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No info here or on the website linked on the rates. Only a sign-up form.
OwnerRez and InsuraGuest are happy to announce a new partnership to provide primary no-fault medical and property insurance.
Most OwnerRez users know that we already offer a great damage protection product for vacation rentals which covers guest damage while the guest is at your property. Damage Protection is an extremely important and valuable product that has saved many homeowners and PMs a lot of tears!
What makes InsuraGuest different? InsuraGuest covers medical accidents, theft, or property damage from any cause, not just accidental, which may occur from operating your vacation rental business. They are considered GAP insurance which is inserted into every reservation. By inserting InsuraGuest into your property rental, you are adding a layer of protection which will address claims or damage made by your guests on a primary no-fault basis, without needing to file a claim with your regular homeowners insurance.
InsuraGuest insurance is charged on a per-night basis, so it works well for properties with shorter average stays.
Get started with InsuraGuest by visiting the InsuraGuest website and check out the OwnerRez support doc for how to integrate OwnerRez with InsuraGuest.
Happy Friday morning, everyone! ☕️ Ready for Part 3 of the Midsummer Updates series? Here we go! This one is small like the last one and covers 23 updates from the week of July 19th.
This update is bug-heavy again, but let's first hit a couple cool little enhancements to our reports.
We know that our custom fields are long overdue for an overhaul and several additional features, and that's coming! Just FYI on that - we're planning to update the create/edit screens as well as data type (number, date, pick-list, etc) for custom fields, and then update the filter and use of them on the back side. For this update, we worked on expanding how custom fields and tags are shown on Stays reports.
To see it in action, run over to the Stays reports section of the global Reports menu and click on the Stays By Date Range report. You'll see some top options for Tags and Custom Fields:
The options should be pretty self explanatory, but they basically involve how you want tags and custom field data rendered when you see the report. Do you want a single column showing all the fields jammed together, kind of like a description or story of details together? If so, select that option, and you'll see something like this:
If you'd rather have each tag and field broken out to its own column in a tabular format. This can useful where you have a lot of short, simple data points across all bookings, or where you want to export to Excel and do analysis and you need field and tag data separated in columns. That option looks like this:
The other reporting update is on expense reports You can now see the Expense Status column on the Expense Detail report. The status (eg. never remitted, fully remitted, pre-deducted) was added to the main expenses list in a recent update, but we never added it to reports. We just addressed that so you can now see it there too.
Space it out! SMS and Airbnb messages with attachments can get unreadable, so we added some line breaks before the attachment download link. Sometimes "spacey" is a good thing!
"Unpaid" isn't always a bad thing. We noticed that credit invoices (ie. invoices that don't need to be paid because your OwnerRez account has a over-payment balance) were still showing an ugly red "unpaid" badge on them. Technically, "unpaid" is correct because no payment was made on those invoices, but there didn't need to be because the account was in credit. We fixed this to notice if the account has a credit balance and not show the unpaid badge.
{BCRE} time zone. We noticed that the {BCRE} field code was rendering the booking's created date/time in universal time instead of the user's account time zone. We fixed this to render out the time in the correct user time zone.
Manually-sent triggers drop attachments. You can manually send a trigger message on any booking at any time. Previously, however, the process of manually sending the trigger would send a message without any attachments. It would show the attachment but when the message went out, the attachment wasn't there. All better now!
Updating rates not immediately updating channels. We found and fixed a small (very small) scenario where some rate changes weren't updating channels right away as they typically do. No need to worry (and run over to the channels and check your rates). This was very rare and only occurred where property mappings hadn't happened yet. Also, it only affected the immediate part of the channel update. There are background updates that also happen throughout the day. But regardless, it's all fixed now.
Channel history crashing. An eagle-eyed user pointed out that some channel messages would crash, and we noticed it as well. This was caused by how our channel and messaging history systems archive and store data. All fixed now!
Always use channel bridge guest details if available. When you do a channel bridge import, you want the details of that import to overwrite what's in OwnerRez for guest counts... now it does.
QuickBooks classes now tracked against invoices as well as invoice lines. QuickBooks Online allows you to specify if you wish to track the class against each transaction (invoice) or against each transaction line. Going forward, OwnerRez now supports both methods.
Don't suggest (or crash when) upgrading inactive Stripe payment methods. If you had both an active and an inactive Stripe payment method with the same Stripe account ID, upgrading the active one to Stripe Connect could error in some cases. We fixed this to no longer error, and we no longer show a message suggesting that you upgrade if the payment method is already inactive. What's the point, right?
Reset selection when changing properties. If you select some rates on the rate calendar and then change properties, those rates remained selected until you selected new rates on the subsequent property. This could result in setting the wrong rate unintentionally. Fixed it by resetting the rate selection anytime the a different property is selected.
Remove door code confirmation if no code exists. We got too eager on confirming those door code generates... if no code has been created, there's no need to confirm that you want to generate a code.
Validate that "Shown on Owner Statement" is Yes for Owner or Property expenses imported by Excel. In a recent update, we banned non-booking (ie. general) expenses from being pre-deducted. But users could still import expenses via Excel or API with pre-deduct turned on. We now validate that pre-deduct isn't turned on when importing or creating expenses via other methods.
Prevent partial failures when updating property rules. In some cases, updating property rules could fail in part, resulting in a corrupt status. We've cleaned that up now.
ORPx? We got you! We now support Excel imports using the "ORPxxxx" formatted property IDs commonly found on channel integrations.
Validate that card type is accepted for tokenized Stripe payment methods. This was a regression introduced when we upgraded Stripe recently. We'll resume blocking card types you mark as disallowed.
Don't save new cards details when they fail payment capture. In some rare cases, a guest could enter bad card details which we would store even if the card failed payment authorization! Now you have bad billing info in OwnerRez, and that's never good! All fixed.
On Monday, I started a "Midsummer Updates" series to highlight the raft of changes that were released over the past 6 weeks. Today we'll cover the 16 updates that went out on the week of July 12th which is mostly bug fixes and small tweaks.
No new features this week, so let's jump right into enhancements!
Do you use FloridaRentals.com as a channel? If so, you can now see your listing numbers live on the FloridaRentals.com channel dashboard page with a link to open the listing on FloridaRentals.com directly. It looks just like our other channels:
This follows our pattern with larger channels like Vrbo and Airbnb, and we're working to bring the same capabilities to all of our first class channel integrations.
Does your property offer free parking? I'm guessing the answer is yes - most properties do. We already had parking options that you could select (under the property > Rooms & Accommodations) but we spent some time clarify the parking options and expanding them. The parking accommodations options were not clear and sometimes led to wrong displays on the channels. We had a "Paid Parking On Premises" option, but we added new "Free Parking On Premises" option. For existing properties, we set the free parking option automatically if "Free Parking" was select because that's what it means now, and then we changed our channel code to send that to Airbnb if the user chooses "Free Parking On Premises". That way you can select both "Free Parking" and "Street Parking" at the same time.
If you're a PM that uses our owner statement system, you can now add an "In Period" pro-rated column to your statements for Prededucted Expenses. A few months back, we added the ability to show "In Period" columns for all the financial amounts on the booking which allow you to only show the owner a pro-rated amount of gross, taxes, commission, etc that matches how long the booking was in that statement period. For some reason, we didn't add an "In Period" column for Prededucted Expenses, so this release fixed that.
A common support question we get is "why isn't my token working?" when it comes to using the WordPress Plugin. Our common answer is: "You're using the wrong email address". 🤦 In our never-ending quest to stamp out common support issues, we decided to add some clarity to the WordPress Plugin page. We now display the account email address on both the token generation page and the page that shows the token later on. We label it as "Username" to match what it is called in WordPress.
Last little tweak for this release... We noticed that when door codes are manually re-generated, if the code already exists, it wasn't clear to the user what was happening. We clarified the process with a confirmation window if the door code was already generated.
