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What is the cost per month? They don't list pricing.
We are pleased to announce that we have partnered with Akia. This will allow OwnerRez users to have guests register for their stay, receive check-in and checkout instructions, ask and answer questions, all over text-messaging.
Akia is a text-messaging platform designed to help vacation rentals quickly build and distribute customer-facing workflows to streamline their guest arrivals. Users can save time otherwise spent answering phone calls or ensuring every guest receives the correct arrival instructions.
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Get started with Akia by visiting the Akia website and checkout the OwnerRez support doc for how to integrate OwnerRez with Akia.
I didn't realize I had to manually release the security deposit hold--I just get an automated email from OwnerRez stating that Mrs. X'S security hold will be released in 7 days, then tomorrow, then another stating it was released. Is this a problem? Is it just releasing because the hold "expired"? I hold 7 days because my cleaners are terrible at noticing missing or damaged items & we always fly up after each turn to inspect.
We are looking into ways of supporting this, but that requires push notifications which means we need to build a native app or messenger service for phones. It's something we've looked into a few times, and are working on supporting but only in conceptual/design phase at the moment.
The sms messages i receive now go to my computer or phone email, not to text messages on my phone, which is the best way for me to receive them. Can the sms messages i receive go to my text messages on my phone and not to my mail?
Please advise.
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Great question, Mary. We are actively working on adding better visibility and clarity on segments inside the app. Our segment counter will be more accurate and also provide tips on how to "clean" your messages to avoid any extra charges. Some reports would be nice too - great idea.
Thank you for the information on something I didn’t know about. Is it possible to add a report for sms messaging to get data on our sms segments per message template and messages per various periods of time? This might help us make better informed decisions on tailoring our messages to reduce costs vs benefit of larger messages.
Last year, before we debuted our SMS Messaging feature, we spent a while coming up with a pricing model that would make it worthwhile for OwnerRez to support and maintain a solid SMS platform across thousands of users while not asking users to pay an outrageous price.
SMS is an important communication tool for any modern vacation rental host, and predictably, hundreds of OwnerRez users immediately jumped on it.
Over the past year, we've been carefully watching and analyzing our SMS costs. If you didn't know already - telephony carriers charge apps (like OwnerRez) per individual message and call (they actually charge per message segment and call leg) so we carefully collect millions of data points so that we know what every communication is costing us. As we've watched that SMS usage, we've been forced to reevaluate how our SMS pricing works.
Our existing pricing model is based on a flat fee ($15/month) that covers most users and is designed to give you a basic package you can operate out of without feeling nickle and dimed. As usage grows in size, there is a usage charge that kicks in. Inbound messages are always included for free, but outbound messages start to incur an add-on fee as usage increases. We felt like this would help us deal with the larger usage of big PMs while also creating a low barrier to entry.
That overall pricing structure is staying the same with one small exception - we are now counting outbound messages per segment. The original flat fee of $15/month is staying the same. The usage cost of 3 cents per outbound send above 200 is also staying the same, only per segment now instead of the whole message.
Before you read further, take a second to click on the following link which will explain what a message "segment" is. It's very important that you understand this:
SMS Common Questions - What is a Message "Segment"
Okay, you're back now which means you've read the above link, and you understand that an SMS message is made up of multiple "segments" based on the size of the body and any image you include. You understand that really large SMS messages can be as much as 10 segments in a single message body.
You will see the same prices and break-outs on your invoice, only the add-on usage charge will include the number of segments.
Contrary to what you might first think, this is not a shameless attempt to jack up our revenue! If we wanted to do that, we would increase the overall price per segment, or include fewer outbound segments for free, or increase the flat fee. We are doing this to address a very real problem.
Here is the crux of the problem.... There is a group of OwnerRez users that send large-body SMS messages to each and every guest and often several times per booking (before, during and after the stay). These messages are many paragraphs long, are 8-10 segments each in size, and these users typically send thousands of these messages per month. Our telephony carrier charges us hundreds of dollars for each of these users per month, so we've been losing a lot of money. We've been watching and tracking those losses for 6-8 months.
We had these two options:
1) Disallow SMS messages (and templates) to be more than 160 characters in size. In other words, force every message to one segment or less.
2) Or, somehow, charge those users more than everyone else
We didn't want to do #1 because a hard limit of 160 characters would restrict what you can do in OwnerRez with sending images, attachments or messages that are slightly longer at times. We did not want to remove functionality from a well-received flexible SMS system. So we went with #2.
Do you send large message bodies in your SMS messages to all of your guests? Do you spell out your house rules, lay out pre-arrival information and so on - all within an SMS message? If so, then yes your SMS pricing will probably increase.
There's no need to guess! Go to the SMS Communication History under the Tools menu. Open one of the SMS messages you send to guests (look for a template-based automated message you send to everyone) and look at the top. We now show the length and include a segment counter as well.
If the above example makes you chuckle, believe it or not this is actually pretty common. Because emails get lost or ignored, some of our users have converted all of their informational and instructional emails into SMS messages which leads to messages like the above example. As you can see, the above example is 8 segments long in a single message. 200 outbound segments will run out quickly if this is what you are sending to guests on a regular basis.
