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Sooo can we get a way to bookmark certain posts, like this one, in the forum for quickly finding it again? Maybe there is one already. I don't know. But this info was so very good at explaining things. I finally understand now!
Great post and thank you!!
I have guest staying at my vacation rentals for this event. I wish I could go but being down for 2 years makes it impossible for me to go. But I sure hope to make it the following year.
Thanks again
Cathy Goutierrez
OwnerRez will be attending and sponsoring two important conferences in early December, and we wanted to make sure you knew!
If you're within driving range of New Orleans or Portland (Maine), take a few hours and come visit us! 🚗
Here's where we will be:
Wednesday and Thursday, December 1st - 2nd
Event: 2021 Vacation Rental Women's Summit
Location: The Ritz-Carlton, New Orleans
Registration and info:
http://vacationrentalwomen.com
Monday, December 6th
Event: 2021 VRMA Connect, New England
Location: DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel in Portland, Maine.
Registration and info:
https://www.vrma.org/page/vrma-connect-new-england
By the way, if you do come by, ask for one of our awesome holiday mugs with hot chocolate balls!
Today, I'd like to wish all OwnerRez customers in the USA a Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃 Enjoy the downtime! If you don't celebrate turkey day, I hope you have a relaxing week nonetheless.
Over the next few days, the OwnerRez team will be spending some much-needed time relaxing with family and friends. But before we go, I wanted to take a second to run through our updates from last week.
Last week, we put out a chunky 26 update release with a new video feature and a long-awaited update to our cancellation screen. Let's run through it quickly before you fall asleep from wine and stuffing!
If you use our Hosted Website or WordPress Plugin, you can now show videos in the photo carousel for each property. This has been requested for some time, and I'm happy to announce that it's now out live.
To use the new video feature, all you have to do is configure a property photo to have a Video URL and we'll show it as a video on the website side. Here's a quick walk-through of what I mean...
I'm going to add a video to my "Autumn Ridge" log cabin so that the first photo shows as a video when I click on it on my website. To do that, I'll go to my properties, find Autumn Ridge cabin and click into the photos area. On the first photo, click the tag button next to the caption. You'll see a window option where you can work on the caption, select a room that the photo is associated with as discussed in last week's product update) and then a new Video URL field:
The video of my property is hosted on YouTube, so I'll copy/paste the YouTube URL into the field and save it.
To be clear, the video must be hosted on YouTube or Vimeo to be used in the photo Video URL field. Use the tools provided by YouTube and Vimeo to find the shareable URL for each of your videos.
Once you've set the Video URL, you're all done! The photo now shows as a clickable video on the website side.
Here's the Autumn Ridge cabin I just put a video on.
Notice how a round "play arrow" now appears above the photo when the photo comes into view in the carousel.
And if you click the play arrow, the full-page carousel will open and the video will begin playing.
You can have as many videos as you want in the carousel, and it doesn't matter what order they are in. Any photo can be a clickable video that opens and begins playing.
The first big enhancement to talk about is our all-new cancellation screen. The cancel function on bookings was long overdue for an overhaul. Not only did it have the old design, but we wanted to update it to change charges and send refunds in one simple step.
Previously, the cancel function on bookings did just that- cancel the booking and nothing more. Any charges that needed to be adjusted or refunds that needed to be sent were secondary processes that we left up to the user. Our support docs said, "after canceling, go adjust the charges and send whatever refunds you want". While this sounds flexible, it was a constant source of tickets and help-desk issues going back many years. It wasn't clear that charges and refunds have to be manually adjusted, so new users always had to have this pointed out, and often the financial side wasn't caught until later on when reports were wrong or owner statements remitted too much money.
No more! Say hello to the new cancellation screen on bookings.
A lot is going on here, but the important thing to understand is that the new cancellation page revolves around what your cancellation policy is for the booking. Everything else flows from that.
The cancellation policy is the first thing that is established at the top. After that, the page shows you (based on that policy) what the guest should get back, breaks down the new charges and then shows you what to refund at the bottom. All of that is laid out by default, based on the cancellation policy, but the page also gives you controls where you can change or override the cancellation policy with something else. Notice in the above example how the default policy is set to 50% refund because that is the policy on the booking but you have the option to give a full refund, no refund or update the charges yourself.
Similarly, the cancel page will show you refund options where the system will automatically attempt to send money back to the guest's credit card, if possible, but it also gives you the option to handle it yourself.
Of course, if there are no available credit card payments to refund, you'll have no choice but to handle it yourself.
If you prefer the old method of handling charges and refunds yourself after the booking is canceled, you can still do that. Simply select both "I'll handle it myself" options on the cancel page and hit the big "Cancel this booking" button at the bottom.
