply buy the information from the credit card companies. I don't know about other owner rez users, but I charge my monthly fee on VISA
Over the past couple of years, we've established an ecosystem for third-party apps and partners.
You've probably seen the many blog posts saying "OwnerRez now integrates with [x]" and talks about what the third-party offers with links to their website and a support article on our side talking about the integration. This happens after we are approached by a third party who has built an app for our API and wants us to review and bless it. We conduct some tests, tell them where it could be better, document how it works, and then give them our approval. 99% of the work is on their side - we basically just review it for them. Anyone is free to create an app for OwnerRez, using our OAuth/API system, but to get the "integrated partner!" blog post, they have to demonstrate value and let us test it.
Over time, as this ecosystem of apps has grown and thrived, we've noticed some behavior that we wanted to address.
Some of these third-party apps have begun sending targeted email blasts to OwnerRez users, announcing the partnership and pointing out that they are contacting the user because of the mutual OwnerRez connection.
Maybe you've received one of these emails yourself?
It is, of course, perfectly fine for third-party apps to announce that they are integrated with OwnerRez. App builders do a lot of work to expand the power and flexibility of our system, and it's flattering that they chose to invest resources in our ecosystem. In fact, we are planning to expand our Integrations page to show more detail - what each app does, add some searching and filtering and so on. We love third-party apps, and we have no problem with them telling the world (on their own website or social media) that they are now a member of our community. 🤝
The problem is the targeted email campaigns. These email messages make our users believe that OwnerRez shared private contact information with the third-party app. After all, how else could the third-party app have gotten your name and email address if OwnerRez didn't share it and say that you are an OwnerRez user, right?
We do not share your information - private or otherwise - with any third-party apps or integrated partners.
We never have and never will. Our Privacy Policy makes this very clear. In fact, we even go out of our way to stop internal employees from looking at user data unless they have a specific purpose (such as fulfilling help-desk tickets or ProConnect work).
Short answer: we don't know. There are "leads" vendors who routinely email us about buying our competitors' user lists, and we assume they claim to sell ours too. We're not 100% sure how they get this information. Our working theory is that they use web crawlers to look for OwnerRez hosted websites that contain similar markers and then fill in names and contact info from those websites to know who to contact as an "OwnerRez user". There are also conferences where PMs will say what vendors they use and OwnerRez is sometimes mentioned. Those conference lists are not supposed to be sold, but they are shared with all the sponsors.
We have. In some cases, multiple times.
When users have reached out to us, angrily asking why we shared their information, we have made it very clear that we didn't and we've reached out to the app and asked them to stop. They don't always listen. In several cases, we have told the third-party app that if they keep marketing in our name, we will remove their integration from our system entirely.
At the end of the day, we can't stop someone else's business from sending email messages across the internet to you. A business can make whatever claims they want and can email whomever they want.
We know that many of the users they email are not actually OwnerRez users, so it's not a very effective marketing strategy.
No means no regardless of size and power. We have been pressured by large channel partners in the past to share lists and coordinate marketing efforts, but we have always made it clear we don't do that and never will. And besides, as an Elite partner, we've demonstrated that those kinds of techniques aren't necessary anyway.
We've designed OwnerRez to be a People-First business, which means we treat others the same way we would like to be treated. Privacy and trust are important, and we rely on that just as much as you do. If someone is leading our users to believe that their trust is being eroded, we want to be proactive in addressing it!
Happy Friday, everyone! Have a great weekend!
Hey everybody! I hope 2022 has started out strong for your vacation rental business. The biggest surge in vacation rental business always happens in the first quarter of every year, so hopefully, you're riding that wave! 🏄♀️🌊
This past week, we've continued doing a lot of low-level work on our infrastructure. OwnerRez continues to experience a lot of growth, so we've taken some time in this first quarter to work on our technology and back-end systems.
Of course, no matter what else we're working on, we always monitor errors and user reports, so we released 8 updates (all bug fixes) last week that might have affected you. Take a look!
