Latest Activity...
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
From time to time, we showcase OwnerRez users that show outstanding work. Not only does operating a vacation rental business take a lot of time, but also a huge amount of effort. This week, we’re back in the interview chair with Kacey from Premium Rentals. Kacey's website and operation can be found at PremiumRentals.com. Below are the questions we asked and his responses.
Kacey: As for OwnerRez specifically, I remember when I started with you guys I had two properties, and I was having such a hard time even managing those two between Airbnb and Vrbo calendars. OwnerRez was a great solution for two properties, but then that’s when the magic happened and I quickly saw that because of OwnerRez there was no difference between two properties and 1,000. There is so much simplicity and automation to OwnerRez that I truly could manage 1000 properties as easily as I could manage 2. So the journey begins, we are now at a humble 83 with 15 more leads in the pipeline and should be on pace to close out the year right near 100!
Kacey: I worked my way up to being a general manager for several businesses where I found my passion for working around highly driven individuals who bring hard work ethic to a team. I earned my business management degree from Ricks College, after which I landed a career within a local RV dealership in Idaho as a General Manager working my way up to becoming the Regional Director of the company. Back in 2008, I started flipping homes as a side hobby. I then spent the next 8 years independently remodeling and selling 15 homes as I balanced my career and my family with 3 children.
Kacey: In 2017 we had just wrapped up the final touches on a home we intended to sell. My wife Tiffanie had the idea to hold onto the property and to give the short-term rental industry a try by listing it as an Airbnb rental for an event happening within our city over the weekend. This turned into a massively successful venture as the calendar filled with all sorts of bookings and we decided to keep the property up and running as a short-term rental. In 2019 I decided to jump 100% full time into the business, leaving the RV industry and opened the proprietary self-built system to manage for other clients. Since 2019, Premium Rentals has grown from 24 properties to now having over 80 listings and is rapidly growing!
Kacey: What I like the most about VR industry is the opportunity it has opened up for me and my family to be able to easily grow and scale a business and be independent from working for anyone else.
Kacey: What I dislike most about the VR business is how picky COVID has made everyone. If I have to hear another guest say how our nearly perfectly clean homes have a spec of dust hidden some place and they say “I would expect a better cleaning considering COVID” LOL! Covid has made cleanings that used to be considered perfect no longer good enough.
Kacey: OwnerRez has opened my eyes to integrations I had never thought about, especially when I was at 2. We now integrate with Merchant Services, QuickBooks, PriceLabs, RemoteLock, Duve and so much more to come. Most of the integrations I only looked at because OR integrated with it. OwnerRez offered it, and I figured if you offer it, it's for a reason.
>>>>>>
Thanks, Kacey! We wish Premium Rentals much success and look forward to you breaking into the double digits soon with 100+ properties!
I'm seeing some issues with the auto reviews. A review is tagged and marked in a several ways as a bad guest so I don't want a review sent.
Yet I have 2 system messages one saying it was sent/scheduled the other saying it was skipped.
I'm hoping it wasn't actually sent as it makes life very difficult with the guest.
Also if I look at the review in OR it shows a written date 14 days ahead so I assume something has been scheduled. Why would it schedule 14 days ahead any guest review would be past the deadline. Can you explain the logic or what is going on here? I have sent a support ticket with the details.
Hello! After looking at your account, the review was not sent but an erroneous system alert was sent to you. We'll get that fixed in an upcoming release.
Thanks for submitting a support ticket for us to look at all this specifically. We can continue the dialogue there.
Small feature request...would it be possible to support field codes, or at least a very small subset of them, in the automatic reviews? I'd like to do something like "We loved welcoming {FNAME} to our home!" to make it slightly more personal and less obvious that these are automated.
You're reading our minds, Chris! This is already in the works for a handful of field codes. It should be out in the near future. Happy New Year!
I'm seeing some issues with the auto reviews. A review is tagged and marked in a several ways as a bad guest so I don't want a review sent.
Yet I have 2 system messages one saying it was sent/scheduled the other saying it was skipped.
I'm hoping it wasn't actually sent as it makes life very difficult with the guest.
Also if I look at the review in OR it shows a written date 14 days ahead so I assume something has been scheduled. Why would it schedule 14 days ahead any guest review would be past the deadline. Can you explain the logic or what is going on here? I have sent a support ticket with the details.
Does Airbnb not support a seasonal differential for this fee?
Unfortunately, the pet fee is like other Airbnb fees such as cleaning and only supports a single all time setting, with no possibility to set amounts by date.
I have a smaller pet fee ($40/stay) that applies to the shoulder/off season and a higher pet fee ($100/stay) that applies to peak season. It appears that OR is pushing the higher fee to Airbnb for all dates (a test booking on Airbnb for next week makes the rate jump by $100 if pets are selected). Does Airbnb not support a seasonal differential for this fee?
It seems odd to look at the booking notes as this field is more often used for logistic type messages and not generally derogatory. Typically thete are always some notes.
As the reviews are about the person it makes more sense to link it to the CRM notes.
Small feature request...would it be possible to support field codes, or at least a very small subset of them, in the automatic reviews? I'd like to do something like "We loved welcoming {FNAME} to our home!" to make it slightly more personal and less obvious that these are automated.
With the AirBNb automatic reviews settings "Any Notes Were Written"
Can you confirm which notes field this is checking, is it only the guest CRM notes or does it check the booking notes as well??
Thanks
It only looks at the booking notes. Not the guest notes.
With the AirBNb automatic reviews settings "Any Notes Were Written"
Can you confirm which notes field this is checking, is it only the guest CRM notes or does it check the booking notes as well??
Thanks
Airbnb only supports per-stay flat and percentage options for the pet fee, not per night. Looks like your standard pet fee is per night, so you'd need to create another one just for Airbnb that is per stay.
Merry Christmas to US! Thank you for all these amazing enhancements -- and all your hard work always!
Quick note that I'm not seeing the Airbnb pet fees working. I used the test you mentioned, to no avail. ("If you're looking to double-check that your pet fee is working, first select some nights without any pets and record what the nightly rate is. Then select a pet and compare the new nightly rate. You should see the price per night increase exactly by the amount of your pet fee.") The total trip cost remained the same with or without pets in my test.
Back at the beginning of November, we wrote a lengthy blog post about how our SMS pricing was changing to deal with "large SMS body" senders by targeting segments instead of whole messages.
Since that time, we've done a lot of things to help users get ready. We've explained what SMS segments are, added a detailed SMS segments calculator, and provided an SMS X-Ray tool when writing messages to help you see and clean up bloated segments.
This past week, we released "SMS Brands" that allow you to establish a "sending reputation" with the major carriers like Verizon, ATT, and T-Mobile. Over time, this will make your SMS messages and phone calls, from your OwnerRez phone number, show up as "verified sender" on guests' smartphones and not be blocked or delayed. The SMS Brands feature is so new, it hasn't yet been documented in our product updates or support articles. You can find it under Settings > SMS Phone Numbers.
Over the past two months, we've also been busy studying the effects of the new pricing model on existing users, based on the messages they have historically sent.
What we found led us to believe that the announced pricing changes were too high. While it is correct to target segments instead of whole messages, the price of 200 included segments with 3¢ (0.03) per extra would really hit all users, not just the large-body senders. Even smallish SMS messages tend to have an extra segment or two, so 200 runs out quickly. What we found is that the price increase would double most users' SMS charges and increase pricing for large-body senders by 8 or 10 times. Way too high!
After studying the numbers further, we have finalized the new pricing. Our SMS pricing will include 500 segments for free and then charge 1.5¢ (0.015) per extra segment.
Weeks ago, we already updated our pricing page, Cost and Fees articles, and other places inside the app to reflect the new pricing, but I wanted to post a special notice about this as users get ready for the new year. For many users, this will still result in an SMS price increase, so take the time to study your message patterns to see if you can decrease the content. SMS messages should be cogent by nature anyway, to capture guests' attention, or guests will gloss over the messages without reading.