Short answer: no. You can continue sending large-body messages to your guests, and many times throughout the booking, as long as you are fine with paying a higher rate every month.
However, we highly recommend that messages be short and concise in nature, pointing to emails or web pages where the guest can go to view instructions and information. We have several "guest guidebook" integrated partners that offer third party apps where guests can view your information in a clean organized manner. If you send large-body messages, not only will your costs go up significantly, but your deliverability rate will go down. Some carriers will delay or block SMS messages if the sender sends a large amount of volume or if recipients begin to block the sender on their phone.
Government organizations and telephony carriers have come up with new standards to address SMS spam and ways of assigning reputation to your brand. This is already in effect in various pilot programs and something OwnerRez is actively working on supporting. It's called "Direct Brands" for A2P 10DLC messaging (application-to-person messaging using regular 10-digit phone numbers) and will be announced in OwnerRez in the near future. You'll be able to create a "brand" for your phone number that will carry real reputation across the carrier networks (Verizon, ATT, etc) and be shown on the recipient's phone as a trusted sender. You will have to maintain you reputation, and not send large amounts of unsolicited messages, or your deliverability rate will suffer.
For new users (ie. those that join OwnerRez from today forward), the new SMS pricing is already in effect right now. In fact, you can see that live on our pricing page and our Cost & Fees support docs.
For existing users, your SMS pricing will stay like it was until the end of 2021. On January 1, 2022, your SMS pricing will join new users and everyone will be billed per message segment equally.
Hi Jim!
Yes, nothing has changed about the API channel integration side.
Only future contacts are auto-merged. The existing ones were not touched. We are going to be adding some tools to show you where there are duplicates you can merge, but that's not out yet.
Hi, everyone! We're back with a fresh batch of product update! This past week, we released 17 updates that enhanced and fixed some existing features.
By the way - over this final quarter of 2021, you'll notice that most of our updates are "maintenance debt" focused, meaning that we're looking back at areas that need to be cleaned up, redesigned and streamlined instead of putting out new features. Don't worry - some great new toys will be under the Christmas tree soon enough, but this is a time of year when the OwnerRez team likes to do some house cleaning.
Last month, we released an update to security deposits that allows you to do "refundable" or "RDD" style security deposits. The money is collected as a payment and you can hold onto it forever, refunding it back to the guest at your leisure. This was a big hit, but we noticed that several users, that were using their own custom "refundable damage deposit" surcharges, didn't want to upgrade. The feedback was that our new built-in style lacked a couple of settings that they needed, so we addressed those settings. You can now collect a "refundable" type security deposit 120 days before arrival and you can mark it to never be automatically released.
To be clear, these settings are only available if you use the "refundable" style security deposit. "Hold" security deposits are still the same - they have to be automatically released, and they can only be reserved a few days before arrival.
If your security deposit is set to not be automatically released, we will send you one reminder after departure that you need to manually release it, and then you're on your own. Make sure to release it!
These two updates should help you upgrade from using a custom "RDD" surcharge to using the built-in security deposit. We highly encourage all users to use the built-in refundable or hold-based security deposit as it is a much better experience for the guest and is far less confusing for accounting, reporting and other downstream functions. If there are other reasons you have to use a custom surcharge, let us know so that we can work on addressing those needs.
For a long time, we've had an excellent Reviews feature where you can record, request and display reviews - not only from direct guests but collected from the channels as well. You can use our Channel Bridge tool to download a file of reviews from the channels and quickly import those as well. However, other than Airbnb, the reviews that were imported into OwnerRez did not match any specific bookings. This is because Vrbo and TripAdvisor don't include a booking or reservation number that links the review to a booking. But we realized that we could still find and auto-match reviews to bookings based on the channel, property and stay dates. So we did just that - when importing Vrbo reviews now, the system will auto-match Vrbo reviews to Vrbo bookings based on the property and stay dates of the review.
Try it out yourself! Go grab a new Channel Bridge file of downloaded reviews from Vrbo, then import it into OwnerRez. After the import is over, check out some of the reviews by clicking on them. You'll notice a "For Booking" link at the top of the review that shows the booking the review is now linked to.
You can see the same thing from the booking side as well. Open the booking and click the Reviews tab under the booking. The same review will show there because it's linked to the same booking.
We plan to add some tools that will help you find and match other reviews to the correct booking, but for now, this should help clean up your Vrbo reviews. If you're wondering - yes, you can re-import old Vrbo reviews and the system will newly attempt to find and match them against bookings. It won't create duplicate reviews. If you don't re-import old reviews, the existing reviews in the system will not be auto-matched to any bookings.
Back in September, we added a "Check Status" function to our Vrbo channel dashboard so that you could check the live status of your Vrbo listings. We realized that the Airbnb channel dashboard should have the same thing, so we added the same Check Status option to Airbnb as well. Go to your Airbnb channel dashboard in OwnerRez, and open the Actions button on the far right of each property. There is a new Check Status option. If you click it, we'll do a live check of your property on Airbnb and report back the live status.