Report export drop-down. Have you tried exporting report data recently? If so, you may have noticed that the export drop-down was getting cut off like this:
Not cool, right? All good now.
Occupancy % report Y-axis. Some of our reports show percentages (%) based on the type of report and the type of value you are summarizing. For instance, here's a report that shows your Occupancy Percentage for last year (2021) with the previous year (2020) next to so that you can see them side by side. We noticed, that sometimes the vertical axis would show really long percentage values because of a decimal that never ended (eg. 23.6666666666666666667%). We now detect and round these types of decimals to two places.
Contact Us page 404ing when not logged in. We created a new Contact Us page a few months back, and it's been working great! ...only it wasn't under the covers. While tickets were being sent in, we discovered that the page was silently responding with a 404 code (ie. "not available") if the visitor was logged out. The page would actually look the same, but the 404 was causing problems with crawlers and other things under the covers. You probably didn't notice this, but it was irritating us so we fixed it.
Smarter property matching when parsing inquiries. OwnerRez receives many thousands of inquiry emails per day that our system parses and turns into inquiry records. This works well, only we noticed some nuances with how certain inquiries are matched up to OwnerRez properties. What if your property listing numbers on the channel that sent the inquiry are 12" and "120" for two different properties? If we attempt to match those property listing numbers, which number is matched first? Suppose we look for a property similar to "12" and end up matching to both (because "120" also matches) or if there's another "12" somewhere in the email, like the number of guests. To fix this, we now look for longer listing numbers first and we check for other property indicators other than the raw identifier. This should help inquiry parsing be a bit more accurate!
Time zones in reports. Back in the summer of 2021, over the course of several weeks, we corrected a bunch of features to show dates and times in the correct time zone. If you live in California, you should see times (eg. the time a payment was collected) in US/Pacific time along with everything else you do. The actual date and time are stored in UTC (London) time but the time zone on your account dictates how it is displayed when you log in. We recently noticed that three reports - Booking Detail, Line Item Pivot, and Tax Detail - were showing dates in UTC (London) time instead of the user's preferred time zone, so we updated those reports to work correctly.
Extra days when filtering expenses. Because of the way the filtering was done, the global Expenses list was including things at midnight the next day (which any manual expense will be because it has no time). This was resulting in filtered Expenses including too many items in the results. We fixed this to not include the extra day.
Airbnb beach access + beachfront. Airbnb recently switched their "beachfront" amenity to a "beach_access" amenity with "is_beachfront" amenity (under the covers) set to yes. This is a technical detail, but it was creating the wrong outcome, so we fixed it to match.
Inefficient country lookup. We noticed a small edge case where the way we were comparing country codes (eg. US, GB, CA) could lead to a slowdown when many addresses or records were being checked in fast succession. For example, think about bulk updates or imports where thousands of records are checked in just a few seconds. It is very unlikely that you would ever notice this type of inefficiency. It's the type of thing only an engineer would see when reviewing logs. 👨🔬 Nonetheless, it was noticed, and now it's fixed!
Happy #BookDirect Day!
If you didn't know this was a thing, then prepare to be educated! Today is also known as ‘Guest Education Day’ and the goal is to explain the mutual benefits for both guests and hosts to #BookDirect. This initiative was created by VRM Intel in 2017 when major OTA's introduced traveler booking fees. According to VRM Intel & Key Data, some of the advantages when taking direct bookings include higher valued bookings, longer stays, longer average booking windows and an increased chance of repeat bookings.
OwnerRez is a strong believer in #BookDirect. We believe it is important to build your brand and start driving customers to your own website instead of third party channels. This is why we offer hosted websites built on renowned OwnerRez engineering and attention to detail. If you don't already have your own hosted site, now is the time!
NO BOOKING FEES! Unlike other vacation rental software companies, we don't charge booking fees. When you take a direct booking, you get the full amount for that booking, minus payment processor fees of course. This leads into another major aspect of #BookDirect, using your own payment processor. As an independent software product, we do not dictate what specific payment method you use. We integrate with a variety of payment methods, so that you have the tools you need to work in the way that is best for you.