Still have questions about the new SMS pricing? As always, just drop a comment here, start a forum post or contact us directly.
Hey everyone! Sorry for butting in on your holiday break, but I wanted to mention a couple of things. First, the OwnerRez team would like to wish you a wonderful holiday season! However you celebrate it, enjoy the downtime with friends and family! 🤟🍷
But also, we have some last-minute presents you can unwrap!
Last Monday, we put out a big release of 44 updates with some exciting new features that we've been working on for a while like Automatic 5-Star Reviews, SMS Brands, and the forums overhaul. Have you noticed the forums yet?!
A few days later, we released another 11 updates that were mostly bug fixes but also added a new enhancement to the property photos area.
Why all these changes right before Christmas? Because we couldn't chase our team out of the office of course! But hey, now they're finally gone, things are quiet, and I have a few minutes to write about it all. Let's get started.
As a smart vacation rental PM or homeowner, you probably already know that most guests who would a leave great 5-star review also tend to be the ones that forget the most. If the stay was bad, they are more likely to leave a review because the sting of it stays with them or they want to get even by hurting your business. But many would-be 5-star reviews get completely dropped after the guest has gone. Out of sight, out of mind!
Airbnb proactively nudges the host and guest to leave a review, but many guests still don't write one. As you may have noticed, the biggest thing that pushes the guest to leave a review is when you, yourself, write a review first. When that happens, Airbnb will send the guest a message saying "Read what the host said about you" or "See your rating" but first makes the guest write their own review. This is extremely useful because it pushes most guests to write a review who would otherwise not have.
Over time, many hosts that have discovered this trick will quickly run through their Airbnb bookings, every few days, and write a few quick sentences like "Thanks for coming out, great guest, would host again!" in different variations. If you're a PM managing dozens of properties, you probably don't have detailed information to leave on each guest, but if nothing negative happened, you want to prompt all of them to write a review. So you run through them and leave some generic happy words.
Now, OwnerRez will do that for you. That's right - you can now configure OwnerRez to automatically write 5-star reviews for your Airbnb bookings as long as your Airbnb bookings don't trigger certain negative indicators.
To see it in action, go to the CRM menu > Reviews and click on Host Reviews. The Host Reviews tab will only show if you have an Airbnb channel integration in place. You'll see a button called Automatic 5-Star Reviews on the top right of the Reviews list. If you click the button, you'll notice a couple of options that are self-explanatory.
If you click "Turn On", it will take you to the same page as the Configure Settings if you've never turned it on before.
The configuration page is simple. It asks you how long you want to wait after the booking to write the review (we recommend just a couple of days - no more than 2 or 3), what review template you'd like to see, and the negative indicators that you want to flag so that the system doesn't accidentally write good reviews for bad people.
If you've never created any Review Templates, it will ask you to write one directly in the settings you're configuring.
That last "Bookings to Skip" part is especially important to understand. You don't want OwnerRez accidentally writing good reviews for bad guests. This could push an irritable guest to leave you a bad review if they anticipated that you did that to them first. So make sure to read through the "Bookings to Skip" section and select the negative indicators. Each of the options is an indicator that the booking may have been a bad or negative experience. For instance, if money was collected from the security deposit, you may not want to write a 5-star review because (a) the guest might have caused damage or (b) the guest might be upset about the extra charge and you don't want to encourage them to write a review.
You can also use tags to stop specific bookings and guests from being reviewed. For instance, you might have a "bad guest" tag that you proactively add to the booking in the middle of a stay. If so, simply use the "is tagged" criteria to select those tags.
If you'd like OwnerRez to rotate between different types of responses, you can do that. Simply go back out to the Host Reviews area, click on Manage Templates and write as many templates as you want.
These are the same review templates that you use as "drafts" when writing reviews on the booking.
By their nature, review templates should be short - no more than a couple of sentences. The point of automatic reviews is that they aren't detailed and don't talk specifically about the guest's stay.
If you want to write detailed reviews, then you shouldn't use automatic reviews. You should continue writing reviews manually one by one as the opportunity arises.
After saving your review templates, the Automatic 5-Star Review settings page will show the list of templates and let you select the ones you want to send as automatic if you don't want to use the entire list.
This will allow you to separate the generic "good guest" reviews from the others you might use for more detailed responses or bad/negative responses.
A couple of important notes on automatic reviews:
A few days ago, I announced that our SMS pricing was changing again (for the better). In that blog post, I hinted at a new "SMS Brand" feature, so let's take a minute to walk through that.
This feature is small in size but very influential in purpose. Every current SMS user needs to take advantage of this as soon as possible.
Overall, an "SMS Brand" is basically just a profile (ie. business name, phone, and address) that you provide to carriers like Verizon and T-Mobile that identify you when they are sending your SMS messages to their customers. It's basically like Caller ID for SMS. It tells the world who you are and continues to ride along with your SMS messages even if you change your SMS phone number. It establishes a sending reputation so that the carriers know you're legit and don't flag your messages as spam or slow down their delivery.
To create your SMS Brand, go to Settings > SMS Phone Numbers and drill in. We will automatically show you the "Create a brand" page right off if you haven't done it before.
After filling it out, click Save and Submit, and the form will disappear with a message telling you that it's pending review. Our carrier will notify you, typically within an hour, if it was approved or rejected. If rejected, you can try submitting it again.
Beyond the value that this brings to your SMS delivery, please know that the industry (and US government) have enacted rules that will soon require SMS Brands to be in place for all "A2P 10DLC" messaging. That might look like a bunch of gobbledygook, but it basically stands for "application-to-person messaging using regular 10-digit phone numbers" which is what OwnerRez does. You have a 10 digit phone number, and it's used to send SMS messages from an application (OwnerRez) to a person (the guest).
Don't want to create an SMS Brand? You don't have to, and we will continue sending SMS messages on your behalf. But very soon, if your SMS Brand is not established, sending may no longer be possible. Even now, many carriers are slowing down delivery or blocking numbers entirely if a sender is unrecognized and sends a lot of messages.
Here are some interesting things to know about SMS Brands:
This one doesn't need much explanation, but it's been anticipated by OwnerRez users for several weeks now as a coming feature.
Airbnb recently announced some new fee types for pets and short stays. Airbnb supported these in the control panel, but there was no way to set them via API. Because of this, all of our API integrated users couldn't set their fees.
Now you can! On the OwnerRez side, there's nothing to show in terms of screenshots or pictures. And there's nothing to do in terms of configuration. If you have pet fees or short stay fees configured, we will now automatically push those fees to Airbnb.
On the Airbnb side, when a guest goes to book, they can now select the number of pets they are bringing.
And the instant price quote will automatically adjust to include the pet fee.
Please note that the pet fee is not enumerated separately like cleaning or service fees. The pet fee is added to the nightly rate like linen, resort, and other types of fees. If you're looking to double-check that your pet fee is working, first select some nights without any pets and record what the nightly rate is. Then select a pet and compare the new nightly rate. You should see the price per night increase exactly by the amount of your pet fee.
The "short stay" cleaning fee is pushed to Airbnb only if you have multiple cleaning fees and one of them has maximum night criteria less than or equal to 2.
Have you visited the OwnerRez Community Forums lately? That's the same ole "forums" that we link to all the time. Nothing new about the location or purpose.
But if you've been there lately, you might have noticed that the design and feel have significantly improved. While this might not seem like a new feature exactly, the overhaul involved a lot of work by our team, and I wanted to highlight it.
The topic threads have improved to get rid of ancillary information, devote more screen real estate to the conversation and highlight what matters.
You can also link to specific posts, and when using the link, the post is highlighted so that you know which one the link is referencing.
All forum pages now work well on mobile and tablet devices.