Handle VR Calendar Sync iCals. This wasn't really our error per se, but we added a fix for it anyway. We noticed that some of our users use VR Calendar Sync to manage their calendar import/export fees (iCals). VR Calendar Sync does not follow the proper iCal spec in terms of how lines are supposed to fold and wrap which caused OwnerRez to not be able to pick up certain events or certain fields on those events. Since a bunch of users were using it, we decided to create a fix for it. We now detect if the iCal is coming from VR Calendar Sync and correct their format so that we can use the iCal information. Incidentally, this also affected Vacation Rental Desk iCals as well.
Fix LQA by putting it in a standalone page. Our Listing Quality Analyzer tool used to have scrolling issues. We're not sure how, when or why, but it was a common support issue and something we noticed ourselves from time to time. We couldn't figure out how to fix it, but we decided to remove it from the pop-up window and just make it always open in its own standalone page.
Pre-select more seasons on seasonal rate editor. In the previous update, we optimized the seasonal rate editor to have a maximum limit of properties and seasons that could be selected at any period of time, but some users pointed out how that limits entry. We've increased the seasonal rate editor limit to a maximum of 70 seasons at one time. We've also corrected the sort so it always selects the first 70 seasons by default.
Clarify booking.com cancellation policy. Previously, we used the policy with the channel first/last payment overrides for both the payment schedule and the cancellation policy. But that wasn't quite right, though - payment schedule should be separate. So we fixed this. Specifically, we changed the cancellation policy to use the straight policy without first/last payment overrides and we show the cancellation policy text on the booking's "Channel" tab in addition to the number we already show. We left the Booking.com "Payment Schedule" section as it was with the overrides.
Capitalization is important. Ever tried to edit a property address to fix only the capitalization? If you have, you may have noticed that your changes didn't stick! That's fixed now.
Less confusing preferences for portal users. The preferences page for portal users was displaying options for how guests should see charges in quotes and widgets... but those options actually don't do anything for portal users because that may only be controlled at the account level. So we hid those options.
Is the booking actually early or late? Previously, we were showing an early/late indicator on bookings (the little red bar on the left or right side of the ribbon strip) if the time was set for check-in/check-out even if it was set to the same as the property. The user might have set a different check-in/check-out time than "standard" but in reality the actual time was the same. We fixed this to not show early/late red bar on calendar ribbon if the time is set but the same as the property rule
Hotel ID? Room Number? 🥴 We now limit the length of the hotel ID entered when connecting booking.com listings to OwnerRez.
Render new-lines in rich text custom field responses on rental agreement preview. If you've got custom fields marked as rich text that you request the guest to fill in, and you've got a rental agreement that displays those custom fields, you may have noticed that the responses from your guests were all one line on the rental agreement preview... or maybe you didn't! Either way, it's fixed now.
Charges snapshot blowing up. We noticed a bug where clicking to get a snapshot of charges from an owner statement would sometimes crash. If you're curious, this was caused by our caching system not knowing what to do if charges weren't cached when the user went to view the snapshot. This is now fixed.
Help tips should be helpful. The owner amount help tip on the statement column header was confusing. Previously, it said that the owner's amount was the "Net - PM - DP" but that is only true some of the time. If you've ever used "pre-deducted" expenses, you may be aware that the Pre-Deducted column also factors into it. To make it 100% accurate, we changed the help tip to now provide the precise formula for Owner amount.
So hey, turns out while I was gone, our enthusiastic engineers kept putting out updates at their normal frenetic pace! 💪 I was out of the office for most of July, and the updates kept silently pouring out.
If you watch the Change Log section of our support area, you'll see the updates each week. Oh look, a new one just landed this morning. If you're curious, those change log articles are the list of updates that I cover in my weekly product update blog post. I'm going to cover all the July and August updates in detail, but to make sure your eyes don't gloss over, I'm going to break up the blog posts into a "Midsummer Updates" series with 6 parts.
Today we'll start with the 25 updates that went out back on July 5th. This update includes a couple of new features for PMs, a handful of tweaks to the UI and then, as always, a good dozen bug fixes!
We added two new features for PMs, both of which are related to how you use owner statements.
If you're used to generating owner statements in OwnerRez, you may have noticed that you had no ability to control the orientation (ie. portrait or landscape mode) of owner and PM statements when they displayed in a PDF or print window. The browser would either do that for you automatically or OwnerRez would hard-code it to portrait (vertical) if you didn't use "Full Amounts" view. After we released custom statement views, users began defining many different columns (hey, did you know you can use surcharge and tax based columns in your statements?!) which increased the size and changed the layout of the statement. But OwnerRez would continue jamming the statement into a portrait view, cutting off columns on the right.
To address this, we added an option on statement views so that you can define the exact orientation you want to see every time you print or download a PDF of the statement. Go to any statement view (or create a new) and you'll now see that option right at the top:
While we were in there, we noticed that PM didn't have a way to customize their emails and statement footers with other pieces of information. For instance, you might want to show the statement grand total at the top or show the statement notes somewhere. You can now do that.
Fields codes have been added for:
For more information about fields codes in general and how to use them, read our Field Codes support article or watch the walk-through video about Field Codes.
More information is better than less information, right? In the July 5th update, we tweaked the UI to include some additional helpful bits of information.
First, we added exact dates to the cancellation policy that shows on bookings and quotes so that you see exactly when the guest has to cancel by in order to receive a refund. The guest already sees the exact dates on their side, but we added it to the user's side as well.
Second, we added the purchased date and time on the booking "Insurance" tab next to the policy that was purchased. Have you ever been curious when the guest bought the policy - at the time of booking or down the road? Well, now you know!
Third, we added the expiration date to the Quotes overview grid. By their nature, quotes expire. It's important that the expiration date is shown so that you can easily see how long the quote will be open.
Finally, we added the most-recent sync time that reviews were checked by Vrbo or HomeToGo in the API channel dashboard for those channels. This is in the same "Synced" hover card that shows for the other sync actions like when rates, rules or content were checked. To be clear, this date/time does not mean that a review was added at that time, only that Vrbo or HomeToGo checked OwnerRez at that time to see if there were any new reviews.
If you have holiday surcharges in OwnerRez, we are now pushing those holiday surcharges to Vrbo so that your rates on Vrbo also include the surcharge adjustments. Vrbo is the only channel that supports this, so we went ahead and put this place for Vrbo only. Vrbo only supports 50 holidays, so we are auto-truncating the holidays we sent to the first 50. If you have more than 50 or you have "Contains Holiday" set to "No" you'll notice that we warn you about this in our Listing Quality Analyzer tool.
Last enhancement to cover in this update... Are you one of those lucky users with massive seasonal rates - like $60,000 per night? No? Probably not. 🤑 But in some currencies, it's not uncommon to have 6 digit nightly rates. For instance, the Chilean Peso is 758 pesos to 1 dollar (as of the time I write this) so a normal nightly rate could easily be 150-200k CLP per night. We now support large 6-digit rate amounts in the seasonal rate editor.
Selecting tomorrow as departure date in the Book Now widget. There was an issue where if the today is open but a booking starts tomorrow, the Book Now widget would keep that date from being selected as the departure dates. This has been fixed.
Raise the flag? Some buttons in the system mistakenly were showing flag icons... Guess the software got a little patriotic! We are showing the right icons now.
Airbnb quotes and rate adjustments. It's possible to add a "rate adjustment" for channels so that that particular channel has a higher marked-up rate than others. However, we noticed that when the rate adjustment was set for Airbnb, custom quotes (or "special offers") were not using that higher rate when the quote was created in OwnerRez. We now check the Airbnb channel rate adjustment before generating the quote line items.
Reporting taxes on non-taxed bookings. We noticed a bug where reports would crash if you grouped by month and showed taxes on non-taxed bookings. We now handle this gracefully instead of crashing.
Parsing some SMTP headers from inquiry emails. We noticed a problem where the Property ID and some other fields were not being properly recognized when inquiry emails came in from certain listing sites. In particular, this was happening with SMTP headers and Boutique Homes inquiries. Found and fixed!