Wondering how fast you can set up your own direct booking website, including taking credit card payments, from scratch?
In roughly 10 minutes, this video will take you from a brand new empty account through adding your property, rates, calendar, credit card payment method and setting up a website that can take live bookings. This shows a quick run-through of the main things you need to get from nothing to a full website with guest bookings. Each of the areas this video goes through has many options and features, which you can learn about in other support articles and videos, but this video doesn't get bogged down in that. We stay at a high level and show the full end to end process.
On Tuesday 2/8, OwnerRez will be hosting a webinar with ResortCleaning.
We'll sit down with Danny Bradford, Chief Executive Officer at ResortCleaning, to discuss 5 mistakes vacation rental managers make with their housekeeping departments.
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez/ResortCleaning webinar link to register.
You can find all of our upcoming and past webinars on our Webinars page.
Thanks for sharing your experiences. Which brand of locks do you prefer for your VR's? I have been a loyal Schlage customer until they started having hiccups in the cold weather here in St. Louis.
Would love to get integration with Windsor Hills Private Rentals (https://www.windsorhillsprivaterentals.com/). There are many Windsor Hills owners on here who use OwnerRez and promote it on owner forums.... that would help a lot!
Great job on the 84 units!! the website looks great!
Hi everyone! Welcome to the first product update post of 2022! We're excited and eager for the changes the new year will bring. Our team is growing and our roadmap has never been more full. 👊
But before we talk about the future, let's run through our latest release which covers 31 updates. This release went out at the end of last week and is mostly bug fixes, though we did update our Affiliate pages, review templates, and Airbnb amenities!
We have a great Affiliate Program that pays out money to users based on the referrals that they send to OwnerRez. Our Affiliate Program has been a great success over the years, and we're happy to see the enthusiasm that users have for this program! We love our guerilla marketing army! ❤️
For a long time, we've wanted to show our affiliates how well they are doing in the program. You might get payouts on a regular basis, but you couldn't really see who your referrals are (ie. the people who signed up through you), or their status, nor could you see your running earnings or history of payouts. Common questions to our help desk are things like "how many referrals do I have" or "has Joe Blow signed up and if so, am I getting credit for his account?". I'm happy to announce that you can now see all that in OwnerRez!
Go to your Account > Affiliate Program page and take a look. You'll see some extra fields at the top, showing your total earnings, total payouts, the PayPal email address we send your payouts to, and your W9 status (more on that further down). Below those fields, you'll see three new tabs: My Payouts, My Affiliates, and Instructions.
The information is pretty self-explanatory, but here are some extra tips about how these tabs work.
The My Payouts tab shows a list of all payments we've sent to your PayPal account going back to the beginning of time. If the payout isn't listed here, nothing was sent. If you see a payout in the list but don't recall getting it, look at your PayPal account a few days after the payout date we show in the list.
The My Affiliates tab shows all of the referred users that have signed up using your link. If you contacted OwnerRez to manually fix an affiliation, that will show in your My Affiliates list as well. Basically, any account that generates money for you will show in the My Affiliates list, including any account that used to earn you money but no longer does. The Affiliate Program only generates earnings for a maximum of five (5) years, but no one has affiliates that are that old, so that shouldn't be the case for any affiliate yet. You'll notice accounts that are closed or still in a trial period as well. If you're wondering if a friend of yours signed up, or what their status is, go directly to your My Affiliates tab to see.
The last tab, Instructions, is a helpful page of links and images you can use to give out to new prospects. This page is similar to the links and images we showed before, but the links are slightly new because we recently changes some storage technology. We encourage all Affiliates to update their links and images (ie. on your website or Facebook pages) to the newest links so that your new referrals continue to work without a hitch.
Our Affiliate Program has been so successful, we realized that we had to start reporting the payouts to the IRS for any user that is a US citizen or legal resident as most of our affiliates are. We don't like the requirement any more than you do, but unfortunately, there's nothing we can do except make it easy for users to provide their tax info. While overhauling the Affiliate screens, we added a new "Tax Info" field and a W9 upload tool. You'll see it right on the same Affiliate Page that I mentioned above.