Best of all, we've improved the post editor, so that you can use rich text (bold, underline, italics) and attach files and pictures to your posts.
Have a problem that a pic would help clarify? Just drop it right inside your post!
There is also a profile page that will show your posts and avatar.
If you don't have an avatar, use the little pencil button on the photo to upload one in a few clicks. By default, we use the public Gravatar associated with your email address (if you have one) but any uploaded avatar image will take priority over the public Gravatar one.
Again, this forum overhaul may not seem like an important change, but we take support very seriously here and consider it to be one of our best attributes.
As we look ahead to 2022 and beyond, our forums will continue being used to promote community ideas, gather feature requests and handle support. We have talked about moving our help-desk and ticket systems into the forums area as well to better streamline our processes, so look for potential updates on that in the future.
While adding the new Airbnb pet and short stay fees, and working on Channel Bridge, we noticed that there was additional booking data we could retrieve for Airbnb bookings. Specifically, the guest fee and the number of pets on the booking. Now that guests can select the number of pets (which triggers the pet fee) the booking can also display the exact number they select.
We updated this for both API bookings and Channel Bridge bookings, so whether the booking comes in automatically or is downloaded via Channel Bridge, the number of pets will be included.
We recently added the ability to add room and amenity associations to property photos. While the feature has been widely adopted, it's been difficult for users and our own support team to know which room a photo goes with after the fact. When arriving at the property photos page, it shows all photos ordered by number with no clear indication which rooms go with which, or even if a photo is associated with a room.
This past week, we released a new overview page for property photos that shows a read-only layout of photos grouped by rooms. Here's a quick example of how it looks after running through and associating some photos with rooms.
Each room will display as a section with the photos that are associated with it inside that section. If a photo isn't associated with a room, it will fall under the top "General" section.
Notice that the photos on this page are read-only. This is meant to be an overview page, not an editable form. You can't upload new photos, change captions, or re-arrange the photo order here. To do those things, click the Change button at the top and you'll see the familiar photo editing area.
While we were messing with photos, we also added "Size" to the details that show when you hover over the "i" icon on each photo. Dimensions, Size, and Uploaded Date are all there now for easy viewing.
To clarify, the "Size" that is shown here is the full-sized image you originally uploaded, not necessarily what OwnerRez or channels will use for a particular purpose. We take smaller cuts of your photos, automatically, to use as thumbnails on quotes or carousel images on listings.
Last month, we updated our PM module to begin including $0 bookings in owner statements. This was done because $0 bookings are often relevant to the owner, and PMs need the ability to include or exclude them according to preference and not have them all summarily hidden. Our intentions were good, but we stepped it in a bit while getting this out the door. What do they say about good intentions being used as paving material? 😟
Over the next couple of releases, we navigated through "fixing" this a number of ways as PMs found zillions of old bookings appearing. We attempted to auto-hide some old $0 bookings but then hid too many and had to roll that back.
A common complaint from PMs is that there was no way to turn this on or off globally. If a PM wanted the original way of not showing $0 bookings, they'd have to manually exclude them on every statement, which in turn means not being able to create multiple owner statements in batch since each and every statement would have to be checked in Preview mode first. That's a pretty legit compliant!
To solve this, we've added a global setting to owner records where you can specify, owner by owner, if you want $0 bookings included. This little guy right here:
By default, all owners will have this turned off, but check your owners to make sure it's set the way you want it.
As with the owner statement generation settings, this option will propagate to the statement creation form where you can select or de-select it there as well. So if you want an owner to see $0 bookings only on one particular statement, you can select it once just for that statement.
There's not much to show on this next one, in terms of pictures, but it's a great update because it paves the way for some coming changes in 2022 that everyone is going to want to get in on.
The way our Portal Access area has always worked is that each user account can have child "portal access" users inside their account. Those portal access users can only access the properties and information shared with them by that one parent user. But this isn't practical. You might give access to a housekeeper, who becomes one of your portal access users, but then that same housekeeper needs access to a different user's account because the housekeeper cleans houses for both OwnerRez users. This happens frequently and, when it happens, the housekeeper has to have multiple portal access accounts created, each with a different email address. Yuck!
This past week, we released an update that changes portal access users to a new "login only" type of user account. This will allow all users, whether regular or portal, to be at the same level so that portal access users can access multiple users' accounts in the future from the same single login. A portal user won't pay for their OwnerRez account, and they still will be limited to only what was shared, but they can access multiple different user's accounts from the same login instead of having multiple portal accounts.
We've just started here, so don't look for any visual changes in the app yet, but know that we're transitioning in this direction so that portal access can be developed in much deeper ways. The next update will include an invite system where portal users will be able to be invited to your account so that they can be assigned access to stuff. Portal users will be able to see all the accounts they have been granted access to but manage their own profile and security individually.
Do you have any special styling on your widgets or hosted website pages? If so, you might know what I mean when I say "CSS". The CSS field is common in a number of places in OwnerRez. CSS provides users with a way to customize the styles (eg. font, color, size) of the content that shows on widgets and hosted website pages. You may also use the source code window (ie. HTML editor) when crafting renter agreements or email templates. The CSS and HTML fields use a special editor called Ace to provide a programming-like interface for doing CSS, HTML, and other types of code.
We recently noticed that this code editor was not mobile-friendly as our version of Ace was a couple of versions behind the latest, so we upgraded it.
It looks cleaner now and works on mobile devices. This wasn't a big update, and many of you will never use it, but we wanted to get it done anyway. It had been overdue for a while.
We are often at the mercy of the channels when it comes to what we can show on bookings. Over time, as the channels add or remove information, we update our systems to work with their updates.
Booking.com recently started sending pre-payment information for bookings. This is the information that tells us that the guest already paid on Booking.com even if a real credit card wasn't included. If you read the long-form booking description from Booking.com, you might have noticed blurbs like this:
"This reservation has been pre-paid..."
Or like this:
"...paid by Booking.com Payment"
While those blurbs might be helpful to human eyes, they don't help our computer systems whatsoever.
Fortunately, Booking.com updated the information they send to enumerate the pre-payment information in a computer-readable way. We updated OwnerRez to store the pre-payment information which helps us make better decisions about what to schedule (or not) regarding payments and what emails to send.
In our ongoing effort to normalize time zone and culture settings, we noticed that our financial transactions (payments, refunds, etc) were using our older method of storing time, so we updated those areas to our new methods and now show all payment and refund times in the account's preferred time zone.
If you're wondering why payments times are still showing in a time zone different than yours, check your Time Zone settings in the Culture Settings area.
If you have per-property time zones configured (ie. your property is in a different time zone than your account overall) please note that payments and refunds will only show in the account time zone, not in the time zone of the property. In general, property-specific time zones only apply to what is shown to guests publicly, not the stuff inside the app.
This update only fixed payment and refund times. We are planning to correct security deposits, CC processing requests, and other financial records soon. To be clear, the times for those financial transactions are correct, but the time zones might still not be reflecting your preferred account time zone.
Did you know your SMS phone number can receive regular phone calls? Of course it can. It's a regular phone number like any other!
There are settings on SMS phone numbers that let you determine what happens when someone calls the number. You can forward the call to a different phone number, such as your own cell phone, or you can direct it to a voicemail for the person to leave a message.
When someone does leave a voicemail, what happens to it? We send you an email, but what if you delete or miss the email? For that matter, what happens if you want to look back at a record of incoming calls, even those that forwarded to you and you talked to?
To handle this, we added a new "Calls" tab in the Communication History area under Tools which shows a record of all calls to your SMS phone number, no matter if they forwarded through to you directly or left a voicemail.
If the caller left a voicemail, we show a link where you can download or listen to the original recording, and a transcript of the voicemail if the call was clear enough for our carrier to decode. Please note that the transcript is automatically created via software, so the grammar is typically incorrect. If the call wasn't clear, the transcript might be unreadable. Regardless, you can always listen to the original recording.