Calculating seasons for triggers. Previously, if there were multiple applicable seasons on a booking, and a trigger was set to check seasons, it would only use the season that was effective for rates. That led to confusion. We fixed this to use all applicable seasons.
Improve Airbnb listing import reliability. If you've ever encountered the "no listing found" error when importing an Airbnb listing to OwnerRez, you know the frustration. We made this more reliable.
Multi-cultural Vrbo imports! Did you try to import a listing from Vrbo that has a URL like https://www.vrbo.com/en-gb/p12345? If you're curious, that URL format is common for UK listings. Well now you can, along with any other region-specific vrbo.com listing. Just another step on our path to world domination! 😎
Move channel bridge history to one grid. Import history doesn't make sense under "Push Rates" so we've moved it to it's own page. Click "View History" on the channel bridge page to see all past imports.
PM batch update crashing because of "no description". We noticed an issue where where the PM > Batch Update screen was crashing if you have a surcharge where the linked expense settings has no description entered. In normal (non-batch) workflows, the surcharge description is always used but the batch update was just crashing. This is fixed now.
Re-enabling a property made smarter. If you have only one payment method, re-enabling a property now assigns that payment method to the property, just like adding a new property. One less step you have to take to get that first booking. Winning!
Use the page lead for the hero caption always if set. In some cases, we were smartly trying to hide the page caption if it was the same as your property name... but maybe you didn't want that! If you set a caption we'll use the caption now. Promise!
Batch update commission to 0. If you change a surcharge to "no commission" the PM > Batch Update Commission tool was not setting 0% commission on matching surcharges. This was common with cleaning fees where commission was removed after the fact. All fixed.
How do you click on a sheet of paper?? Printed documents can't really make use of buttons, right? We noticed where an "Action" button was showing on owner statements when printed, so we removed it.
Calendar rate min. nights must be less than max. nights. Some users and integrations have occasionally (either mistakenly or on purpose) set minimum nights on spot rates higher than the maximum nights on the same property. This causes problems down stream for channels like Vrbo, so we no longer allow it.
Faster seasonal rate editor. For some folks with hundreds of properties and/or seasons, the seasonal rate editor can be extra slow. So we restricted this interface to edit only 20 seasons and 50 properties at a time.
Happy Friday!
Last week we hosted our Payment Processing Industry Expert webinar with David Goodale. He discussed pricing models, interchange and how to get a lower rate from a payment processor. If you missed that webinar, be sure to watch the replay here.
It seems like everyone is going public lately! Vacation rental management platform Vacasa, is going public as part of a recently announced deal with TPG Pace Solutions. Once the acquisition is complete, the combined company will trade under the symbol “VCSA.” This deal provides Vacasa with an implied pro-forma equity value of about $4.5 billion!
If you’re currently operating an illegal vacation rental, AI is coming for you! La Quinta, California has begun using AI that mines real estate transactions, along with other data, to determine if homes are operating as unpermitted vacation rentals. Cities are using this tool to step up their regulation and ensure all STRs pay the city bed tax.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has sent a letter to Airbnb, Vrbo and other vacation rental platforms, urging them to require owners to disable residential elevators or provide inspection certifications showing that there are no dangerous gaps. This comes after a 7 year old boy at a beach vacation rental in North Carolina died after getting stuck between a moving elevator. Vrbo has already stated they plan to follow through with at least some of the recommendations in the letter, while Airbnb and TripAdvisor stated they were reviewing the letter.
Good news, it’s Friday!
Next Tuesday we are hosting our Payment Processing Industry Expert webinar. We'll sit down with David Goodale, payment processing industry expert, to discuss the ins and outs of selecting the right processor for your business. The session is free to join, but you need to use this link to register.
Vrbo is giving away 30 stays over 30 days as part of their #VrboReunionContest. You could win a $5,000 getaway (anywhere in the USA) to reunite with your family. To enter the contest, post a photo of you and the person you miss most on Instagram or Twitter, and in your caption make sure to add the hashtag #VrboReunionContest and why you can’t wait to be together.
Airbnb recently ran a report to see if any of their hosts have a 100% rate of 5-star reviews for check-in, cleanliness and communication. Turns out 35 North Carolina Airbnb hosts had perfect ratings, but one stood out among the rest. Jessica Withers has two Airbnb listings located 10 minutes from downtown Asheville and since she began listing back in 2013, she now has more than 600 perfect guest reviews! That is the highest amount of perfect reviews in all three categories out of all Airbnb hosts.
HomeToGo and Lakestar SPAC have agreed to merge in a $1.41 billion transaction. The arrangement is expected to close in the third quarter of 2021, with the combined company (HomeToGo) valued at $1.01 billion. HomeToGo will be listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker “HTG”.
Happy Friday! Here’s this week's industry news.
Vrbo has decided that they will start adding hotels onto their platform. Now you might ask yourself, “Wait. Doesn't Vrbo stand for ‘Vacation Rentals by Owner?’ Why would they add hotels?” The reasoning behind this decision is that Vrbo wants to help fill in the gaps where travel demand is high and not enough vacation rentals are available. Now, guests may see hotel rooms or resort inventory along with vacation rentals in their Vrbo search when looking for a place to stay.
Looking into buying your own vacation rental or expanding your current supply? A report from Realtor.com has found the most profitable real estate markets for those looking to list their property on sites like Airbnb and Vrbo. They even figured out how many days you would need to rent on average to cover your monthly mortgage payment. The top five locations are: Joshua Tree, CA; Sea Isle City, NJ; Lincoln City, OR; Sedona, AZ; and Blue Ridge, GA.
Canada now has its first 3D printed home, which is the world’s first fully 3D printed tiny-home to be featured on Airbnb. The home was built over 11 days and is constructed from 20 printed elements. All proceeds from Airbnb bookings of the 3D printed home will be put towards the World Housing’s Affordable Homes project.
Southport, NC has approved an ordinance that limits vacation rentals. This prevents owners from setting up new short-term rentals in residential areas. Those already operating vacation rentals must prove they were doing so prior to the ordinance, and must apply for a permit that has to be renewed annually.
On Tuesday 7/20, we'll sit down with David Goodale, payment processing industry expert, to discuss the ins and outs of selecting the right processor for your business.
Some of the key topics of discussion will be pricing models, interchange, how to get a lower rate and cross border fees.
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for Payment Processing Industry Expert webinar link to register.
You can find all of our past and future webinars on our Webinars page.
Very true, Annie! I'll look into seeing if that can be added quickly.
What would really be helpful is a improvement to the calendar so that one could scroll past the end of the month into the new month. It is very difficult on the last day of the month and the first day of the next month to figure out the reservations.
The new empty units report is looking great. However, what would make it useful for us for the stated purpose of scheduling maintenance etc. would be if it was possible to also include same-day turns in the list. In practice, that's where we have to squeeze in most maintenance work, and we frequently compile lists including the same-day turns for various services.
Hi everyone! This week, we released a neat-and-tidy little set of 23 updates, so let's take a second and run through them. ☕️
Have you ever wanted to know which days were unoccupied at a given property, or wanted to see all the properties unoccupied for a given weekend? Perhaps you'd like to see when you can schedule maintenance, deliver appliances, do a deep clean, etc. You could already do that with our main Bookings menu (Ribbon view > Filter > Available dates > Search) but you might want to see a list of those dates as a report or even export those dates to Excel. Now you can! We added an "Empty Units" report that allows you to select a range of properties and dates, and the report will return all the empty date ranges where the properties are not occupied. To find it, go to the Reports menu and look under the Stay Reports section for the one called "Empty Units". Mash the button and it's pretty self-explanatory from there.
The Empty Units report automatically orders the results by property name first and then by date range. Each range of unoccupied dates is grouped together by continuous days, so if a property is open 3 or 4 days straight, that will show together as one row with the From and To columns showing the start and end of that range. Like all of our reports, you can quickly export the results to Excel for additional manipulation.
As has become our custom, let's hit the enhancements and tweaks that affect channels first...