Click that Submit button and a little window will open with instructions on what to fill out and upload.
The form is a standard IRS W9 which basically collects your US-based tax ID (either EIN for business or SSN for individuals) with your signature and date attesting to the accuracy.
After completing, simply use that Upload button to find the finished file and then click Submit W9 to send it over. OwnerRez will automatically mark your tax info as "Pending Review" status and a member of our customer success team will review and confirm it soon. If anything else is needed, we'll circle back with you directly. Be sure to sign and date the W9 or we can't accept it.
Here are a couple of common questions about the W9 requirement:
Do I have to do it now, or can it wait? If you've ever received a payout, we need a W9 as soon as possible. Even if you don't have pending payouts ready to go out, we still need it to report 2021 numbers to the IRS. We've modified our policy requirements to note that payouts will not be sent to any affiliate that does not have confirmed W9 info on file. If you do have pending payouts waiting to be sent, our system will no longer send them if your tax info isn't finished. If you've never received any payouts in the past, you can take as long as you like to send it.
I'm not a US citizen or resident, so what do I do? The W9 requirement is only for US citizens and legal residents. However, for non-US citizens, we still need to confirm your tax status, so we need to see an ID and signed statement stating that you are not subject to US taxes. This isn't difficult! Take a sheet of paper, put your photo ID on it, write a note on it that you are not a US citizen or legal resident and do not need to send a W9. Your photo ID should match this statement by showing a non-US address. Then sign and date the bottom of the paper, and scan or take a photo of it. Use the above upload window to send that instead of the W9 and our team will confirm.
I messed up and need to submit a new W9. No worries. Simply go back to your Account > Affiliate Program and use the "Change" button next to the Tax Info field to submit a new one. You can do this at any time, even if your previous submission is still in Pending Review status.
I don't have access to a scanner or the ability to sign. e-Signatures apps and pictures from phones are perfectly fine. Just make sure to use a signing app so that it's a legit signature, and make sure the photo from your phone is high resolution and clear when you send it. We want this to be an easy process so that it can be done quickly.
The best channel manager for vacation rentals only stays the best if it is constantly monitored and supported! Thankfully, you use OwnerRez. Nearly every week, we tweak, change or upgrade some aspect of our channel management engine.
This time around, we worked on Airbnb amenities. I don't have a definitive list of amenities added, but our team went through the latest additions by Airbnb and made sure to correct differences where we saw them. We get docs from the Airbnb dev team on a regular basis, and we noticed some new changes. Do you have a boat slip? If so, you can now check off that amenity! ⛵ Board games, rain shower, baking sheets, grill utensils, bread maker, mini-fridge, wine glasses, rice maker, piano, record player? Awesome, check them all! (Also, I might want to rent your house.)
When you get a second, scan through your amenities and see if you want to select, deselect or add notes. It's good to do on a regular basis anyway.
As part of this, we removed a couple of deprecated amenities as well - ie. amenities that were in there but Airbnb wasn't showing live anymore, so we removed them. Things like: Cable TV, Lock On Bedroom, Beachfront. Again, this only applies to Airbnb.
In the last release, we rolled out Automatic 5-Star Reviews to much fanfare, and it's been great to watch the reception. Users have really jumped on it, and we're seeing a lot of review activity. If you haven't started using it yet, give it a try. It's a powerful way to build your reputation.
However, there was a lot of push-back on our decision to remove field codes from review templates. If you recall, we yanked the ability to have field codes because reviews are permanent once submitted, and we foresaw a lot of accidents where field codes either exposed private guest information or contained an error or empty value and looked bad (or robotic) with no way of correcting. But still, the push-back was strong, and for good reason. Saying "thanks, you were great, come again" over and over is a bit sterile and obvious. Around here, we like flexibility and power, not sterile and obvious.
So we put our heads together and came up with a solution. We identified a bunch of field codes that won't expose sensitive guest information and tend to always have data (ie. won't be empty). If you're curious, the list of approved field codes is limited to the guest's first name, the property name, the number of nights they stayed, the number of guests in their party, and your name or company name.