Partially Paid on PM Statements. Last time, we talked about how we fixed owner statements to properly differentiate between unpaid and partially paid when looking at the Owner Statements list. But what about PM Statements? Those needed the same tender love and care, so in this release, we did the same fix to the PM Statements side. You can now correctly see 'Unpaid' versus 'Partially Paid' statements and filter by that as well.
Communication history gone wild. Our Communication History area is pretty cool. You can see an archive of all email, SMS, and Airbnb messages in one spot and filter for different things. If you don't know what I mean, look for that option under the Tools menu. There are different places in the app that link to the Communication History with predefined filters. This allows us, for instance, to show you all of the email history relevant to an individual booking. However, when linking to specific Communication History tabs with predefined filters, we noticed that the other tabs would go to "all time" (ie. no filters) when clicking away from the current tab. This was confusing as many users would get to this area by clicking from a quote or booking to "Email History" and then clicking on the SMS tab. We fixed the tabs to maintain the same quote, inquiry, booking, or guest filters when deep-linking into the Communication History area.
Forum alert images. After doing the new forum overhaul (yes, the one we just mentioned above) we noticed that all of our new system alerts for forum activity (eg. "New reply to a topic") were showing broken images. Those images have now been fixed.
Cancellation refund should round first. Credit card processors don't support payments in partial cents. But our cancellation form was still calculating the refund amount to 100th of a cent! This was causing the validation confirmation to think something was amiss because the final refund amount was less than the expected refund amount... by $0.0001. This is now fixed (for USD and all other currencies)!
Change the charges if the descriptions change. If you move a booking, you may not change the price at all if the new dates have the same rates as the old dates. But if the charge descriptions include the booking dates, you might still want to update the charges so that the correct dates are reflected on the final invoice. Previously, we only looked at the amounts and recommended changes if the amounts changed, but now we look at the descriptions too.
Damage Protection batch update. After a recent update to our Damage Protection area, some users reported that the Batch Update was no longer working. We found and fixed the issue. If you're wondering, the Batch Update allows you to target current and future bookings that need to have Damage Protection applied after you make a change to your property coverage levels.
Trying to "reanswer" an inquiry? We recently introduced a bug that prevents you from selecting a different template when answering an inquiry that is already answered. We've recently fixed that bug.
Marking an inquiry as answered... ...should do so. And now, it does.
Total paid amount on guest form. When guests go to use the "fix up" form in OwnerRez, they are greeted with some information about their booking and party size. Only sometimes, that information is confusing because the guest paid on Airbnb or Vrbo and the amount they paid (on the platform) is different than what is recorded on the booking in OwnerRez. To reduce the confusion, we removed the total amount paid from the form. Showing the amount paid really isn't important in the "fix up" context anyway.
Make Channel Bridge faster and get payout data on Airbnb. Channel Bridge works by crawling through your Airbnb or Vrbo account, just like you would do manually, clicking links and reading information on the page. Recently, Channel Bridge was no longer able to read the "Transactions History" page on Airbnb because Airbnb's page structure changed, so it stopped download payouts. At the same time, we noticed some new things, under the covers, that gave us access to faster better payout information. We switched Channel Bridge over to the new stuff, and it now downloads payouts again, as well as being faster overall.
Clarify channel booking "merge blocked" message. When channel bookings come into OwnerRez, either the first time when we attempt to sort out your history or in an ongoing way for new bookings, we do a merge process to check if there are existing blocks or bookings that the channel booking is the same as. You might have manually blocked the same dates, or the booking might have been imported via a different mechanism. However, if we can't figure it out, we'll alert you that the dates are blocked. We recently added some clarity to this, so that you know more about the conflict and what dates are blocking it.
Future time-based trigger time. Previously, it was incorrectly showing some text from booking-created triggers. We fixed it so that if the trigger will be sent, we show when it will occur.
Help with Facebook Pixel errors. Many users have written in, pointing out that Facebook has sent them messages about their Pixel tracking not working or producing errors. This is a known problem with limitations that Facebook has put in place, and there's very little we can do because Facebook has put onerous restrictions in place based on which domain names can use the same Pixel accounts. It largely has to do with a spat with Apple. 😙 Anywho... Lately, some of our users have been getting other Facebook Pixel error emails about pages not being tracked because of PII (personally identifiable information) being shown in the URL which Facebook has a policy against. We noticed that we could actually target these URLs and exclude them from tracking without breaking the overall tracking pattern for our hosted websites and guest forms, so we put that in place. Your Pixel tracking should now work on all guest forms from start to finish without any of those pesky error emails.
Require multiplier on pet fees. Vrbo requires that all pet fees have a pet "multiplier". A multiplier is the number of times a fee is calculated. For instance, if you charge your pet fee for each and every pet, then your multiplier is "1". We updated our surcharge settings to require a pet fee multiplier number if the "Pet Fee" category is selected at the top. This will enforce good business practices while also making it so that Vrbo channel syncing doesn't crash for your listings with pet fees.
Converge gateway errors. In the past several weeks, the Converge payment gateway suddenly started failing when OwnerRez issued "void" requests (eg. releasing a security deposit). We dug into it and found that the Converge API had suddenly changed to no longer allow some of the fields they allowed in the past. This isn't supposed to happen without a public API announcement, but... it did anyway. We quickly upgrade our end so that Converge transactions could resume cleanly.
Incorrect season wrapping when seasons start and end in different years. Hold onto your hats on this one... There was a scenario we found where if a season should start at the end of this year and wrap to the beginning of next year, but we were calculating for a period next year that intersects the season, it would skip the season entirely. Need an example? Let's suppose your season is "Winter Wonderland" and runs from December 24, 2021 until March 31, 2022 and today's date is sometime in November 2021. And then assume we're excluding surcharges in the "Winter Wonderland" season. A booking rolls in with stay dates of January 13 - 17, 2022. The old logic was skipping past the "Winter Wonderland" period entirely and starting with the Dec 24, 2022 period (next year), so the surcharge wasn't matching correctly. All better now!
Airbnb duplicate guest messages. Airbnb transforms the Unicode non-breaking space character and other Unicode "white space" characters chars to normal spaces. We didn't realize that before, so we were searching for the guest message on our side, it would not find it (since our characters were slightly different than theirs) and create a duplicate message that looked the same. Now that we realize that, we are sanitizing our characters the same way before searching and creating guest records based on Airbnb messages.
Inquiry comments can allow angle brackets. We used to allow this, but a recent update started crashing. We've restored this functionality so you can now use angle brackets (< and >) in your inquiry comments. To be clear, the inquiry comments area won't show rich text (ie. HTML code) live, but it also won't error if you try to save it.
Show changeover restrictions even on departure/arrival days. If there was a changeover restriction like "no arrivals" or "no departures" on the same day that a booking departs or arrives (or also in the middle), the restriction wasn't shown on the rate calendar. We thought this might be confusing, so we tweaked it a little. We now show the gray bar on the arrival side (ie. right side) if "no arrivals" and the guest is departing. We now show the gray bar on the departure side (ie. left side) if "no departures" and the guest is arriving. And the hovercard now shows the correct changeover restriction text in all cases, including in the middle of a booking.
Agreement preview property drop-down now useful! The property drop-down in the agreement preview was getting cut off... We asked the kid with the scissors to leave.
Import Airbnb listings again. Some newer Airbnb listings were not compatible with our property importer because of some really long listing numbers. If you haven't noticed, Airbnb has started using really big listing numbers for all new listings. That's been fixed
Arrival days from now... This is a confusing one, but in short, the arrival days from now criterion on triggers wasn't actually looking at "now." (ie. today) This could result in false positives or false negatives depending on your rules and settings. We fixed this so that all comparisons of "now" are using today's date.