Our Rate Table widget smartly shows different rates in seasonal periods based on the seasons and rates you have in OwnerRez. To do this, it crunches a lot of rates and then groups them into buckets to show the exact amount or a range of amounts, and it smartly checks whether you have LOS ("length of stay" like week or monthly) rates at all. For a long time, we would show a "Weekend" column of rates based on the rates that the user set for weekdays versus weekend days, but this still caused problems with what users wanted to show publicly. So we finally broke down and added a Weekend-specific setting on the Rate Table widget.
You can now always show it, never show it (ie. hide it) or show it smartly if the property's rules allow weekend stays and the weekend rates are different than the normal nightly rate. For those of you that don't want Weekend rates to show at all, and don't understand why it's showing up, just select the "Hide" option.
Trying to find your channel listing numbers or links while looking at your smartphone? You can do that now. We updated our channel API dashboards to show the listing numbers and URLs even while on small devices.
This is part of our ongoing effort to normalize all functionality between phone, tablet and desktop screens so that you can use whatever device you want, have a comfortable experience, but also maintain all functionality without having to switch devices.
While we were tweaking things, we made the Total and Owed columns on the Bookings list view be links that will take you directly to the Charges and Transactions tab of the booking. You can now go directly to the charges or payments of a booking in one click.
In our ongoing efforts to make the rate calendar more awesome, we've added another bit of data to the display: Booking window rules! You can now see directly on the calendar that no arrival/departure is permitted where a booking window rule is applied.
In the following example, the property requires three nights of lead time (ie. nothing can be booked within three days of today) and today is the 4th of the month. Notice if we hover over the 5th, what it shows:
Even though the time is technically available, a gray ribbon shows because the system won't let guests book directly because of the three-day booking window rule.
Additionally, the hovercard will now show channel blackouts. To be clear, channel blackouts aren't shown directly on the calendar as red ribbons because they only apply to certain channels, not everything, but we do show them on the hovercard.
Last week, we mentioned that the Rate Push tool in Channel Bridge was deprecated, meaning that it was no longer going to be supported in the future. Many users contacted us, concerned that Channel Bridge was going away entirely. Channel Bridge is not going away. The Rate Push tool part of Channel Bridge is the only specific thing that is ending. We have updated our warning messages inside the app to make this clear.
"Who will I be charged by?" At the bottom of the quote guest form, there's a paragraph called "Who will I be charged by" that tells the guest what will name will show up on their credit card statements. We do this to help grease the skids so that there isn't confusion later on when their credit card bill shows up. We noticed, though, that we were mentioning things that may not apply to the current quote. For instance, travel insurance might be disabled or there may not be a security deposit due. This led some guests to contact the owner or PM with extra questions about the security deposit and travel insurance because they read this paragraph. We updated the guest form logic to change the message based on the rules and settings on the quote.
HomeToGo connection form. There's a new HomeToGo signup form, so we updated our link to coincide.
Don't overwrite billing info on scheduled security deposits with Booking.com virtual card info. Yep, just like it sounds. When billing info was sent to OwnerRez from Booking.com, our system would replace the billing info on pre-existing scheduled security deposits because our system always looks to use the latest best billing info when it's updated on a booking. However, this Was problematic if the new Booking.com billing info was a "virtual card". We now detect if the new billing info is a "virtual card" and skip around the downstream updates.
You keep using that word; I don't think it means what you think it means. For a long time, users have been confused about the Channel Rate Tester tool. The Channel Rates Tester compares what your rates are in OwnerRez to the channel, but users assumed that the "Airbnb" column next to the "OwnerRez" column meant that they were seeing the difference between direct pricing and Airbnb pricing, particularly when they had a rate adjuster in place. That's not what Channel Rate Tester does. Instead of "Airbnb" and "OwnerRez columns, you'll now see "Live" and "Expected" columns. These columns will hopefully clarify that both rates columns are for Airbnb, but one is the live amount currently being shown to the world on Airbnb's public website and the other is what OwnerRez expects the Airbnb rate to be based on your rates and settings in OwnerRez. In other words, they should match (or be close) all of the time.
Display name on Airbnb reviews. This was a multi-part fix, but the bug was mostly seen on Airbnb reviews. Basically, the display name of the guest (ie. first name, username or handle) was often empty or not being imported correctly. Because of this, we would show the guest's actual first name instead of letting that be set. We updated this to allow display names to be set on Airbnb reviews and also made sure the internal Reviews menu and list were showing that correctly.
Optimized season rates. Are you someone with a lot of properties and seasons? If so, you might have noticed that it took a while to set rates on the "Seasonal Rates" season matrix. We noticed too, and it's now fixed. We optimized several things about how seasons and rates are loaded in that area, so it should be fast again.
Trigger messages for quote-based blocked-off time. Previously, we noticed some situations where we were sending trigger messages for blocks that were created by quote holds. As you'll recall (since you read every product update diligently!) our quotes can now hold dates automatically. The system does this by automatically blocking-off time that matches the quote dates and then automatically removing that block when the quote changes status. Our trigger messages were sometimes firing when for these quote-based blocks, so we updated the trigger system to not send messages for these types of blocks.