If you're wondering where the cancellation policy comes from, remember that it's possible to have a different policy on the booking or quote level which can override what was set globally. Some channel bookings might carry a channel-based cancellation policy into OwnerRez as well. If you're unsure what the current policy is, go to the Rules tab of the booking and scroll to the bottom.
This new cancellation page should provide a one-step process where charges and refunds are taken care of correctly and immediately instead of being forgotten or ignored until later. Your accountant will love you. 💯
This past week, the PM area got some love as well. We released three (3) PM updates based on some common requests that PMs were making in our Feature Request forum. By the way, if there's stuff you really want added, drop a feature request in there. We do add work to our roadmap based on what we see in there. Some requests, by their nature, aren't things we can do right away, but we do read and follow that forum religiously.
The first PM update was to add Rent, Guest Fees and Host Fees to statement views as optional columns. A user pointed out that these were pretty obvious misses, and they were right! We have scores of columns that can be selected, but the raw amounts for Rent, Guest Fee, and Host Fee were not in there for some reason. Now they are!
As you'll see, there are prorate versions of those columns as well, so you can show only the in-statement amounts for each booking. This follows the same prorate pattern we show for other currency columns.
Rent is shown under the Categories columns because it's similar to those columns in that it is a type of charge category. Guest Fees and Host Fees are shown in the top section under the Booking columns.
The next PM update was to make the Download to Excel option on owner statement match the correct view. This is another pretty obvious one. Previously, the export option would create an Excel file that matched the "Full Amounts" system view of the statement. Since the Excel download option is only available to PMs (not portal users) this was a quick way of giving users the ability to convert statements to Excel with all columns showing. After we added custom statement views a while back, users rightly pointed out that the Excel download was off because it wasn't showing any of the custom columns, charge categories or taxes.
Here's a quick example I put together.
On the left is a custom statement view that only shows the guest name, booking total and what the owner gets along with some custom column headers. On the right, the Excel spreadsheet shows the same thing including the custom column headers.
Another PM update we put out makes it so that $0 bookings are now included by default in owner statements. Since owner statements now have the ability to select and exclude bookings on the fly (both temporarily and permanently exclude) it doesn't make sense for $0 bookings to be magically excluded from statements. There are several scenarios in which you may want to show a $0 booking to an owner. A booking might have been canceled or it might have been an owner booking, so the charges ended up being $0 but you still want to make the owner aware of it. If you don't want $0 bookings included, simply select them and exclude them permanently when creating the statement.
On that note, we did our best to find and pre-exclude a lot of old $0 bookings that were in the system, so that your next owner statement isn't filled with hundreds of historical bookings, but we might have missed a few. When creating your next round of statements, you might see a couple of bookings jump in that you'll need to manually exclude. If you select the permanent option, you'll only need to do this one time.
Recently, we announced that our SMS pricing was changing to target segments instead of whole messages. We added a support article about segments, but we wanted to do more in the app to be clearer when you're creating messages, so did a couple of things to show you clearly what your segment count is and why.
First, we updated our character counter so that it shows both characters and segments while you're typing. Instead of guessing or doing division in your head, you can now see an exact segment number right in front of you while you type.
Looking for more clarity on why the segment counter is jumping quickly? For instance, notice that the segment count jumps quickly after using emoji or special characters like smart quotes.
To explain exactly why the segments are increasing, we added a "Message X-Ray" button that will open a special window and show you which characters are causing segments to jump quickly. You can open the Message X-Ray window by clicking on the little "?" icon next to the segment count.
The X-Ray window should be pretty self-explanatory. It will show the characters that can be cleaned (either removed or replaced with a non-special version) and give you a "Clean Message" button to do that. Clicking the button takes you right back to the message editor with the cleaned version showing.
If you immediately click the X-Ray button again, the window will show that there are no characters to clean since you just did that.
Okay, now for the last part where I huddle with the nerds. 🤓 Everyone else turn away...
Want to see some really awesome data on SMS segments, characters and encoding types? We added a special SMS Segment Calculator in our support area that will completely break-down every part of the SMS message in detail. It not only shows the counts, but it shows each segment in different colors, the encoding that will be used and the exact GSM or UCS character that carriers recognize when the message is passed to them.
Yeah, I know we didn't have to build this, but our research into SMS segments and encodings got a little carried away, and we figured some of our users might enjoy playing with it as we did. So there you go - enjoy.
At any rate, our mission to clarify SMS segments is now complete. If the above warnings, tools, and calculators don't show you what you're sending, nothing will. 😀 On a serious note, we do hope that all users take some time to examine their SMS message templates and triggers and notice how much volume is being sent. We are perfectly happy for users to send long SMS messages filled with emojis and special characters, but you need to understand the cost of it. It will be expensive and come January 1, we don't want there to be any billing surprises!