Show the real collection date always. A scheduled security deposit that has already been collected or held, should show the date it was processed, even if the booking changes. Before it wasn't, but now it is.
Don't show rates the guest can't book! On the calendar rate widget, we noticed that rates were showing on days when the rules prevented the guest from actually booking. For instance, the Max Days In Future or Booking Window rules might not allow a day to be booked. Why show a rate? That's misleading. We now hide rates on dates beyond the "max days in future" rule.
Manual payments alert for Booking.com and "card on file" status. We found and fixed a small timing bug with Booking.com bookings where our "manual payments" alert would be sent out without showing a card on file, even though the guest provided one.
QuickBooks Sync should use dumb quotes. Do you know what smart quotes and dumb quotes are? No? Smart quotes look like “this” and dumb quotes (or normal quotes) look like "this". Smart quotes basically look fancy, and sometimes they're called "curly" quotes. When syncing information to QuickBooks, we found out the hard way that QuickBooks chokes on smart quotes. We fixed it by detecting smart quotes and auto-converting them to normal ones on the fly.
What about quotes that do hold dates? There's a blurb on the bottom of our quote emails that says "This quote does not put a hold on the dates requested. The dates will not be reserved until this quote is accepted". It's been that way for more than a decade, going all the way back to the original quote emails that OwnerRez sent in the times that were before.
But that's not true anymore, is it? Back in September, we released an awesome little update that gave quotes the ability to block dates until either the quote expired or the quote was booked. So the email blurb was wrong.
We fixed this to automatically detect if the quote is holding dates and show the correct message on the fly. Note that this blurb is inside the {QHCTAB} field code, so the entire paragraph can be removed or re-styled at any time.
Shiny new alerts! We upgraded the design of the "Scheduled Payment Failed" and "Scheduled Payment Skipped" system alert to use the new alert style and to have an on/off setting like all of the others.
This wasn't really a bug exactly, but it definitely needed to be fixed. We're getting pretty close to having all system alerts converted over.
Statement views grouping. In the previous release, we added some new layout settings to Statement Views and moved the grouping setting to the statement view. However, in the process, we accidentally set everyone's "Group By" setting to "Do not group" even though the majority of users prefer to group by property, and grouping by property is the default. We fixed this to flip statement views back to property grouping.
Prefer booked or blocked color to changeover restriction color on rate calendar On the rate calendar, the gray strip showing booking window restrictions was appearing on top of existing red bookings strips. The red booking strips are higher priority and should be shown instead of the window restriction if both are present.
We fixed this to always show the red booking strip if both are present.
The hovercard will always show the correct information, including Minimum Night or Changeover Restriction
Did we repeat ourselves? Looks like we did! We've removed the double reviews help text on Vrbo channel settings.
Typos! When batch copying rates, there was an extra "to" in a section header. When deleting blocked-off time, the confirmation message referenced "booking". In the Property Sharing area, we called the plural of property "propertys". All have been fixed.
Editing disabled bookings. Ever tried to edit a booking at a disabled property? Doesn't work very well. Well, now it does! We show "[disabled]" wording around the property name, but you can make your edits.
Discounts versus negative amount. Our Line Item Summary report breaks up revenue into general rent, surcharge, and tax buckets with totals at the end. However, we recently realized that we were showing positive and negative amounts for each column with "Discount" as the negative heading. That's confusing. After all, discounts are an actual thing in OwnerRez. If you see a "Discounts" column, you're going to naturally assume it's one of the real ones (eg. last-minute discount or promo code) and not just a negative rent amount. So we did two things to clarify this. First, we added Discount columns to actually show those. Then, we changed the other revenue types to have "Negative" columns. For example, there are now "Rent" and "Rent Negative" columns side by side.
"Sleeps" language. Do we all understand the difference between Sleeps Min and Sleeps Max? Looks like a bunch of people didn't, and for good reason - our property info tab was awkwardly worded. Sleeps Min means "number of unique beds in all rooms". Sleeps Max means "number of sleeping spaces in all rooms based on 1 or 2 people per bed depending on the bed size". We updated our property info tab to say exactly that.
Channel Bridge date should set the correct time zone. In recent times, we've done a lot of work to support user time zones correctly. We noticed another time zone-related issue that needed to be corrected in Channel Bridge. Channel Bridge was overwriting the booking's correct booking time (set in the user's preferred time zone) with a different time from what it crawled and found on the listing site, even though the time and time zone were both already correct. This has now been fixed.
I'm sure I'm missing something, but in your cancellation screen example, if the guest cancels and never stays at the place, why would you refund only half of their paid taxes? Wouldn't you refund 100% of the tax? That money would never go in your pocket in the first place but in your example it looks like it goes in your pocket?
Sorry, found it!
There is no "disable property" button in the top right corner.
Hi everyone! This week, we put out a large 50-update release with several new features (webhooks, enhanced DP, yay! 🎉) and a lot of tweaks and bug fixes. Our previous release was almost a month ago, so we had quite a few items roll up into this one. Let's get started!
Have you created an app for OwnerRez or used our API to automate your data? If so, you'll be excited to learn that we now send webhooks for apps!
To get started with webhooks, open your app in the Developer/API area and scroll to the bottom. There was already a Webhooks section there before, but it was only used for disconnection notices in the past.
Now, you'll see a new "Types" drop-down with Booking and Guest as options.
If you select those types, OwnerRez will begin pushing updates to your app automatically any time a booking or guest is created, changed, or deleted. It doesn't matter how the booking or guest is created in OwnerRez - from a channel, from a third-party app, direct booking, manually in the control panel - we'll notify you and provide you the details in real-time of all changes
For those of you with apps, this is really big news! It means that you no longer need to periodically check OwnerRez throughout the day for updates to your (or your customer's) bookings. We'll notify you instead. This cuts down on the amount of communication going on and gives you near real-time updates of all changes.
To see the data format and read the details about how webhooks are sent, and the format they are sent in, take a look at our new Webhooks Overview support article. Notice that we sent a small payload with just the entity type and ID of what was changed like this:
{
"id": 12345
"user_id": 12345,
"action": "entity_update",
"entity_type": "booking",
"entity_id": 12345
}If you're wondering why we don't send the entire booking or guest object, in its entirety in the payload, that's on purpose. We intentionally designed our payloads to be small to minimize security vulnerabilities and maximize performance. This means that you will need to make additional API calls to load all the details about an event. You should use the entity_type and entity_id to distinguish which API calls are needed.
You should create a table to store all webhooks that come to your app and then process them after the fact. Please read the Webhooks support article in its entirety to understand all aspects of the format as well as how to debug the process and other best practices.
Last thing I'll mention on Webhooks... We added a cool new "test" function so that you can make sure your webhook URL is working. Back in the app area, notice the Webhooks tab at the bottom of your app. There's now a new "Send Test Webhook" button.
Anytime you click that button, we'll send an immediate test to your webhook URL, and, just like the other type of webhooks, you'll see the test event show up on the list of webhook events. Click the Data button on the far right of the event, and a window open to show the details of what was sent.
The same window shows all webhook details, so this is a good place to hang out when you're testing your booking and guest webhooks.
For a while, we've been in talks with RentalGuardian, our primary insurance partner, about providing additional Damage Protection levels to our users. Not to put the cart before the horse, but eventually, it's our goal to offer guests their own protection options while booking (ie. where the guest can buy their own damage protection) but also add higher levels of protection for the current owner-covered policies that we provide now.
Two issues are commonly raised about the standard Damage Protection we've always offered - host liability and bedbugs. Neither of those is covered by the standard coverage, but both come up as common things that PMs want to be included. So we put our heads together with RentalGuardian and solved the problem. We're happy to announce that you can now turn on "Enhanced" levels of Damage Protection for your properties that include both host liability and bedbug protection.