Clarify Channel Bridge errors and what to do. In the past, Channel Bridge would sometimes show errors like "The field w_Fee must be greater than or equal to 0" which actually means "there's an unknown data issue, and we need to investigate". We now catch those errors and show a more general message of "Unknown data detected. Take a screenshot of the reservation charges and payments/refunds on [channel name] and send that with the Channel Bridge file to help@ownerreservations.com so that we can track down what's going on."
On Tuesday 11/2, OwnerRez will be hosting a webinar with ASTRHO.
Join us for this 1-week power course where you'll learn everything from how to connect your listings to channels, the available smart home solutions, to other types of marketing or operations technology. Find the best-fit options for you!
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez/ASTRHO webinar link to register. If you're not an ASTRHO member yet, please sign up for a free membership prior to registering for the webinar.
You can find all of our past and upcoming webinars on our Webinars page.
You guys must never sleep! LOL, Two questions: 1. I am assuming API connected channels still push rates? 2. Are our current contacts now all merged, or only future ones? Thanks Jim
I had a very nice demo from Superhog and it seems good value, it would enable me to drop any security deposit holds.
My concerns are that there is just too much form filling for guests and that would be a friction point. However with the integration effectively they will have already booked subject to the verification.
This may be awkward to manage via any instant book OTA bookings if Superhog subsequently comes back with a don't rent verification.
For this to really work for me I would like to see either embeddable links from super hog we can put into a rental agreement. Or somehow combining the rental agreement signing within the T & C's of Superhog. (Much tighter integration and data sharing between OR and Superhog). Overall I liked the product and the insurance element is good value for money. I will give it a trial but at the moment I am not sure how to weave it around the OR rental agreement for minimum guest friction.
On Tuesday 10/26, OwnerRez will be hosting a webinar with RentalGuardian to discuss the use and importance of damage protection.
Damage Protection covers your property against the accidental damage a guest might do while at your property, which has saved many of our users over the years. We'll sit down with John Slaughter, Senior Vice President, Growth & Strategy at RentalGuardian, to discuss the benefits of the program.
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez/RentalGuardian webinar link to register.
You can find all of our past and upcoming webinars on our Webinars page.
Scott J said:
May we just get a simple interface for guests to upload their IDs, please?Not interested in AI, and being part of biometric surveillance machine.
Happy Thursday, everyone! This week we've released a monstrous 33 updates which include a bunch of cool upgrades. Let's go through the changes!
The update I'm most excited about is one you can't actually see in the interface! Well, you sorta can... 🧐
For a long time, our CRM area (ie. the menu where you go to see and manage contact records) has had many duplicate contact records. This is because every time a guest books your property or sends an inquiry, OwnerRez would create a new contact record even if the person had booked or inquired previously. The same is true for channel bookings. I'm happy to announce that contact records are now automatically merged for new bookings and inquiries if OwnerRez sees obvious indicators that the guest is already in the system.
If you're curious, the auto-merge process works like this... When a new inquiry or booking comes in (from a widget, inquiry email, API channel integration, etc) OwnerRez checks the phone number, email address and mailing address and compares that to your existing contacts that are already in the system. If it finds one, it then checks for a similar contact first and last name. Only one of the phone number, email address or mailing address has to match (not all three) but the name has to match exactly. When a match is found, that contact record is used for the new booking or inquiry, and no contact records are created. This should greatly reduce the number of duplicate contacts in your account.
If you still see duplicates records, and you might because slightly misspelled names or missing contact info, you can still select the records in the CRM > Contacts list and manually merge them yourself. That process works exactly the same as before.
In the above example, those three Maria contacts would not have been auto-merged because the names do not exactly match even though the email and phone numbers are the same. We designed the auto-merging process to be conservative so that contact records are not merged too aggressively. We feel like it's better to have extra duplicates than accidentally merge together family members or friends with similar contact info that might result in confusion down the road. We are planning on adding some merge tools in the future that will help you find records that look similar so that you can quickly find and merge contacts.
If you do run across a situation where a contact was accidentally merged and should be split out again, you can do that by going to one of the contact's bookings or inquiries and using the Guest Record > Associate with different guest to find or create a new guest record.
After creating the new guest record, you would then need to go each booking or inquiry on the old contact and make sure each one was associated with the correct contact record.
While we were in there working on auto-merge for contact, we also fixed a bug where manually merging was dropping parts of the contact record. You can read more about that about that in the Bug Fixes section below.
A couple weeks ago, we overhauled our security deposits, fixing the accounting and adding "refundable" types. At the same time, we added a new Security Deposits detail report, but it wasn't super useful as it was. This past week we upgraded the Security Deposits report to have new filters for amounts and statuses and fleshed out the details to show better information.
You can now search for specific "kept amounts" or look for security deposits that are Collected, Fully Released, Partially Released or Pending. The report rows show more information as well including all the dates, statuses and amounts from what was reserved, released and kept.