We added support for Airbnb's new "Firm" cancellation policy. That's exactly what it sounds like. Airbnb updated their cancellation policy for "Firm" which (from their website) means:
If guests cancel up to 30 days before check-in, they can get a full refund. After that, guests can cancel up to 7 days before check-in and get a 50% refund on the nightly rate for all nights. After that, no refund will be given.
We also updated our cancellation policy language for Airbnb to include the non-refundable discount if one is specified. Airbnb doesn't have a separate non-refundable policy, but there's a separate option for it, so we can see if the guest selected that. We now detect if the guest selected that and show that policy in the field codes.
While working on that update for Airbnb, we added some field codes at the property level for cancellation policies and some field codes for security deposits too. These can be found on our global field code list, but here is what was added:
For the most part, you should continue to use the booking or quote level version of these field codes in your message templates or renter agreements as that will show the specific rules that apply to the quote or booking (which might be overwritten or changed from the property ones), but there are times when having property level field codes are necessary. For instance, in website pages or guest forms, you may want to show general information about the property and not have specific dates for a quote or booking. These new field codes now allow you to do that.
After adding Wifi network and password fields for Airbnb last week, we noticed that these were pretty common fields for properties, so we added these Wifi network/passwords fields to our property import and export tools. So you can now update your Wifi network and password across all of your properties in Excel and then upload as an import when making other adjustments.
For HomeToGo, we updated the logo to the new HomeToGo logo.
We also added review support for HomeToGo. We recently added review integration for Vrbo and it turns out that HomeToGo is able to use reviews in their integration as well. Whether HomeToGo will show your OwnerRez reviews, or where/how they show them, is something you should check with HomeToGo on directly, but OwnerRez now shares the same review data with HomeToGo that we do with Vrbo.
For Booking.com, we made some changes to error Booking.com messaging so that there is more clarity in what goes on with Booking.com bookings. Many OwnerRez users get frustrated by Booking.com, and for good reason, because of the lack of clarity and normalcy in the booking workflow with Booking.com guests. Bookings and payments are hard to understand. First, we changed the actions log on the Channel tab (under the booking) to be more accessible. We show where there was an error and we now have a way to "retry" the action if it was an error. On known double bookings, we send an email to the user telling them about the issue with a link to the actions log so that you can reprocess the booking if the time is freed up. We also notify our success team about these situations. Finally, we check if the temporary block that we put in place failed because a booking is already in place with the correct dates. If so, we don't show the failure since the block was a temporary thing to support the process.
We noticed that a listing site called VastTrips had calendar exports (iCal) with markers showing bookings versus blocks, so we updated our calendar import settings to allow bookings versus blocks for VastTrips when entering an iCal. You'll need to setup a custom source with a "vasttrips.com" domain, but once you've done that you can start importing "only bookings" from those VastTrips iCals!
That's it for channels, but let's look at a couple other great tweaks!
We recently notified a small group of PMs that they had "hidden expenses" or expenses that weren't ever billed to the owner. We talked about this last week in our product update blog post in the bug section. We flagged this as a bug and fixed it so that general expenses (ie. expenses not linked to a specific booking) cannot be hidden or "prededucted" on statements. This immediately raised the question "how do I find my prededucted general expenses?" After all, if you want to fix them, or even look at them, there needs to be a way to find them in bulk. Fair enough! So we quickly got to work and added a status on the global Expenses list and a filter for showing and finding the remittance status for expenses.
When you go the global Expenses list, under the top PM menu, you'll see a new Status column:
This column will show one of our statuses:
To help you narrow down the list, we also added a filter to the Expenses grid with these four statuses so that you can find expenses that match what you're looking for.
At this point, shrewed users might notice that there's a scenario where you may not be able to find certain expenses. If an expense was not associated with a booking, but is marked as prededucted, how do you find it? This was the bug that we fixed last week. To help users find these hidden expenses, we added another filter called "Related To" that specifically targets the level the expense is at: booking, property or owner. To find the hidden expenses, select owner and property under Related To and Pre-deducted under Status. This will show general expenses never billed to the owner.
Over in the messaging world, we noticed that some users were having trouble finding, formatting and using phone and email links in their message templates. A few months ago, we updated our link editor to be a lot smarter. The link editor shows you field codes for all field codes that are links in addition to letting you enter a custom one.
We updated this link editor to also include phone and email field codes. This way, you can create clickable links in your messages that are (for instance) the guest's email address or phone number with the propery format to make them open email programs or dialer apps with the correct address.
Link other links, you are free to change the formatting or text of the link at any time after inserting it. If you want the original email address or phone number be what is shown, simply use the field code again as the text of the link.
Last tweak for today... The rate calendar (under Settings) now remembers the property you were on when flipping between different properties. Our larger PM users struggled with this as they would select a property - perhaps out of hundreds - navigate away and then want to come back. Or perhaps you want to send a link to a friend or helper to look at the property you're working on. Now you can do all that. The URL, in your browser's address bar, will change for whatever property you select as you work in the rate calendar, so copy/pasting the URL will work if you want to send it to someone else or come back later to the same place.
"You need to register your place". This was an Airbnb error that was shown in the "publish failed" email we sent to users. We now detect this error, correct the message so that it renders the link and shows a more helpful message so that you know where to register your listing on Airbnb.
Vrbo date criteria. We found and fixed an issue where Vrbo was using date criteria without combining with month of year criteria if both were supplied. This affected discount and surcharges that were pushed to Vrbo via the channel integration.
HomeToGo rent-only discounts. As with all of our channel integrations, you can set HomeToGo to have a rate adjustment. We noticed that for discounts that have "percent of rent" amounts, the rate adjustment was not being factored in, so we fixed that.
FloridaRentals rate adjustments. Speaking of rate adjustments, we noticed an issue where the rate adjustment for FloridaRentals.com wasn't applied when creating quotes for inquiries that come in from FloridaRentals.com. This is now fixed.
PayPal button not showing. If you use both Stripe and PayPal, you may have noticed an issue where the PayPal button wasn't showing properly on some guest forms for collecting payments or security deposits. This only happened if you also use Stripe and only after you select different payment methods, so it was pretty rare when guests hit this bug. All better now!
Blocks blocking themselves. In the Portal Access area, there was a case where the Move page was being blocked by the very same booking or block that the portal user was trying to move. We found and fixed this.
Allow retry-until on Day of Arrival triggers. If your trigger is set for "0 days" (which is the same as Day of Arrival), our system used to sanitize that to "after arrival" which meant that you couldn't set the retry options. We switched this to be a "before arrival" trigger so that you can use the retry-until option. In the near future, we plan to add a specific option for "day of arrival" to avoid the before or after problem with 0 days.
No Vrbo for Location Description and Other Activities. These description fields are no longer supported by Vrbo, so we stopped showing the Vrbo logo underneath them.
Smarter property mappings in Channel Bridge. Previously, the Channel Bridge import process showed the mapping page, even when no mappings are needed. This could happen if the property numbers were already configured on the API channel integration (so they're available, but not in the expected listing site identifier mapping area). We now detect this and don't show the mapping page on Channel Bridge if all of the mappings are available from the API channel integration. While we were in there, we also fixed the Channel Bridge dashboard page to be less confusing. Specifically:
Converge ampersand. This again. We did some work with the Converge development team to find and fix an issue where ampersands (&) were causing problems in the data we send and receive with Converge during payment processing. We hope this is the final time and that Converge will continue running smoothly in the future.
Converge security deposit re-auth's. While we were in there, we tackled something else with Converge. Converge holds pre-authorized funds (ie. security deposit holds) for 21 days after which they are automatically released, so we now automatically renew the hold after 21 days, if the guest has not yet departed. This is similar to our re-authorization for the 7-day processors like Stripe and Lynnbrook, just longer.
so is this a replacement for short term commercial insurance (like Foremost. Lloyds of London, BHHC) combined with per-stay damage insurance?
Thanks I am in the process of looking for insurance right now.
Happy Friday!