The homeowner liability protection is $1,000,000 of coverage that protects the homeowner against bodily injury lawsuits for injuries that occur during the rental stay and damage to adjacent property and tenant property within adjacent units.
The bed bug protection covers losses relating to extermination, replacement of ruined soft furnishings, limited loss of income during remediation, and alternative accommodation expenses for relocating affected guests.
You can add Enhanced coverage or switch from Standard to Enhanced at any time directly in the app. Go to Settings > Damage Protection > click Change and select what you want for each property.
As with all insurance, there are limits and deductibles involved. Please read the following policy documents to get a sense of the details. For comparison's sake, I've posted both the Standard and Enhanced versions. The Enhanced version includes everything in the Standard version, so take a minute a brush up on all of it.
OwnerRez Standard Damage Protection.pdf
OwnerRez Enhanced Damage Protection.pdf
Now for the big question - what's the cost? The Enhanced version costs $10 more per booking for all 4 levels of coverage (500, 1500, 3000, 5000) than the Standard version. You can see a full breakdown of pricing on the Damage Protection Overview support article and on our Costs & Fees doc.
Here at OwnerRez, our systems send millions of emails per month, and most of those messages are booking related. In other words, we send those messages on your behalf to your guests, owners, housekeepers, and other recipients that are part of your business operations.
Occasionally, email messages will "bounce" because the recipient's email address is not entered correctly (ie. there's a typo in the email address) or the email address was turned off. We carefully monitor all email messages to record any bounce notifications that occur. We show bounce feedback to the user in the Communication History (under the Tools menu) and we send an alert to the user every time a bounce occurs.
However, it's not enough to merely watch and record bounces. To maintain a high rate of deliverability and protect our users' reputation, it's important to proactively stop bounces from occurring by not repeating them to the same recipient over and over. Email providers like Gmail and Yahoo are careful to notice when senders generate a lot of consecutive bounces, so it hurts our sending reputation (which in turn hurts our users' reputations) if bounces aren't proactively stopped, where possible.
To manage this, we created a "Suppressed" Email Address feature so that our system is not generating many bounce notifications over and over again to the same recipient. "Suppressed" means blocked, so in layman's terms, we are blocking email addresses and creating a list of them to remember who bounced recently and block them from getting more email.
At the same time, we created a process so that you can see your list of Suppressed Email Addresses and also reactivate any email addresses that you want to send messages to. That second part is really important. Sometimes, email providers make mistakes or email addresses are only temporarily down. Just because an email address bounced today does not mean it will bounce tomorrow. Our system will show you the blocked addresses and let you quickly reactivate any that should be tried again.
To see it in action, go to Settings > Suppressed Email Addresses. You'll see any recently-bounced email addresses and the current status.
If the status is Suppressed you can click the Reactivate button to turn it back on. If reactivating the address fails, as is sometimes the case for spam complaints, you will need to contact support to get the address reactivated.
You'll also notice language about "Suppressed Email" showing up in other places throughout the app.
For instance, when an email message bounces, OwnerRez already sends you a system alert. But now, if the email address was suppressed, the system alert will include that information:
You can also see that the address was suppressed on the communication history:
If your own email address - the one you use to login to OwnerRez - bounces, it too will land on the Suppressed Email Address list. If that happens, we'll show an app-wide global alert that one of your own account emails is suppressed until you fix the problem. To fix it, you can either reactivate the email address or change the email address in your account (profile or theme pages) to something different. Third-Party Alerts are also considered account emails, so if any of those bounce, the global alert will show for those too. You'll need to find the property with the bouncing Third Party Alert and remove it.
For more info, check out our new Suppressed Email Address support article.
In keeping with our ongoing effort to clean up old pages and get everything moved to the newer mobile-friendly design, we did a bunch of work on the Inquiry pages. All inquiry-related pages have been moved to the new mobile-friendly design. As you click through the inquiry, verifying the message or sending a reply, you'll notice a fresher look and it will be easier to use from your phone or tablet.
Probably the best example of this is the Verify tab on the inquiry. The Verify area shows a split screen with the original email we got on the left and the parsed inquiry data on the right.
The design is similar to before but has a fresh look and collapses well on mobile and tablets. As you move through the Inquiry pages, you'll notice the same updated design and mobile ability.
Our commitment to being the best channel manager in the industry means our engineering team is constantly talking with the channels (Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com) and putting out updates and tweaks for the new stuff the channels put out. Nearly every release, there is something we're doing that is channel-related because the feature area is so large and involves so many moving parts. In this release, we tweaked two things for Airbnb.
First, we implemented a new "enhanced availability" response when communicating with the Airbnb systems. This basically means that instead of telling them "no" when their system asks us about available dates, we are now providing them a full availability response so that they also update their calendar and rules at the same time. This was a new option that Airbnb's API team released recently, and we jumped on it immediately. While this may not sound like much, it means that Airbnb will stop asking our system for requests when dates fail as often.
It was already very rare for our system to tell Airbnb "no" for dates because our system already pushes availability to them in near real-time. But sometimes when a booking or block occurs, their system hasn't quite updated fast enough or the various queues are still running. In those situations, the "no" responses that we send will not contain other information so that they don't continue to ask us for booking checks as the guest clicks the quote forms on Airbnb's side.
Second, we now set Airbnb taxable categories based on the surcharges we are syncing with Airbnb. Again, this might sound confusing or trivial, but it's an important little tweak for maintaining a high degree of accuracy with their systems.
We recently reached out directly and emailed the users that were affected by this, so this is something you may already know about: Triggers will no longer fire messages for bookings after 30 days past the booking's departure date. In other words, if the guest departed 30 days ago or more, the booking triggers will no longer send messages for that booking. You can still send manual messages to the guest, of course, but the automated triggers won't fire for that booking.
For a long time, we've watched as users have created far-future triggers as a marketing tool to remind guests about past stays and push them to book again. That's a great idea and we commend the marketing acumen!
However, this is not what the trigger feature was designed for, and there are technical reasons we need to limit them. It also hurts your deliverability and brand over time to send unsolicited marketing emails without unsubscribe links included in the message.
We are planning to release some email blast tools in the future and create unsubscribe lists to better help you automate your marketing. However, those tools aren't out yet. In the meantime, you should use a third-party tool like MailChimp to import your contact list and send email blasts.
There is a report in OwnerRez called "Email List" that is designed to work with email apps like MailChimp. The report contains special columns for when the guest last booked or inquired so that you can write messages reminding them of that when you reach out. You can also query and export other lists such as the Booking list view or CRM > Contacts list.
We understand that this might be frustrating, but please know that the change had to be made for technical reasons because these far-future triggers are not sustainable by nature, and they have led to negative results with our messaging speed and deliverability.
For our PM users, custom Statement Views have been a big hit. For those that don't know, Statement Views allow you to customize the booking and expense data you show to your owners on your monthly statements. As users have begun using them more and more, the requests for additional options have come pouring in. We took some time over the past couple of weeks to add some of those new options as part of a new Layout section on Statement views. Here's a quick image of the changes:
First, you can now turn off the Notes and Total sections entirely. Don't like how those look? Turn them off! Want them called something other than "Notes" and "Totals"? You can set that too.
Then, we moved the "Group By Property" option into the view so that you can store this with the view instead of configuring it on each owner. It's really more of a display setting, so the view should dictate that if you're using a view at all.
While we were at it, we also added a few more booking columns up above in the column selector.
You can now select:
It had been a while since the Custom Field Import had gotten any attention, and it was getting a bit stale. We did some work to catch it up and add some additional settings.
First, we added the ability to import Owner and Contact type custom fields. Those custom fields types were added to the app a long time ago, but the Excel import never supported them. That is now updated.
Then, we updated the Custom Field Excel template spreadsheet to use a hard-coded drop-down list showing the types that can be selected in the RecordType column.
This makes it clearer what is supported and validates against bad data entry.