The rate calendar also had an "update after the update" this week. A few weeks ago, we worked on the rate calendar, significantly overhauling the colors, formatting, click behavior and more. The user response has been super positive, but we noticed a few things and wanted to take care of them.
First, we noticed that users really appreciated seeing rule-based virtual blocks (the gray lines) that showed no one could arrive or depart on certain days, but there are other things that prevent a day from being booked, like missing rates, so we wanted to add that too. The rate calendar now shows a red warning icon on any day with a missing rate to clearly mark that day as unavailable.
Then, we added a virtual block for the booking window so that minimum days before arrival will show up as not bookable on the rate calendar just like gap rules.
Have you ever wanted to find bookings that are channel connected? Now you can. The main Bookings list has a new filter that lets you search for channel-connected bookings.
To be clear, channel-connected bookings are bookings that were pushed directly to OwnerRez via an API integration and did not require you to send a quote or answer any inquiry. So, for instance, if you have Houfy or FindRentals connected as API-integrated channels, the bookings from those channels would not be be considered "channel connected" because those channels send inquiries that you answer with a quote before the guest books with you directly. Vrbo, Airbnb and Booking.com are examples of channels that send channel-connected bookings.
Speaking of channels, we also changed our property mapping process for channels to follow common business workflows instead of combining the connecting, disconnecting and mode-changing operations into the same page. When you open a channel now, you'll notice that the "Change Property Mappings" button is now a drop-down with with workflow options. The drop-down options are different depending on the channel you're working on.
For Airbnb, you have six options which is the most of any channel:
Clicking on any of those options will take you to a page where you are solely focused on that one thing (un-publishing, disconnecting, changing modes) and nothing else. We did this because we realized that users never need to connect, publish or change modes at the same time, so it was better to be clear about each of those things then combine them all together.
On Booking.com, the mapping options are limited to connecting, disconnecting and changing sync modes. On channels like Vrbo, Houfy and others, the full mapping page still shows as there is no way to change connection status or modes for those channels on the fly.
As we continue to update old pages and normalize the design, we are trying to clean up a few things each week so that we finally get the entire app on the same design palette and everything device-responsive. Accordingly, this past week we upgraded several areas that were still using old-design pages. We cleaned out all the old pages under the Properties, Account and Quote areas. The functionality and pages still exist, but the design is new.
If you're looking for an example, take a look at Third Party Alerts. Go to any property and drill in then click on Third Party Alerts on the sidebar menu. Notice the list and create/change pages.
All shiny new. Same with the account close page and everything under quotes. While we were cleaning up some of the quote pages, we moved the Notes tab to the overview page and made it a window that opens inline.
About those Third Party Alerts... While we were in there, we fixed the system alert that tells you "the third party has unsubscribed" to use the new email design, and the Settings > System Alerts area now shows it as an option to turn it off.
Couple last little tweaks to mention...
Most of you receive inquiries, like email and SMS, many times per day. Showing the "received" date is helpful but not as much as showing the time. In the past, we added received time to the communication history area, and we decided to add received time to the Inquiries list as well. The time will show in your account's time zone, so if you're wondering why the time appears ahead or behind, check out your time zone setting and make sure it's correct.
A long time ago, before we had direct channel integration with Airbnb and Vrbo, we built a "Rate Push" tool that crawls Airbnb and Vrbo's websites (if you're logged into those channels) and updates rates for your listings. The tool only pushes some rates (no period rates, no discounts, no fees, no taxes, no stay rules) and only works on some Vrbo and Airbnb accounts depending on where you are in the world and what type of rate settings you have on the channel. It was never designed to be a permanent solution or trusted forever. For now, the tool continues to work, but we have marked it as "deprecated" which means we will no longer upgrade or support the Rate Push tool moving forward. If you are one of the few dozen users that still relies on the Rate Push tool, we're sorry that you'll be losing something you use, but it's been a long time coming. If you're wondering why we're doing this, the Rate Push tool costs far more for to maintain than it's worth, it causes channel problems, and it's is a violation of the channels' Terms and Conditions - channels that we are official partners of. In addition, there is no long any need to use the Rate Push tool because our direct channel integrations sync rates with the channels via API which is a far better and far more-comprehensive solution than what the Rate Push tool ever did. We will leave the Rate Push tool up for the time being, but once it breaks or requires an upgrade (because of changes in the channels' websites) we will be removing it for good. To be clear, this does not affect the Channel Bridge tool in general - downloading bookings and reviews will still work, same as before.
Calendar sync clarity. We noticed that users are often confused when they see an error, coming from calendar sync, but then see nothing in the calendar sync event list, or they are confused when calendar syncs merges and they don't see that either. To fix this, we now check if the last success time is after the last item in the list and we add a dummy calendar sync event called "Synced Successfully with No Changes". And when associating a booking with a calendar sync by match, we now create a "Booking Merged" sync event.
Refunding kept funds on security deposits. A few weeks back, we did a massive update of our security deposit system to fix accounting and add "refundable" types. As part of that, you can now refund kept funds after the fact, so that if you and guest reached a different resolution, you can undo what you kept. However, we noticed a small error with how those funds are refunded for users that use Stripe for payment processing. All fixed now!