So yeah, field codes are back! Check it out!
You can insert these field codes into any part of the review body. Here are some quick examples:
Check back in a few days, and you'll see the automatic reviews being written with more of a personalized sound.
Also, if you were one of the ones who had a bunch of review templates hidden from the previous release, you'll be happy to know that they're back! That's right, take a look at your review templates list, and you'll see the old ones back in there. Please note, if your old review templates have non-sanctioned field codes for reviews, as shown above, then the Auto 5-Star Review system will skip them when submitting reviews.
Want to use a different field code in reviews? Let us know, and we'll take a look. I'm sure there are plenty of other bits of information that could be included, but we started small to avoid pitfalls.
Triggers, surcharges, and discounts have always supported filtering by the "month of the year" that the booking is created, arrives, or departs. However, the month of year field required a number that tended to stump a lot of users. In other words, you needed to enter "1" for January.
We've made it easier to manage those types of criteria by making the months a drop-down of month names.
We like to think we have the most powerful filtering and automation options in the industry, but those filters are only good if you understand how to use them! Hopefully, this makes it easier to target months.
Broken links you can't see. You would have only noticed this bug if you're a web crawler, so if you're a human reading this post, you probably didn't see it! During our big forum overhaul recently, we added a profile page where you can see your posts and upload an avatar. However, in the process, we set the "canonical URL" for the forum profile page to a broken link. Canonical links tell web crawlers what the true link is for any given web page. It allows a web app to offer different page variations but centralize the metadata for those page variations to a specific URL. All fixed! (And if you are a member of the web-crawling undead, I'll find out about that too... 🧟♀️)
Render final review body when selecting a template. When you create review templates, you might use field codes (like {CFIRST}) to personalize the content. You naturally expect that when the review goes out, those field codes are replaced by the guest's name or other booking information. In one of the previous releases, we accidentally changed some behavior such that when writing a manual review, the template was not transforming into the final version before you finished. This was only affecting the manual side of sending reviews; automatic 5-star reviews were fine. Users writing manual reviews might have expected that the field code would change after they submitted it, but it wasn't. We fixed this to copy how emails and other things work with field codes. If manually selecting a template, the system will render the final version before you make your changes so that you can see the transformed field codes before sending.
Send flat tax to Airbnb even if rent is non-taxable. When we added the taxable categories, we stopped pushing taxes if there were no applicable categories. However, that only makes sense for percent taxes - flat taxes don't need taxable categories. We fixed this so that we now push flat taxes to Airbnb even if nothing is taxable.
What is the total of an average? Did you know that we show ADR (average daily rent) and ADG (average daily gross) on some of our booking reports? Yep, sure do! You can query a range of dates and see what your nightly average revenue was for those booked nights. However, we noticed that the "Total" value at the bottom was summing up the averages and showing a large number. We fixed that to show the total average - ie. the average of all the averages above it. This is what you really want to see.
False alerts about Auto 5-Star Review being scheduled. After our new Automatic 5-Star Review feature came out, you may have noticed that you got email alerts telling you that the booking would be skipped but also that a review was scheduled at the same time (two alerts). Nothing bad actually happened here - the skipped bookings were still skipped - but the extra email alert needed to be removed, so we took care of that.
Vrbo icon for Location Description/Activities. We show a little channel icon for the prominent channels (Vrbo, Airbnb, B.com, and TA) underneath each of the description fields that those channels support so that users can quickly see which ones need to be filled in for certain channels. However, we overlooked the "Location Description" and "Location Other Activities" fields - those sync with Vrbo, but there was no icon. The Vrbo icon is now in place!
Allow deleting all charges even if the last charge is a discount. We found an issue where a booking couldn't have its charges deleted if it had positive charges followed by negative charges, and you attempted to delete them all and save them. This is now fixed!
Partially released is not fully released. Even when a security deposit was fully released, the new Automatic 5-Star Review feature was thinking that something was kept because of a bug in the logic that compared the held or refunded amounts. Fixed!