Finally, we added a new Custom Fields Export function, so that you can quickly dump out all your custom field data, make changes and then import it all back in. You can find the new Custom Fields Export page in the global Import/Export area (under Tools).
Select the type of custom fields you want to export, and mash the button. That's it!
Have you sent us a ticket in the last few days? We get a lot of them, so you probably have!
We overhauled our Contact Us page and created a new ticket form to help you contact us faster. We also got rid of the corporate address and "office hours" nonsense and showed who we really are - a remote company spread out everywhere.
It was time for a nice overhaul, and it feels really good to get rid of that old page. "Office hours"... Why did we ever post that? We're not a dentist office. Hopefully, no one actually tried to drive to Seattle to knock on our door. 😀
To be clear, we do receive mail at the corporate Seattle address, but it's merely a mail receiving address and not where any of our team members actually work. No point in even showing it. If you do need to mail us something, feel free to send a ticket, and we'll point you in the right direction.
Recently, we moved notes to the overview page on bookings and quotes, and the Notes tab no longer had a purpose. We left it there so that when clicked on, users would get a message telling them where it moved to. Likewise, the Info and Date tabs were also transitioned to other places, but the tabs were left behind with messages. Since it's been a few months, we felt it was time to remove the Notes, Info, and Dates tabs from bookings and quotes, so we have now done that.
In case you hadn't noticed, we like to send a lot of alerts around here. In fact, we tell you pretty much everything all the time. For instance, when channels or iCals report new bookings but run into conflicts, we fire off alerts that tell you about the conflicts. However, we noticed that some of those conflict alerts could be a little more helpful so we added more information. Specifically, we added the booking number and dates to the booking conflict alert so that you can instantly see what bookings or blocks were overlapping the one new one.
When you go to claim an SMS Number, the window just sits there for a second, communicating with our SMS carrier. You don't really know what's going on and might mash the button again. While noticing that, we also noticed some annoying Log buttons sitting on the SMS Numbers list that seemed kind of out of place. Then we noticed that our carrier was mentioned by name in the "edit" link on the SMS list. Then we noticed that the "Forwarding To" column was empty when no forwarding option was configured which is kind of confusing. Sigh... So many things. This past week, we took a few minutes and cleaned up the SMS settings area. It needed love, and now we can stop noticing things. Win, win!
Last month, we announced that our SMS pricing was changing because of some analysis we did throughout the year. After doing more analysis, we decided that the pricing change (targeting segments instead of messages, but leaving it at 200 included with 3¢ (0.03) per segment) would be too costly for many users. Even normal senders typically use several segments per message. It is still necessary for us to target segments, because of the large differences in sending patterns between users, but we've changed the pricing. The new pricing will include 500 segments and be 1.5¢ (0.015) per extra segment. We feel that this is a reasonable price that will correctly handle both normal and large-sending patterns.
If you haven't seen it yet, take a look at the special SMS Segment Calculator that we mentioned in our last release. We tweaked a little bit more this time around and added a way you can link back to the SMS calculator after doing your analysis.
Stripe fees for security deposits. We have always detected and recorded a Host Fee on bookings for any payment processed via credit card for those users who use Stripe to do their credit card processing. Only we recently noticed that security deposits aren't doing that even those generate payment as well if they are "refundable" type security deposits. So we took care of that. Security deposits processed via Stripe will now record a Host Fee on the booking just like any normal payment.
Improve Cancel Booking screen. We recently released a giant overhaul of the Cancel Booking screen that shows you your cancellation policy, adjusts the booking charges, and sends a refund all in one go. As is our custom, we sometimes move quickly and break things! 🏋 We noticed a number of tweaks (okay "fixes") we needed to make to smoothen out the process, so we got to work and straightened that stuff out.
Gracefully tip-toe around Airbnb room issues. Airbnb doesn't support removing accessibility from a room. When you do that, it causes problems, so we made some adjustments on our end to gracefully handle the process. When you update a room, we re-sync everything. We also sync the photos again. And if we sync photos that are linked to a room that has a problem, we ignore it, assuming that the room hasn't been created yet.
Edit blog posts. Would you like to change your blog posts after writing them? We noticed that some of the buttons weren't working correctly on the blog editor, so we fixed them. If you don't know what I mean by blog, we recently released a really nice blog option for our hosted websites, so check that out.
Be helpful when importing Reviews! Need to import some reviews from Channel Bridge? Previously, if you didn't have your channel mappings configured, it would fail while saying "Couldn't find the property." We figured we could be smarter about this and offer you the chance to map those property IDs inline so you can proceed immediately, just like the other Channel Bridge import does. We also allow you to skip properties if the import contains extra reviews for listings that aren't in OwnerRez.
Prefer first payment override on Booking.com if there's only one payment. We noticed that if both the first and final payment overrides are set, in the Booking.com channel setting area, the final one is used because it's applied last. But that's confusing. So instead, we now only apply the first payment only if there's one payment.
Prefer active properties when merging. We noticed that, when merging channel bookings into OwnerRez, if there are multiple bookings matching by booking number, there is sometimes a strange scenario if you merge the booking in and associate with a disabled property. So instead, we now detect if there are multiple matching booking #'s and take the active property first (if any).
What other property URL is there? The Availability/Property Search widget has a "URL Generation" option with a drop-down and most of the time the top "Property URL" option is what users select. In fact, it's the only thing you can select if you aren't using our hosted website feature. This is confusing - why show the URL Generation drop-down if there aren't multiple options to select. We fixed this to hide the field if a hosted website isn't being used.
Reduce flat tax to the amount of Airbnb tax. It's possible for Airbnb to report less tax than they should when new Airbnb bookings come in. Before, we were just calculating a flat tax, but we decided that we needed to follow the Airbnb tax numbers even if they're wrong. Otherwise, it's confusing to both the user and our team members. We fixed this to reduce the total booking amount if we calculate more flat tax than what Airbnb actually reported as tax. And if the amount is a percent, we check to make sure that the "last tax" in the last doesn't run out when reducing it.
On statements that can't be deleted, still show the button. Across the app, our UI pattern when it comes to "things you can't do" is to show the button or function but make it disabled with a message when you hover the mouse over it. We do this so that it isn't confusing why a button or feature is gone when you get to a page, and so that you know instantly why it isn't possible. We noticed that this wasn't happening on statements, so we put the button back but disabled it and added a message.
Statements unpaid vs. partially paid. While we were fixing the statement button, we also noticed that the statements list sometimes showed a different status than the statement itself. Previously, the statement list showed either Paid or Unpaid, but it's possible for a statement to also be "Partially Paid". We updated the list to show Partially Paid and we added a filter for that as well.
Add phone number validation in the quote acceptance process. When guests are doing direct bookings on OwnerRez (eg. via widget, website, or quote) there are several places they can enter their phone number. When the process gets to the end, and the guest clicks the "Confirm Booking" button, our system validates that the phone number looks valid by checking that digits (0-9) were entered. However, we realized we could do this earlier in the process. Instead of forcing the guest to go back and correct a phone number, several steps back in the booking process, we now validate the phone numbers on the page at the time the guest types in the number.
Always show "Move" button even if the booking is channel-linked. Like the man said.
Allow HTML in notes again. While the "Notes" field on bookings and quotes only allows plain text, there's no reason to blow up and show nasty crash messages if rich text (ie. HTML) is entered, right? We fixed this to be like before. Rich text won't render in notes, but it won't crash if you enter it either.
Default to canceled by guest. When canceling a Vrbo booking, you are asked who canceled the booking - the PM (you) or the guest. Vrbo uses this information to determine if a PM is canceling bookings too often. Frequent cancellations by PMs isn't cool because it hurts Vrbo's reputation as a lodging marketplace. However, often the cancellation is initiated by the guest and we realized that there are times when the user might not realize what is being asked and cancel without making the appropriate selection. We now default the cancel option to "guest" and let the user change it back if desired.