Payment receipt emails with wrong totals. We found and fixed an issue where payment receipt emails were being sent for Vrbo channel-connected bookings before the booking total was updated.
Rate multipliers not terminating. We saw a situation where a surcharge was set for every 2 guests above 4 up to 6, but putting in 8 guests made it hit twice instead of just once. The "up to 6" maximum amount should be honored even if there are more guests than the 6. This is now fixed.
Evil emoji? We see it all around here! We noticed a situation where emoji in the property headline (like "Owl's Nest Hideout 🦉") would sometimes blow up when pushing content to Airbnb, but only in very rare situations. We finally figured it out and fixed it. If you're curious, it had to do with how UTF32 characters were being truncated, making pat of the emoji code get cut off.
Double the host fees? Yikes! We found and fixed an issue where Airbnb host fees were showing up twice on the Line Item Pivot report. This only happened with deleted fees, but it still had to be fixed!
Travel Insurance purchases when carrier is down. We found and fixed an issue where travel insurance were being dropped if the insurance carrier was down. Instead of trying again later, the network issue would cause the travel insurance request to think it was declined and fail back to the guest or user that requested it. We now detect the network outage and handle it gracefully.
We have an icon for that. While overhauling the Rate Calendar, we added a nifty little legend above the calendar. After it was released, we noticed that someone on our engineering team, who shall remain nameless, used a question mark ("?") on the legend link instead of the correct icon for that. That person pointed out that someone else, who also shall remain nameless, was unclear in specifying that an icon should be used. After much deliberation, the icon was put in place and order has been restored to the galaxy.
Enhance quote payment method testing messages. Recently, we noticed that users sometimes get confused when they do a test quote that doesn't show a payment method they've configured because the rule doesn't allow it. For instance, the user will have a check payment method configured but the quote doesn't show it because the quote is too last minute for the check method to apply. To help with this confusion, we added some messaging. If the user is logged on when looking at a quote, we now show any payment methods that are hidden by rule so that the user understands why the payment method can't be used.
Saint Martin. Times change. Looks like our country list needs to get with the times. We updated our country list to have the correct country code for Saint Martin as opposed to Sint Maarten. And yes, those are two separate countries that share the same island.
Update Airbnb cancellation policy descriptions. We've clarified the meaning of each cancellation policy based on Airbnb's latest documentation. Check out Airbnb's cancellation documentation on their website.
Quote holds work for Airbnb special offers. Want to send an Airbnb guest a special offer AND hold the dates for them? We gotcha!
Default rental agreement email template should use BUFIXUP. We have field codes that will insert a link to a guest form that the guest can use to do certain actions like make payments or sign a renter agreement. We notice that the default renter agreement email template was using a link asking the guest to sign the renter agreement which sounds... good, right? Except that there's a better form you can use - the "fix up" guest form. The "fix up" guest form will do multiple things including ask for POC info, get a signed renter agreement and collect a credit card for security deposits as well. It does this automatically depending on what is needed based on the booking's rules.
How do you describe this? If an event-based trigger didn't run because the relative criteria doesn't match, the message we show wasn't clear. We clarified it.
Fix property share styling. You don't need two page headers, do you? The new property sharing feature had two page headers showing for some reason. Fixed!
Make widget help article link clickable again. In the widgets area, there's a link to our support articles that explains how to use the Embed Code and other widget stuff. The link was hidden by something over top of it, but all better now!
Quoting historical dates? We strive to stay out of your way as much as possible, but we also try to be helpful when appropriate. If you have ever accidentally put in historical dates when creating a quote, you might not have even noticed, as the system allows that without a hitch (assuming your rules allow it). But this is a pretty uncommon scenario, so we added an extra confirmation step if we notice that the quote arrival date has already passed.
Delete more owners. If you assign an owner to a property, but then delete that property, what happens to the owner? Well previously we wouldn't let you delete that owner, but now you can!
Clean up "Floor" and "Situated In" types. Some minor validation was needed here, that's all. If you don't know where these property details are, don't worry - we'll show you if you run into it.
Merge more guest details. Ever merged a guest? Maybe you discovered that files and notes didn't merge. That's now fixed. We also added tag and custom field merging while we were in there. And hey, thanks to the new enhancements we talked about above (ie. guests now auto-merge) you shouldn't have to manually merge as many contact records anymore!
Recheck Vrbo listing status periodically. We recently added a Vrbo listing status column, that ties into the live listing status Vrbo provides to our system, but we forgot that it may not be up to date unless the user hits the "Check Status" button. We tweaked it to check if the status is empty and update it as needed so that the column can show correct information for all listings regardless of history.
Tell Vrbo the channel is inactive if they try to get the details or send a booking. Vrbo reaches out to our system many times per day and asks us about our users, listings, bookings and so on - this is all part of the awesome integration we developed to make sure you can update Vrbo directly and provide proper content, rates, rules and availability. However, we noticed that sometimes a Vrbo channel integration is disabled on the OwnerRez side, but we weren't saying that to Vrbo. We upgraded our API feeds with Vrbo to return the proper error messages for integrations that are disabled.