Last week we released our largest product update ever. We covered 65 updates, with the main features including: generating door codes based on the last 4 digits of the guests' phone number, auto-creation of listing sites, including cleaning fees on statements, charge snapshots, and delayed door code generation.
Looking for something to watch this weekend? Netflix has released a new series called, "The World’s Most Amazing Vacation Rentals." The series includes eight episodes that feature three different rental properties across the globe.
Summer on the island of Maui is in full swing, with a total occupancy rate of 75% according to the Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority’s May 2021 Vacation Rental Performance Report. Out of all four counties in Hawaiʻi, Maui County has the largest vacation rental supply with 234,400 available unit nights. The average daily rate for vacation rental units statewide was $236, while hotels were at $288.
If you're thinking about taking a summer vacation, you better act soon! Vrbo's president recently stated in an interview that "there are not enough vacation rentals to go around." The flipside of this shortage is that vacation rental owners are either fully booked or close to it, and are therefore able to increase nightly charges based on demand.
Ok Help me here please. I am considering replacing my trusty erentallocks with one that 1) can set user code (such as last 4 of phone number) 2) does not require a hub (I have enough hubs already - want a direct WIFI connection).
I thought remotelock but when I click on website, it tells me to "ask for a consultation"? Seems an overkill for just a coupe of locks...
I made a small correction to my response above. Door codes are set by the trigger sender, first thing, so that they are available for any trigger messages that day.
Hi Chris,
Some answers for you:
Chris L said:
Door codes are set by the trigger sender, first thing in the morning, so that they are available for any trigger emails that will go out that day. Basically at 12 am UTC (London time), the door code will be set for that day. So you should be good if you send your email at 9am.
But to be extra safe, yes, you could simply have the code set 8 days before arrival.
Chris L said:
Not in bulk, unfortunately. You'd have to go through each of those bookings, one by one, and go Change/Move button, set the listing site and save. We don't have the original referrer/domain on them to do that in bulk unfortunately.
Chris L said:
For API-connected, they don't serve much purpose and we mostly encourage users to just get rid of them and use your own email address. I'm talking about the inquiry emails only. The vast majority of Vrbo traffic is instant booking or request-to-book now, and so inquiry emails are less important. You can leave them routing through OR but if the guest contact info isn't real, you'll have to answer them manually anyway. If things are working okay, then the best thing is probably just to leave it like it is for now.
When you get a second, please up-vote and comment on this Feature Request for Vrbo API messaging:
https://www.ownerrez.com/forums/requests/vrbo-native-messaging
We are working with Vrbo to build support for this so that the Expedia leadership circle quickly moves it forward. It's been a push of ours for some time and has recently paused on their side. Your up-vote and comment on our side will be sent to them in the monthly partnership discussions we have.
Wow! Lots of changes and fixes!
Question about the door code: I send the door code at 9am one week (7 days) before arrival. If I choose the option to set the door code 7 days before check-in, what time does that occur? I just want to make sure I don't end up sending the template with the door code before the door code is actually generated. Should I set it to 8 days just in case?
Also, for the new automagic import of showing bookings made by a hosted site, is there any way to retroactively attach that to previous bookings?
And last, should I edit my Vrbo contact settings to get rid of the property-specific ORP email addresses and switch everything to ORU? Or as an API-connected channel, should I get rid of them entirely and just use my real email address?
You guys are my favorite! I always look forward to these posts -- and this one was a GOOD ONE! So many updates!
Chris Hynes said:
The reviews integration with Vrbo just went live yesterday!
The reviews integration with Vrbo just went live yesterday!
Strap in, folks! We've got a lot to talk about this week! We put out several large updates over the past few weeks (first a set of 28 and then another 37). The big highlights are some long-awaited updates to door locks and the ability to show cleaning fees and other fee categories as columns on owner statements, but it goes way beyond that. We're going to cover it all in one giant write-up here, so - like I warned - strap in! 🤠
The first thing we'll talk about is door locks! OwnerRez integrates with a variety of door locks and generates door codes automatically for bookings. However, we've been tracking some much-needed updates for awhile and we tackled a bunch of those updates over the past several weeks.
You can now define how a code is generated, when it should be generated and how it should be displayed to the guest. Along with this, you can now use the guest's phone number as the door code. Let's take a look at each of these things.
When you open your door lock settings in OwnerRez, you'll notice a new section called Code Generation with several options.
The top setting, in this new section, is called "Generate How" and it lets you pick four different options:
The next setting is called "Generate When" and there are three options you can choose:
In the bottom Options sections, there is a new setting called "Segment Length". This gives you the ability to display long door codes in human-readable chunks so that it is easier for guests (or housekeepers) to see the number when reading an email or SMS message. You can use a 3, 4 or 5 digit segment length. On the booking and in emails, OwnerRez will display the code in segments according to that length with hyphens between each segment.
If the code creates uneven segments, the last segment will be smaller to hold any dangling digits that didn't fit in the previous segment.
While working on these new door code options, we added a number of other door-code related feature requests.
For instance, we added an option to send the guest contact info (email, phone) to the door lock maker's website.
This means that when your door lock maker (eg. Remote Lock) shows the guest's name, stay dates and door code in their control panel, it will also show the guest's phone number and email address if you want to include that. We never sent that in the past for privacy and security reasons - we guard guest and user data as much as possible - but some users pointed out that they could do more with their door lock maker's reports and other features if we sent that contact info over. So there's now an option where you can do that. By default, the guest's contact info is not sent to the door lock maker, so you need to go turn that on if you want it included.
Need to use our Batch Update page to generate codes in bulk, but want to keep existing codes as they are? You can now do that. Our Batch Update screen for door locks now has an option to synchronize door codes with the lock maker but keep existing codes if the booking already has one. If the booking doesn't have one, a new code will be generated.
Why is this important? Say you already have a door lock in place with active bookings, but then your lock breaks or you want a different door lock. You buy the new lock and install it but the new lock has no codes programmed for all the upcoming future bookings. OwnerRez has codes for those bookings, but the new door lock (and lock maker's website) doesn't have those codes entered. Even worse, the guests were already emailed their codes, so you don't want to notify them all with a new code. This new option will allow you to retain the existing codes while updating the door lock (and lock maker's website) with the existing code.
Do you use Kaba as your door lock but have trouble with long stays (30+ nights)? We now support door codes for long stays with Kaba door locks. If you're curious, Kaba locks require that long-stay door codes start and end on specific alternating Mondays (yes, you read that right 😕) which took some mental maneuvering on our part, but it's all good now. There's nothing you need to do or change on your end. Long stays will now work cleanly where they didn't before.
If you've mapped multiple properties to the same door lock integration, you might have seen the property mapping list get rather dense. We've thinned it out by combining the door code properties into a short "X properties" link that you can hover over to see the full list. This is similar to what our grids and list show when an entity is mapped to several properties.
Okay, moving on from door locks! Let's talk PM and owner statements...
A few weeks ago, we added fee categories to surcharges so that you could exactly-categorize your cleaning, pet, resort, firewood, etc fee types beyond the general description. We have a lot of plans for fee categories, but one of those is the ability to bring that information into owner statements for our PMs. And we've just done that. You can now configure custom columns on owner statements that will show exact surcharge and tax amounts for that booking. And for tax amounts, you can select each type of tax. Like all custom columns, you can choose your own name and description to show to the owner.
Let's use Cleaning Fee as an example. In your custom view, add a column and scroll down the list to the bottom. You'll see a new set of columns called "Specific Surcharge" where you can select any of your surcharges.
These surcharges are exactly the same as the surcharges you've configured in your rates settings but only those surcharges with a mapped fee category are shown. And the fee category itself is shown, not the surcharge description. So if your surcharge is called "Housekeeping" but it's mapped to a Cleaning Fee category, this list of columns will show "Cleaning Fee". Same with pet, additional guests, and all the other types of fee categories.
Right under that, you'll notice a list of the taxes from your account. You can select taxes as custom columns as well, so that you owners can see a break-down of each type of tax in addition to the totals.