Watching the topic twice. We noticed that when writing posts (either first posts or replies) in forum topics, the forum would occasionally subscribe the user multiple times to the same topic. This is the top "watch this topic" function that sends you emails when there are changes. We fixed those situations, so it should no longer be happening.
Property URL empty in signed/archived renter agreements. We noticed that if (a) an email template is triggered while signing and archiving a renter agreement, (b) the user has an active hosted website, (c) the property URL is empty, and (d) the property is included in that active hosted website, the URL is replaced with a blank one instead of the expected hosted website link. Sound rare? It is! But our engineering team monitors a lot of different error reports precisely to find very-rare errors like this.
Skip Vrbo push if the status is erroring. Previously, we could accidentally deactivate Vrbo listings that were waiting to be integrated if we did a push. We didn't know if a property was connected, which is why this could happen. But now that we have the Vrbo status service, we realized we could stop this problem from occurring. Now, before doing a push, we check if there is a last-synced booking or it's synced successfully in the last five days. We also check when pushing listing content if there's a 403 or failed status and handle it gracefully so that the listing isn't deactivated.
Global alert about bouncing email sticking around. When you have a Suppressed Email Address in your account that also happens to be an account email address (eg. your profile or login email address) we show a red global alert warning you that all emails being sent to you are bouncing. We do this until you either "reactivate" the suppression or change the account email address to something else. This is necessary because you can't have an account email address that is also actively bouncing. Account email addresses are really important and need to be valid at all times. But the global alert was sticking! Even after you fixed the problem, the global alert would continue to stay. This is now fixed.
Gear or tag? When you go to set "accessibility amenities" in the Accommodations tab, for a property, there's an orange warning reminding you that you can also include photos for those items over on the property Photos page. But the warning mentioned a "gears" button. The button on the photos has an icon that looks more like a price tag than a gear, so we corrected it.
Icon widths in menus. Some of the icons we use in some of the menus (like Tools) were using different widths depending on the icon and menu option. This is has been corrected.
Phones can have magic too. We host a support article called "CSS Magic" with snippets to tweak your hosted site in ways that the built-in options don't support. CSS is a web language that controls the style of web pages. We noticed that some of the snippets on our CSS Magic article didn't work on mobile. This is because our hosted sites are designed to dynamically change when being viewed on tablets or mobile devices. So we ran through and updated the CSS Magic snippets to work on mobile. In some cases, there are multiple CSS lines to use, so make sure to copy the entire snippet.
Reject Vrbo bookings with missing street addresses. We noticed that sometimes Vrbo sends bookings to our system, via the API integration, but the guest's street address is missing. We're not sure why Vrbo allows that, but they do and when the missing street address hits our system, it causes problems with credit card processing. To help make this process more graceful, we now check for missing addresses earlier in the process and immediately report back to Vrbo that we can't take the booking. This should help stop extra emails from flying around between you and the guest asking for a street address later in the process.
Cancel button when reactivating. Previously, the Reactivate Booking page didn't have a "Cancel" button. We added a Cancel button so that it follows our design pattern.
Alert to request payment when cards fail. Some users were getting confused if they hit an error when attempting to process a credit card. They thought that we sent a payment failed email to the guest like we do when automatically processing scheduled payments. We added some things to help make this clearer. First, we copied the "send payment request" call-out box so that you can see it (and copy the same options) when the card fails manually. Then, we updated the "Pending Confirm" page to show the same options.
Fix CFAR rules, again. Guests can't always purchase CFAR (Cancel For Any Reason) travel insurance. It depends on when they booked, when the arrival date is, what country they are a resident of, and so on. We noticed a place where our rules were off, so we fixed that. We also made our CFAR travel insurance documentation a little clearer. Oh - and while we were in there, we updated it to allow New Hampshire residents to buy CFAR. New Hampshire is now good to go.