Clarify Booking.com connection confirmation errors. Previously, our error email would refer you to a missing confirmation step even though the process had you auto-confirm. We changed that message in the property mapping page of the Booking.com channel settings, and we put a note at the beginning of the error message instead of at the end.
What a shame Europe is not covered as the pricing seems much better than Price Labs.
Can we PLEASE have an "Insert Field" for "Discount". It would be VERY useful in writing templates that discuss the discount given to a guest. There could actual be two. One for the dollar amount and the other for the description. I dont know about anybody else, be when we get quotes come in for dates we normally would not book, we turn around and give them a discount if they book. Currently this is all done manually for the discount information. Thanks OR team, keep up the AWESOME work. I dont how you guys do it!
The Superhog website has a bunch of pages about how it works and an FAQ (https://superhog.com/frequently-asked-questions) where they answer what countries they operate in and what the costs are.
Agree its hard enough getting guests to sign the rental agreement some times and I fear this is just another barrier for legitimate guests. There is no information about cost or how the workflow integrates. Can we please have more detail.
Hi everyone! Slow week on updates because a bunch of us were at VRMA, but we still managed to bang out 13 bug fixes. Take a look!
Always process Travel Insurance. We have a "Confirm and Finalize" page where users often go to make 'pending' bookings permanent. The confirm page runs the guest's card and does a bunch of stuff including processing Travel Insurance requests. However the user can bypass this by going to the payments area and just running the guest's card directly. When they do that, the booking's 'pending' status is removed. We noticed some scenarios where this process would leave the Travel Insurance request open and not process it. We fixed that.
List optimizations. We noticed that some users had long-running list loads. For instance, when you pull up your list of Expenses, the list might take a few seconds because of how many you had. There were a couple of lists around the system that were doing this. We made some tweaks to how those lists load to get rid of the speed issues. Back to fast! 🏃♀️
Widget scrolling on first load. In a recent update, we made the Property Search/Availability widget automatically scroll to the top when loading pages because it uses a pager bar at the bottom to show a certain number of pages at a time. When moving to the next or previous page, the widget now automatically scrolls to the top so that the guest can see the property results without having to constantly move up and down. However, we noticed that this was happening on the first page when the widget is first loading causing some web pages to jump down to where the widget is. We fixed this so that it no longer happens on the initial load.
No blog yet. Some of our upcoming work on hosted websites, specifically around a blog option we're adding, was leaked early! Some users saw some blog buttons that went nowhere. All gone now.
Default commission/expense amounts on new charge line items. Last week we updated the charges line item grid to work better on mobile. However, while doing that, we introduced a bug where Commission and Expense amounts were not being set correctly when a new line item was added and a surcharge type was selected. This is now fixed.
Security deposit reminders for Airbnb. Back in the days before Airbnb security deposits, we didn't want security deposit reminders going out to Airbnb bookings so we would turn that off for Airbnb bookings automatically, no matter what your settings were. Now that security deposits are managed by Airbnb and shown to the guest, the reminder should go out like any other bookings, so we stopped doing that.
Pending Vrbo bookings not showing correct amounts. If you get bookings from Vrbo in Request To Book mode, the booking comes into OwnerRez in pending status then updates when you confirm and run the card. However, we noticed that in some cases, the Amount Received totals on the booking's transactions page was not updating. This has been fixed.
Reactivating old properties should reactivate the mutual blocks too. If you deactivated a property before July 2020, and subsequently reactivated it, you may have discovered that previous mutual blocking was no longer functional. We ran a cleanup on those so you can reactivate those properties now with peace of mind.
Removing a tag from a booking should remove it from the report too. A sharp-eyed user pointed out that a tag he had deleted from the booking was still showing on the Daily Checklist report.
Some browser like drop-downs a little too much. We recently updated the change charges page to be more mobile friendly, but we discovered that some mobile browsers were too eagerly expanding the first drop-down as soon as you open the page. This is really confusing to you our users, so we told them to stop that.
If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it... Somewhere along the line, we lost the ability to add the Forest location type to properties. We put it back in, so maybe you'll hear that tree fall now. 🌳
Discount codes should go in the right place. If you have discounts you want to apply only to some charges, we offer the position feature. However, we discovered a bug when using a discount code: the discount was always added after surcharges that had no position set. It should be added before, so we fixed that.
Commission and expense should auto-fill. When you add charges to a booking or quote, the commission and expense used to auto-fill from the surcharge (or discount). They now do.
May we just get a simple interface for guests to upload their IDs, please?
Not interested in AI, and being part of biometric surveillance machine.
Is this applicable to European hosts?
On Tuesday 10/19, OwnerRez will be hosting a webinar with StayFi to discuss email marketing.
Collecting and utilizing guests' email addresses can be confusing and take lot of time. We'll sit down with Arthur Colker, CEO of StayFi, to discuss how to get started with email marketing.
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez/StayFi webinar link to register.
You can find all of our past and upcoming webinars on our Webinars page.