Once you've added a few surcharge and tax columns, go preview a quick owner statement and notice how it looks.
Those columns will show the exact amounts for your surcharge and taxes based on whatever the booking charges were at the time the statement was generated.
And speaking of that, what were the charges at the time the statement was generated? This is a constant question that leaves PMs puzzled (and our support engineers when asked) that requires a lot of digging around. You no longer need to guess! We now store a snapshot of the booking charges when owner statements are generated and you can pull them up, on each booking line item, on the statement. Open any owner statement, and look at the far right side of each booking. There is an Action button with a "View Charges Snapshot" option.
Click that option, and OwnerRez will open a window showing you a list of the charges, along with the commission and expense amounts, as of the time the statement was generated.
No matter how or when the booking changes, over time, this snapshot of charges will stay the same for each statement. If the booking is remitted on multiple statements, each statement will have its own snapshot of charges for that booking. This should help you more easily investigate why commission and earning numbers are the way they are on various statements even when the current charges look different.
Another exciting new feature we're happy to talk about is auto-created listing sites. For years, we've encouraged (harangued?) users to create custom listing sites and make sure quotes and bookings are tracked so that you know where each guest came from and see that in your reports. We do this automatically for big channel integrations like Vrbo and Airbnb, but it's important that your regional, local and direct bookings are tracked as well. If you have your own website, you should have a custom listing site configured in OwnerRez to track bookings from your website. The same is true from other sources. It recently occurred to us that we could do this automatically. When you use an OwnerRez widget (or website) to create quotes or bookings, our system can typically see things about the request that show what website the guest was on before they came to the OwnerRez quote. Because of that, we are able to automatically create a listing site for whatever website the guest was on and then use that new listing site on the quote or booking. If you already have that domain name in your listing sites, then we'll find and use that one instead. Otherwise, we'll create a new one. This might lead to you seeing a bunch of new listing sites popping up in your account, and we plan to add some merge and clean-up tools so that you can organize these listing sites better. But for now, enjoy the more-complete tracking of auto-created listing sites!
The last new feature I'll mention is the new field codes we added for contact and social media links. To help users create better cleaner email signatures (and other themes) we noticed that our field codes needed to be smarter about what they displayed when it comes to social media links and contact/profile information. You might have a Facebook link but no YouTube page, so showing a Facebook and YouTube icon won't work. You need field codes that display the ones you actually have and leave off the ones you don't, and they need to work for single and multi-line layouts.
These are the new field codes that were just added:
Again, these field codes only show the social media links, email address or phone number fields that actually have a value. So if you only have an email address, the phone number won't show. If you only have a Twitter link, the Facebook, YouTube and other links won't show. This allows for email signatures (and other theme areas like RA and guest form footers) to look like this:
And those email, phone, social media links in the email signature will stay up to date with whatever is in your OwnerRez account settings as they change over time. Remember that you can create multiple themes, mapped to different properties as well, and each theme will follow the same field code logic.
For more info on how field codes work in general, visit our support article about field codes or watch the field codes video.
Let's start off the enhancements section by talking channel integrations...
For Airbnb, we added new Wifi Network and Password fields so that you can neatly fill in the exact Wifi information and have that transmitted to Airbnb where the guest can find it in their Airbnb booking information and in the Airbnb app. You can find the new Wifi fields under the property Guest Instructions tab right above the Internet Info area.
Users used to use the Internet Info field to write out an explanation about the Wifi - and you can still do that - but the Wifi Network and Passwords fields now let you directly state what the network name and password. Again, if you have the Airbnb channel integration connected, via API, these Wifi fields will flow directly into Airbnb.
And what good would these fields be if you couldn't insert them into email templates? We took care of that too. There are now new field codes (called PWIFINAME and PWIFIPASS) that will insert the Wifi fields into your templates.
We made another update for Airbnb over in the guest conversation thread. When a "reservation request" occurs, we now show separate Accept and Deny buttons, mirroring Airbnb's language, so that it's clear what action you are intending to take. Instead of "Answer", you can now directly accept or deny the request. This is different, think "pre-approving" an inquiry or answering a message. The Accept and Deny buttons will only show if it's a special "reservation request". If you use Instant Book as your Airbnb booking mode, you may not see the Accept or Deny buttons at all.
Along with the new Accept/Deny buttons, we added a new system alert for Airbnb reservation requests so that you can see when there's an Airbnb quote that was created. Along time ago, we used to send a system alert for every new quote, but it was irritating and not very helpful, so we removed it. This change puts that alert back in place but only for Airbnb quotes and updates the format to our modern alert style.
We recently announced support for showing non-Vrbo reviews on Vrbo listings. After working with Vrbo directly over the past several weeks, we're happy to report that Vrbo has finished certifying OwnerRez to deliver third party reviews and has begun showing them live. However, we made some changes to our reviews feed (ie. the reviews we share with Vrbo) so that only guest-entered reviews will show up on Vrbo. This is in keeping with Vrbo's review policy. So to be clear, if you go record a manual review in OwnerRez, that review will not show up on the Vrbo side. If a guest uses the OwnerRez review form to submit a review, that review will show in Vrbo.
We also tightened up some restrictions on reviews so that guest-entered reviews cannot be edited after they are submitted by the guest, specifically the star rating, title or body of the review. You can edit other aspects of the review, and of course add an owner response, but the guest's original star rating, title and body are no longer editable by you (the OwnerRez user) after the fact.
Also for Vrbo, we tweaked the Vrbo Channel Tester to only allow future dates. The point of the Channel Tester tool is to simulate rates and rules for future dates and show you where your rates or rules are off. We noticed that when running on historical dates (ie. dates in the past) the results were a bit wonky and ambiguous. There is no reason to use any of the Channel Tester tools on historical dates, so we clarified and restricted the tool to require future dates only. Specifically, Vrbo requires the start date to be tomorrow or in the future. Other channels require today to be the start date.
We noticed that a lot of new users asked about the "global" rules that properties show in the Channel Rules tab. "Global" as in.... where? Over on the channel's control panel? To stop confusing everyone, we renamed "Global" to "Channel API" on the property channel rules. If you're wondering what Channel API means, go to the top Settings menu and look at the API Integrations.
Finally, we are now displaying the Account # on the channel integrations list for more channel types. FindRentals is an example of a channel that was not showing the Account # but now is.
That's it for channel updates. Moving on to some other great enhancements!
When recording a manual payment in OwnerRez, you can now select "Other" as the type of payment. These days, there are many ways to accept payment, and our list of payment types doesn't cover them all. "Other" will help you with those other types. At the same time, we added "Chargeback" as a type of refund. While credit card disputes are never pleasant to deal with, they do happen from time to time, and we wanted a way for users to be able to classify them and search for them later in reports.
Another little tweak we made to payments was with credit card numbers. We noticed that a lot of people like to copy/paste card numbers from emails or other screens. When copying, spaces or hyphens are often pasted in with the credit card number which in turn fouls up the credit card validation logic. The credit card form would tell the guest or user that the card number is wrong because of the extra spaces or hyphens. We updated our credit card validation to allow hyphens and spaces without erroring.
The "Info" tab on bookings has been there for a long time and we've wanted to update it for a long time. Recently, we realized that instead of updating it, we should just remove it. After all, the booking "info" is kind of the same as the property, dates and so on. If you're changing the guest party size or booking title, you might want to change the dates at the same time. Changing and moving the booking are basically the same thing, so we removed the Info tab and changed the "move" page to include more things. Move is now "Change / Move" and the page includes group/party size, title, booked on, cleaning date, currency, listing site and more.
Like before, the screen will detect if you change the property, dates or check-in/out times and present you with some email options. The email options are the same as before only they now have blue call-out formatting so that they are a bit more obvious.
Also like before, if the charges need to update as a result of your changes, a window will appear showing you the old and new charges and ask you to confirm if you want the old or new charges.