Hosted website file cleanup. We host a lot of user-generated content. User-generated content is images, videos, and files that you (the user) upload to our system. That user-generated content is used all over the place, from email templates to forum posts to guest forms to hosted websites. We recently upgraded our content storage technology to move to a better system. Afterward, we noticed that some of the content used by hosted websites was not referencing the newer storage technology, so we fixed that. To be clear, no downtime or broken images were shown on hosted websites. This was an under-the-cover fix that no one would have noticed on the surface.
Handle phone number/brand race conditions. The term "race condition" is a technical thing. It means that two or more pieces of code are trying to update the same data at the same moment, and bad things happen. We saw this happening when SMS Brands are submitted based on how our SMS carrier was communicating back to us.
Our security is better than that! We noticed that the footers of our quote emails and guest forms still said we used "256 bit SSL encryption." While that may have been true many many years ago when those forms were first developed, security moves very fast and we've come a long way from 256-bit encryption. We have always stayed on the cutting edge of security to protect the information of both you and your guests, but this blurb was a bit outdated. We've updated the text to reflect that we currently use "2048-bit TLS encryption."
Duplicate Forum replies. You might have seen this one too. After the recent forum overhaul, it became possible to create two forum posts when replying to a thread. Hard to run down, but we found and adjusted a few things that should make it stop happening!
Tighter on mobile. The new forums overhaul was designed to make our forums look and work well on mobile. Over the past couple of weeks, we noticed some areas that could still be improved - lines that could be removed or buttons moved around when on mobile screens. We went ahead and took care of those.
Security Deposit alerts in the wrong place. We noticed that the system alert for "Booking Security Deposit Failed" was sitting up in the "Bookings" section of system alerts, probably because this alert is pretty old and predated the "Security Deposits" section of the system alerts. It was time to move this little guy to his proper home, so we went ahead and took care of that. This alert now sits alongside the other security deposit-related alerts.
Booking.com numbers. This again, oi vay. Booking.com's property IDs (aka "hotel IDs", aka "room numbers") are different in format and size depending on how your property is configured. Recently, those numbers got longer, but only because they added some variations on the end for different rooms or units. On our channel property mapping pages, we try to help you figure out the right IDs and provide feedback on (or even change) what you enter to make it work with what we know the channel really wants. Often, users enter room numbers instead of hotel IDs when it comes to Booking.com property mappings, but also... maybe not? We don't always know. 🤪 To help with this, we now check the hotel ID that is entered. If the hotel ID is not found, we assume they may have entered a room number by mistake. Before showing an error message, we try lopping off the last two digits and seeing if that works. If it does, we update the hotel ID to the lopped-off number. If it still errors, we change the message to say "should be 6 or 7 digits long" because it could be either. While we were in there, we changed "Hotel ID" to room number on the "Disconnect" page
Can't remove addresses while channel-integrated. If you've got our world-class channel management running, you can't change or remove your property addresses. I mean you could actually, technically, remove the address from OwnerRez before, but the channels would throw a fit or ignore the changes. To help remind you of this, we now prevent you from removing a property address if the property is actively connected to a channel via API. There's a nice warning that explains what's going on and tells you what to do.
Over the past week, we've put out some new videos about our Verified Email Domains feature. Verified Email is a cool way of using a custom domain name you already own to send email from OwnerRez to your contacts while maintaining a high sending reputation using OwnerRez's excellent sending speed and email services. These videos will talk you through it. Start with the Setup and Configuration video, then watch the video specific to your domain registrar to see how to put DNS records in place.
I am curious about the map as well. The locations are broad on the map. Can you not pinpoint each home on the map?
As always, thanks for all of your hard work and all of these improvements, we appreciate it!
A suggestion for the "Messages" tab display:
I don't know if my experience is common to others' use of messages/templates but on any given booking there is a long list of messages on that page.
It would be helpful if messages that don't apply to the booking are not shown. For example, if the booking is not an Airbnb booking then none of the messages using the "Airbnb Message" method should even be displayed on this page. It would help simplify what we are seeing on the page greatly if we only were shown the actual messages that apply to the booking.
Some of the messages that are displayed on one particular booking that do not apply to that booking have the following explanations:
How did you get the map feature integrated into your OR hosted website? Thanks Jim