Thanks to everyone who joined us during our San Antonio Hangout event! It was a pleasure to finally meet so many familiar faces in person and make plenty of new acquaintances.
This was our first time attending VRMA and it definitely won't be our last! OwnerRez is excited to see what the future holds and we look forward to working collaboratively with our fantastic colleagues and future partners.
Here are some photos we took of the hangout. If you enjoyed it as much as we did, let us know in the comments below. If you have photos to share, email them to us so we can take a look!
Thank you for doing this, and thank you for giving us credit. The idea was ours, excellent execution was by Ownerrez.
We are happy to announce that we've partnered with DPGO to offer our OwnerRez users another dynamic pricing option.
DPGO is a dynamic pricing tool for hosts, vacation rental owners, and short-term rental managers. Their AI-driven software analyzes over 200 market data parameters.
Similar our other dynamic pricing integrations, DPGO will create spot rates automatically in your OwnerRez account every day or whenever their algorithms deem it necessary. One of the major differences of DPGO is that you must be listed on Airbnb to use their dynamic pricing system. Their database is comprised of all USA and Canadian Airbnb listings.
Manage prices and availability rates with data-driven insights and knowledge of your target market.
Get started with DPGO by visiting the DPGO website and check out the OwnerRez support doc for how to integrate OwnerRez with DPGO.
Happy Friday!😃
It's been a little while since we've posted an industry news because we've had SO MANY UPDATES to talk about. If you missed our recent product updates, be sure to take a look at the Midsummer Updates series we've posted over the past couple weeks. The series covers all of the product updates that were released back in July and August. There were 9 parts, beginning with this one, and it's worth the time to read about the dozens of new updates.
The San Antonio VRMA conference is next week! If you're in the area, join us Monday, October 4th from 6:00pm - 9:00pm, at Prost Hous! Come say hi and enjoy a cold brew or a mouthwatering appetizer buffet on us. While we're talking about VRMA, they recently announced to their members that they are partnering with Vrbo to include rental property owners, many of whom self-manage bookings through platforms such as Vrbo. This decision was made to enhance professionalism in short-term vacation rentals and encourage owners to share their expertise.
The Honolulu County Planning Commission proposed a new bill that would change the definition of a short-term rental from 30 days to under 180 days. That doesn't sound very short...🤔 This will specifically affect those in residential areas, however these changes would need to be approved by the Honolulu City Council prior to implementation.
Strasburg, VA Planning Commission has introduced a new short-term rental ordinance intended to regulate STR's and enforce a 6% transient-occupancy tax. This would also require one additional parking space per guest room for both owner-occupied and non owner-occupied properties.
Summit County, CO housing department has made conversion plans for short-term rentals. The idea behind this is to increase the number of affordable housing units in Summit County. One of the proposed strategies would be to convert short-term rentals into long-term rentals for local residents. The details are not yet solidified, but the department would like to roll out the program on October 15th.
From time to time, we showcase OwnerRez users that show exemplary work. Not only does operating a vacation rental business take a lot of time, but also a huge amount of effort. This week we spoke with Fred from Villas in Jamaica. Fred's website and operation can be found at villasinjamaica.com. Below are the questions we asked and his responses.
Fred: We've been in the Vacation Rental business for over 30 years...Our core business was retail travel agency, tour operator and hotel & villa representation / non traditional properties in Jamaica.
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Fred: In a past life I was a musician and built guitars for years. I also have a background in Real Estate sales & management. I have been in this business for 30 years, and have done a ton of researched for years. From the top to the bottom, OwnerRez is hands down is the best software out there. It can handle all the strange curve balls that other systems simply don't have the tools for. Our website is from OneRooftop, but we don't use the booking engine, we use OwnerRez because it works so much better. Other booking engines can't do the arbitrary things that OwnerRez can! They try to cram their hotel model into the vacation rental environment, which leaves something to be desired.
Fred: Back in the day Reggae Music and Jamaican culture. We represent properties exclusively in Jamaica where I also own a home. Jamaica is unique in the vacation rental business because all the properties are all fully staffed. You get to connect with the staff so you have a better understand of the area and a unique experience. We handle 300+ homes and they're all fully staffed as a standard!
Fred: Gives me an opportunity to make available the experience of staying in a private home instead of traditional hotels. Great for families, special event, birthday and weddings. Once stay at a vacation rental once or twice, you'll be doing it in the future. Vacation rentals off much more privacy vs in a hotel, which is a huge plus for a lot of people trying to get away.
Fred: The ever changing marketplace. Also the fact that very large businesses in the travel industry come in and try to merge into the vacation rental space. They don't do a great job and misrepresent the industry.
Fred: We have been using the Ownerez booking engine for decades...After endless research they are the best! We aren't even using OwnerRez to the fullest extent.
Fred: Flexibility on how rate data is used - no close second. OwnerRez has a product that can handle all different rate values and situations. The system can accommodate my rates and display them how I want, I don't have to adjust to the system. For that reason OwnerRez is the best!
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Thanks, Fred! We wish Villas in Jamaica much success as they continue to manage their business and thrive in the vacation rental industry!
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