Please note that this is a transitional update. In the near future, the "Info" tab will disappear from the booking entirely (right now, it still shows but with a message pointing out where you should go) and the "Change / Move" buttons will simply become "Change". Baby steps!
From the beginning of time, our PNAME field code was designed to change dynamically and show the public property name, instead of the internal property name, so that the guest always saw the public version. However, there are numerous scenarios where you might need to use the actual property name in your messaging, not the public name. It created a problem because there are cases where you want the regular name and other times where the public name is better. Now, you can decide. We added a new field code called {PDISPNAME} that is the "display name" of the property. This new field code will work like the old PNAME one did, dynamically changing to show the public property name if one exists or falling back to the regular property name. The original PNAME field code will revert to only showing the property name. And if you want to always show the public name, whether it exists or not, we have a field code called PPUBNAME for that too. All existing message templates have been upgraded to use the name PDISPNAME. If you want to always use the regular internal name, switch those back to PNAME.
Back in February, our yuuuuge PM overhaul included the ability to have multiple owners for properties where you can establish a timeline for when a property changed hands or the commission settings changed. Since then, we've noticed a lot of confusion with the way users change, remove or set owners. Many users set a new owner on the property when they really just want to change the existing one or fix a mistake from before. However, we wanted to make sure that fixing a current owner configuration doesn't remove an old owner when the property is old. Switching owners should keep the old owner in place and start a new one relative to a starting date. So we went back to the drawing board and came up with a new user experience for switching owners while also creating the ability to fix old mistakes. When you go to change the owner configuration for a property, you now get a set of questions asking what you actually want to do. You can now configure that the property was sold (ie. switched owners), is changing commission with the same owner or that you messed up and need to fix the current owner. You have to select an option; there is no default one selected.
After selecting the option that you want, the edit screen will show you options specific to that option. For instance, if you are switching owners because the property sold, the edit screen will show you the current owner and ask what owner you want to switch the property to and on what date. You obviously cannot select the same owner, so the current owner isn't in the list of "new owners". The effective date has to be some time after the current owner started.
The other options work similarly and show their own edit screens. This should reduce a lot of confusion in changing owners while also leading users down a path of success.
The last big enhancement is kind of a nerdy one and might fall under the "dev ops" stuff we don't talk about publicly. However, we decided to mention it here because it might lead to some changes you see in the user interface. We've been cleaning up our dates and time zone logic to correctly respect the time zone of your user account and property (depending on the date in question and if the property has a different time zone than your account) in many places throughout the system. This is part of a culture and localization effort we are making to normalize and upgrade our language, date, currency and culture settings throughout the system. It's a long-term effort, but one step at a time. In this update, we changed our booking dates to store all dates in UTC (universal time zone) time and then display channel values in user time correctly. If you notice places where time is now showing correctly in your time zone, whatever time zone your account is set to, please let us know and we'll take a look.
And finally, the little tweaks...
Do you have multiple custom calendar exports (iCals) you share with other people or programs? Ever get confused about which one is which? You can now provide a name on each custom calendar export to help identify them to your team (or yourself).
Have you noticed our icons are a bit newer? We upgraded our FontAwesome support to 4.7. That's not the latest version, but hey - we're getting closer!
Ascent got a new logo and link, so as always we made sure OwnerRez was updated to show the latest greatest thing! Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Have you built an OAuth app for OwnerRez using our API? If so, you can now receive webhook notifications when a customer disconnects your OAuth app. This will allow you to clean up your user database and know when a mutual OwnerRez customer has stopped using your app from our side.
When a security deposit re-authorization fails, we say that on the booking Transactions tab. However, what we don't mention is that the security deposit will try to re-auth again, typically the next day, but it will only try again up to a certain point. We've updated our Transactions page to show that the security deposit will try to re-auth the next day, if it will, so that the message paints a complete picture.
Reduce errors from PointCentral door codes. We noticed some areas where we could reduce the error messages being returned by our PointCentral door lock integration, so we upgraded our code in a couple places and starting using their new API as well.
Don't auto-release security deposits on cancellation. Just like it sounds. In the past, we were automatically releasing the security deposit when the booking is cancelled, but there are situations where the booking is currently active (ie. the guest is there) when the cancellation occurs, so the security deposit might still need to be used. We stopped auto-releasing the security deposit so the booking will notify you of the security deposit after departure just like regular bookings.
Validation errors not being shown on New Card guest form. When we did the Stripe 3D Secure and Stripe Connect updates this past fall, we unified a bunch of code including our guest forms. The Request New Card guest form is different than the other guest forms because there's no separate confirm page, so the spinner fires inline. Now the Request New Card guest form will show validation again - both for raw cards and Stripe Connect ones.
CRM menu showing unread messages when there aren't any. This is now fixed. The CRM menu will only show an unread message counter if there really are unread messages.
Recommend the "ORUxxxx" address. We've been working for awhile to get rid of the per-property @inquriyspot.com email addresses, and our instructions now correctly point to the account-level email address only. This means the "ORPxxxx" email address per property is no longer recommended (or shown) in inquiry email instructions.
Allow disabling owners of disabled properties. We noticed a situation where owner records could not be disabled because they were associated with properties that were disabled. We don't allow owners to be disabled if they are associated with properties (you have to remove or change the owner configuration on that property first) but this caused a problem when properties were disabled because there was no way to clean up the owner configuration. We now allow you to disable owners of disabled properties.
BULEASESIGNF is sometimes blank. We found and fixed an issue where the BULEASESIGNF field code was not displaying correctly in some renter agreement signed trigger events.
Long numbers in property names. We attempt to sort property names logically, that is based on alphanumeric characters, but also include a check for numbers. Some users have long numbers in their property name, and that was causing our sorting to blow up on some screens. We fixed this.
Filtering bookings timing out. We found and fixed an issue where searching for bookings based on "sent [x] email template" was taking a long time and timing out.
SMS templates and images. We noticed an issue where sending images wouldn't work if you selected an SMS template on the guest conversation thread. The SMS body (ie. text) would go out but the image would be dropped. This is now fixed.
Door codes based on phone numbers when there is no phone number. Right after we released our new door codes features (see above) where you can generate codes based on the guest's phone number, we noticed that this would create error alerts on bookings where there wasn't a phone number. Nothing bad happened - there was no code generated - but it was pesky to get an alert when it's obvious that a door code can't be generated. We stopped sending the "could not generate code" alert email when there is no phone number.
Segmented door codes with irregular segments. Right after we released our new door code features (see above) where you can split up a door code based on a certain number of digits, we noticed that the last segment (ie. chunk) of digits would often not be the same number as the previous segments. We didn't want the last segment to be small and create dangling digits, but after conferring with users, we realized this was better than having a fat segment at the end, so we updated our code to create a final segment even if it leaves danglers at the end. In other words, if you have a segment size of 3 digits and a 10-digit door code, you would have seen "123-456-7890" before. Now, it will display as "123-456-789-0". The dangling 0 at the end is better than having a fat final segment with extra digits.
Listing site might exist by name. Right after we released our new auto-create listing site feature (see above) we noticed that some users have listing sites where the name is a domain name. Then the auto-create would kick in, because of a widget firing off a quote or booking, and the system would get a "name is already in use" because the domain name already exists. We now updated the existing listing site instead of erroring when quoting through a widget if domain name is missing.
Links in hosted website properties overlapping other page parts. We found and fixed an issue where links in the property description on property pages on our hosted websites would overlap with other links around them. The overlap area was invisible, so no text or images were being blocked, but when you went to click on the link in the property description, it could not be clicked. All good now!
Clarify the First Payment option for Booking.com. Previously, "First Payment" was a checkbox field on the Booking.com channel integration settings. That was a bit confusing, so we converted that to a set of options called "use the first penalty date from the cancellation policy" and "collect first payment upon booking".