Display CC errors when confirming. Previously, when the "confirm booking" screen would run a credit card, if it ran into errors, it would silently fizzle and move right on by. We now stop and show those errors to the user before continuing the confirmation.
Crash on API listing 'since' query. If you use our API, you might run queries where you're looking for property changes "since" a certain date. We found and fixed a bug where this would sometimes crash.
Percent of Rent on discounts and surcharges. A while back, we added the ability to target "Percent of Rent" for the amount on surcharges and discounts. However, the discount or surcharge must be applied "automatically" for the Percent of Rent option to be used. Using codes or optional ones won't work. This has always been the case, but we weren't clear about it and we still showed it in some confusing situations. We fixed this to completely disable the Percent of Rent option (with a message) if you configure a surcharge or discount in a way where the amount cannot be applied against the rent only.
"Consider canceling instead" link broken. Did you know you can delete bookings? Yep, that's right. As long as the booking is pretty empty and doesn't have a lot of payment or channel activity, you can completely delete the booking from our system. When doing that, we show a warning that you might want to consider canceling instead, only the link we provided was broken. What good is that? All good now.
Association button on new photos. Recently, we added the ability to associate photos with rooms and amenities. There's a little button on photos that allows this (ie. the one that looks like a price tag). We noticed that when uploading a fresh new photo, however, the association button wasn't working. All good now.
Trigger update when changing Airbnb guest vs adult rule. Just like it sounds. When changing adult and guest rules on a property, it can make a difference in your Airbnb fee settings because extra guest fees are linked to those rules. We weren't triggering an immediate rate update to Airbnb when some of these rules changed, but that's now fixed.
Default commission when adding charge. We tend to move fast and break stuff around here, and that happened with the charges grid. The charge grid was overhauled a few months back to have a newer design and be more mobile-friendly, but in the process, we didn't realize that charges weren't having the default PM's commission rate set correctly. So if the property was configured to have a 20% commission, that would work everywhere except if you entered a charge manually. Entering charge line items manually is pretty rare, but it does happen. This bug is now fixed.
Charge import should respect surcharge commission options. Speaking of charges and commission, here's another one... Our Excel Import for Charges was ignoring the commission settings on the surcharge when importing charge line items that matched to that surcharge. This has been fixed.
Double clicks identifier mappings. We noticed a situation where users might accidentally click twice on the save button after entering a bunch of Identifier Mappings for channels. When that happened, we were saving duplicate mappings which caused confusion downstream. We fixed this to lock the channel property/listing for updates while setting the mappings so that it could not be set twice at the same time.
"Cancel Booking" alerts defaults. In the previous release, we noticed a bunch of places where alert settings were not being honored by the app when you go to process something manually, and we fixed that. But recently, we noticed two issues on the Cancel Booking screen. The "open in editor" or "send immediately" wasn't following the pattern that we use elsewhere (of defaulting to "open in editor"), and the alert itself wasn't honoring the global preference. Both of those issues have now been fixed.
Booking.com virtual cards with no expiration date. Booking.com sometimes processes payments from guests using a "virtual card number" system where a temporary card number is created with a date and dollar amount that can only be used once. The guest's real card number is not known or passed to the PM or our system. We support these virtual cards when we detect them, but we recently noticed that they don't have expiration dates similar to real credit cards. Because of that, we had to fix the process to look for an "activation" date instead.
$0 bookings on statements causing problems. In the previous release, we started including $0 bookings on owner statements. We noticed that Direct Remittance and Guest Paid amounts could cause certain bookings to appear as $0 bookings incorrectly, so we made some corrections.
I live in Europe, what the heck is a "dollar"? The OwnerRez team is mostly American, so we sometimes forget that "money" is not defined as "dollars". Believe it or not, we actually have customers in more than 190 countries though 90% of them are in the US or Canada. We found a place where we were saying "dollars" in a blue call-out bar, so we removed it.
Use previous tax applicability for Vrbo taxes if it hasn't changed. We noticed a rare (but possible) scenario where we could send a later tax applicability date to Vrbo even if a previous date would have been applicable. Basically, if there are multiple applicable tax periods, we needed to join together ones with the same applicability so that we don't lose a date range when we trim the previous ranges. Sound confusing? 🤔 Yeah me too. But the engineers said that they fixed it and all is well, so whew -- I feel better!
Operating a vacation rental business takes a lot of time and effort. Periodically we like to interview one of our exceptional users. This week we spoke with Daniele from Salt and Shine Vacation Rentals. Daniele's website and operation can be found at saltandshinerentals.com. Below are the questions we asked and her responses.
Daniele: I was working for a large corporation in the medical financial field specializing in transportation and coding. After the company changed their management team, they axed my position. I found myself without a job and had no desire to stay in the field. I had very little passion for the job. I had no idea how I would reinvent myself at this point in my life. I was in my 40's.
My family and I went on our annual vacation to Key West to escape the harsh Maine winter and to visit with my parents. My retired father had taken on a job with his friend's vacation rental company. He was a guest service coordinator and property manager. I had NO idea these kinds of jobs existed! I was intrigued - I tagged along with him to see what the job entailed. That was it.... I was hooked! I wanted to learn everything I could about the industry.
When I returned to Maine, I took an entry level position at a seasonal vacation rental company in one of our beach towns. I quickly moved into a management position. Unfortunately, when I started with the company they were struggling financially and with their staff. The issues they were having internally were trickling down to their rentals, the entire show was suffering.
I could not represent the company any longer and decided to give my notice at the end of the fall season of 2016. In January of 2017, I was back in Key West when I received a phone call on my cell phone from a former owner of one of the properties I had signed on from the vacation rental company I had left. She also left the vacation rental company due to their lack of commitment and services.
I was shocked to be hearing from her and on my private cell number. She was adamant that I take on her property as a property manager and guest service coordinator. I told her I needed time to consider this, but she didn't give up. She said she saw something in me and I needed to start my own company in Southern Maine. *This woman's job is to find, train and create elite real estate agent teams that list and sell multi-million dollar properties for Keller Williams.
In March of 2017, Salt & Shine Vacation Rentals was born. It has been the best decision I have ever made. Everyday brings new challenges, new lessons, successes, and losses. I Love Every Minute of It!! The Very Best part about my company is I get to work with my brilliant daughter who took us to a new level. After she graduated from The University of NH she came on board full time. She is my General Manager and a force! She is incredible in every aspect of this business.
*PS- I did find out how she got my cell phone number.... her cousin is a profiler for the FBI so she used her connections to get a hold of me!! Sneaky!
Daniele: I have lived in Maine for the majority of my adult life.
Daniele: I welcome the challenges this career brings. I love the variety of people we meet, I love to help create lasting Maine memories for our guests, I love the concierge aspect. I adore my staff. I am quite simply in love with this industry. I wake up everyday and am thankful!!
Daniele: Partners (property owners), who can't grasp or do not appreciate how much we do for them. Guests that complain after they check out without giving us the opportunity to fix any issues while staying with us. We give them ample opportunity with our 3 touch approach. Which means our policy is to reach out to all of our guests the morning after check in, mid week and the night before check out. These are text messages which 99% of guests respond to.
Daniele: I use just about every aspect of the software to manage my business.
Daniele: I'm not sure I can pick just one!! Syncing capability, owner payments, booking online, reports. One thing I do wish it had..... were more accounting features. Also, there doesn't seem to be a feature that would let us know if we had missed an owner payment. We have had to create an Excel sheet to keep track of payments. It would be ideal if there was a report feature added for this function.
And here we are, Daniele & Hannah Rogers. Daniele is the Salty one and Hannah is the Shine!!
>>>>>>
Thanks, Daniele! We wish Salt and Shine Vacation Rentals much success as they continue to manage their business and thrive in the vacation rental industry!