Over-syncing QuickBooks payments and invoices. This is a long-standing issue that some QuickBooks users will recognize. When the financial info on a booking is changed - any financial info including charges, payments, refunds, fees, expenses - we nudge the booking to be synced with QuickBooks again. However, we were "over-syncing" the information when the invoice and payment data often wasn't different. Our QuickBooks syncing engine would attempt to delete or re-update the same invoice and payments again even when the invoice or old payments were changed. Because of this, the QuickBooks sync engines would frequently return errors from QuickBooks that the invoice or payment could not be changed or other errors about payments already being deposited. We updated our QuickBooks syncing engine to check the invoice and old payments, to see if anything is actually different, before attempting to remove or re-update those entities.
SDRELAMT is an amount, not a date. The SDRELAMT field code is supposed to render out the "security deposit release amount" which is just what it sounds - a currency amount. We were using a date format instead, so it would sometimes show "MMM d, yyyy" instead of the currency amount. This is now fixed.
More accurately match listing sites on widget inquiries and quotes. We've cleaned up our matching logic for inquiries and quotes coming from widgets. If the referring site matches more than one of your Listing Sites, we will now use the most specific match. This was recently affecting inquiries that were from .com.au domains but not matching correctly to listing sites.
Allow adding a booking on the last day of the month on ribbon calendar. If a booking departs on the last day of the month, you should be able to select that day to add a new booking... You can now. Fixed Ribbon view quick create link on last day of month
Why the red menu? The "Mountain Lodging" website template had some default style formatting in place that automatically made the last menu red. No matter what the last menu was, the font would be red. This was based on something we copied when creating the Mountain Lodging template originally, but it really doesn't make sense and caused a lot of questions. We updated the template so that the last menu font is no longer red.
Spacing in property type descriptions. Is your "Suitein a bungalowon the first floor"? That really should read "Suite in a bungalow on the first floor." Now it does.
"Botique" is not Boutique. How long was this misspelled? Nobody knows. On the property Amenities page, this type of Hotel is now spelled correctly.
Support BDOORCODELIST in Airbnb and SMS templates. Though they work the same way, Airbnb and SMS templates are different than email templates. Airbnb and SMS templates are plain text only, but they do support field codes. The problem is that some fields codes render rich text by their nature. For instance, they might render a table of charges or a bullet list of activity. Rich text isn't possible in plain-text templates (like Airbnb and SMS) so what does one do? In some cases, we simply don't support that particular field code. If you use it, a blank spot will appear in the Airbnb or SMS template where the field code was. However, we noticed that BDOORCODELIST rendered a simple list of codes, so we updated our field codes so that this one can be used in Airbnb and SMS templates. To show it as as set of bullets, we use an asterisk (*) and a new line for each door code that is displayed.
But don't support BDOORCODETABLE. At the same time, we realized that the table version of the door codes list was not possible to render in plain-text templates, so we updated the field code editor to no longer allow it to be selected when editing Airbnb and SMS templates.
Copy forward the criteria too. We recently added the ability to "Copy Forward" seasons so that you can move the current range of seasons to next year (or the year after) and move the associated surcharges and rates along with them. Only we forgot to move all the criteria, so we just fixed that.
General expenses may not be hidden from the owner. This was more of a mis-feature than a bug. Basically, it was possible to have prededucted expenses that weren't associated to any booking, so they were never actually prededucted and the owner was never charged for them. We allowed this for some time, but it caused more problems than it solved, so we've gone ahead and removed the ability to prededuct (ie. select "Do not show on owner statements") for property or owner expenses. The option is still there for booking-related expenses.
Better instructions for FloridaRentals inquiry emails. We recently changed some of our channel integrations to parse inquiry email in a cleaner better way. In tandem with this, we made it so that inquiry emails for an account only need to be sent to the one account-level "ORUxxx" formatted email address and not the property-level "ORPxxx" email address. This has been the case for several months, but we just noticed that our instructions for FloridaRentals still referenced the old format. We have corrected this.
Switching guests on Airbnb bookings. We turned off the ability to change contacts (ie. do the "Associate To New Guest" button) on bookings if the booking is an Airbnb API booking. While technically possible, switching guests on an API booking is problematic when it comes to down-stream functionality, so it is no longer possible.
Don't send reminders for pending bookings or if payment/secdep is scheduled. We noticed two scenarios where payment and security deposit reminders were going out when they shouldn't: pending bookings and bookings where a scheduled payment or security deposit failed. In the second case, the user would get both the fail email and the reminder if both fall on the reminder day. We now filter out pending bookings and send reminder emails before processing scheduled payments and security deposits so that the schedules ones will stop the reminder from going out. The failure notice will still be sent if the payment or security deposit fails to process.
Stop Air triggers on non-Air bookings. OwnerRez tracks guests across multiple bookings and sometimes there are guests that are "Airbnb guests" (ie. tied to an Airbnb thread via API) but also have non-Airbnb/direct bookings. When this happens, we noticed that OwnerRez was allowing Airbnb channel triggers to be sent even when you're communicating with the guest about a non-Airbnb/direct booking. This means that the new message would go back to the guest via an old Airbnb conversation, which is... weird. We now block Airbnb channel triggers from being used for non-Airbnb bookings even if the guest has an Airbnb message thread or previous Airbnb booking.
Handle negative charges after cancel. We noticed a scenario where Airbnb bookings were being cancelled and, because of a resolution adjustment, were creating an overall negative balance. Now, before saving, we check to see if the total charges will be negative. If they are, we wiped out all charges, not just the channel managed ones.
Track owner correctly on property-level expenses. Previously, property expenses (ie. expenses linked to a property and not a specific booking) only cared about the current owner of the property, not the historical owner of the property at the time the expense occurred. This meant that an expense could be recorded, the property sold (ie. switched to a different owner) and then the new owner would be charged for the expense depending on the date of the expense and when the new owner took over. We fixed this so that property-level expenses now track the correct owner relative to the date of when each owner owned the property.
This week, we have a couple of new videos about payment processing. If you recall, our last videos were about the payment process overall and taking credit cards, so we decided to follow those up with some additional payment videos. This week, we added videos about getting paid by PayPal and checks. Take a look:
Hey Paul! Any updated ETAs on when the Vrbo review integration will be active?
On Thursday 6/24, join us live during the inaugural ASTRHO Live Partner Showcase.
ASTRHO Live brings together technology, service providers, and experts so that short-term rental homeowners can find the best-fit solutions to learn and grow all in one place.
During our 20 minute live session, Ken Taylor will give a brief demo to discuss the most important aspects of OwnerRez.
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez ASTRHO Live webinar link to register.
You can find all of our past and future webinars on our Webinars page.
OwnerRez and Safely are proud to announce a new partnership to provide homeowner's insurance (ie. dwelling, fire/wind insurance) for vacation rentals!
Most OwnerRez users know that we already offer a great damage protection product for vacation rentals which covers guest damage while the guest is at your property. Damage Protection is an extremely important and valuable product that has saved many homeowners and PMs a lot of tears!
But what about the structure of your vacation rental house itself? What if the house burns down while guests are there or the deck collapses? Will your primary homeowner's insurance (ie. dwelling or fire/wind insurance) cover the cost? What if your insurance carrier finds out that a third party guest was occupying the property when the damage happened or that you were operating it as a commercial business? Even if they cover the structure, what about the medical costs of the guest?
For these reasons and more, it is often very challenging to properly insure vacation rental property - both the physical structure and the liability. Most ordinary homeowners policies do not include commercial use, and will not cover claims arising from any rental operation. At the same time, commercial insurance often does not cover properties zoned as residential, as most houses are; or, if it does, is extremely expensive.
Safely now offers to OwnerRez clients the ability to purchase primary homeowner's insurance that comprehensively covers all damages, liability, and any incidents arising from a vacation rental operation.
By choosing Safely coverage for your rental property, you protect yourself from the potential of a denied major claim by conventional homeowners insurance, and also from excessive rates charged by commercial insurers.
Get started with Safely by visiting the Safely website and check out the OwnerRez support doc for how to integrate OwnerRez with Safely.
What exactly does it integrate? Is it going to feed expenses back into owner is?
I live in San Antonio so YES!