Speaking of SMS, we also made a small update to our SMS Phone Number settings so that phone numbers are actually released and returned to our carrier. Over the past year, as more and more users have turned on SMS Messaging, the number of reserved phone numbers in our system has grown significantly. However, when users turn off SMS Messaging or close their accounts, we weren't sending those numbers back to the carrier. We were hanging onto the numbers in case the user came back or wanted the same number again. However, there's a cost to reserving hundreds of extra phone numbers, so we created a process where after 30 days the phone number is truly released and returned back to the carrier so someone else can use it.
We'll wrap up the enhancements area by talking about a couple of channel-related updates.
Have you ever noticed that you don't get "new message" and "new inquiry" alerts from OwnerRez for Airbnb inquiries and messages? Airbnb sends inquiries and messages too, but the standard OwnerRez system alert doesn't get sent. We designed it this way originally because Airbnb always sends the host an email or push notification, and we didn't want OwnerRez users getting inundated with extra messages. A while back, some OwnerRez users pointed out that this was inconsistent and confusing, and that they wanted to see the same alerts for Airbnb, so we added an option in the Airbnb channel settings to send inquiry alerts. By default, the setting was turned off, so you had to go out of your way to find and enable it. As we work to normalize the interface, we wanted to move that Airbnb inquiry alert setting to the normal system alerts area in Settings, so we've done that.
At the same time, we also decided to add a system alert for new Airbnb messages so that you could be notified by OwnerRez for those as well. This alert looks like the New SMS Message alert, but it shows Airbnb messages instead.
If you go to the System Alerts area under settings, you'll now see alerts for both of these things.
By default, both of these new Airbnb system alerts are disabled. We continue to believe that most users will not want duplicate emails every time an inquiry or message comes in, but now you have the option to turn them on, and the setting is in the same place as all other system alerts.
A couple of weeks ago, we changed the properties mappings on channel connections to break out different types of operations and clarify the process so that connected, disconnected, publishing and other operations were standalone and intuitive. We noticed that we could make this a bit smoother even still, so we updated the property mappings list to only show properties that are currently connected and show a message for properties that weren't connected to the current channel or were connected to a different version of the same channel elsewhere. We added a button so that you can see them all, but we believe that hiding them by default is less confusing so that users don't have to scroll way down to find the properties they're looking for when connected to different channels.
IPs for channel CCs. Most credit card processors consider the IP Address of the cardholder when evaluating risk at the time the card is processed. Gateways like Stripe, Authorize.Net, Braintree, OpenEdge and many others will take the cardholder's IP Address and log it in case they need more information or in case you (the merchant) need more information. Some gateways like Authorize.Net have fraud detection settings that you can adjust based on the IP Address. However, for OwnerRez to pass the cardholder's IP Address to the processor, we have to know what it is. For direct bookings, it's easy - the cardholder is usually using our app or interface, so we grab the IP Address and pass it right along. However, there are situations where the cardholder is on a different app or website (eg. Airbnb) when booking. We noticed a situation where we could get the IP Address from a channel - Vrbo - but we weren't actually using it. We updated our channel integration with Vrbo to detect the cardholder IP Address and use it for credit card processing. This only works for Vrbo bookings where the booking is an API-managed booking.
Delete financial stuff when auto-canceling. When a pending booking goes past the "pending until" date, the system auto-cancels it. When that happened, we purposefully left the charges, expenses and guest fees there, in keeping with our previous pattern of forcing the user (you!) to clean up the booking and set the financials to whatever you wanted. Since we now have a more mature cancellation process, we decided to change this and automatically delete charges, expenses and guest fees when a pending booking is auto-canceled by the system.
Honor system message settings on inline options. This one has been bugging users for a while. We have a system messages area in the Settings menu where you can disable certain types of messages from being sent to guests. However, when you go to a particular feature in the app, that global setting does not always carry across to the email options you see on the screen. In other words, the system was only considering those global system message settings when conducting operations in the background, not when you do something manually. Here's an example of what I mean.
The screen on the left is the Reserve Security Deposit page under a booking. Notice that "send receipt to guest" is selected even though the global system messages page shows it disabled on the right. This required users to constantly de-select email options that were already disabled globally. This is now fixed! We found it happening in a bunch of places but might have missed a spot. If you see one, let us know.
Better file type detection. In recent times, we started checking files that were uploaded to OwnerRez (eg. PDFs, images, etc) to make sure there were known types of files. In the process, our file detection was excluding some legit types of PDFs. We upgraded our detection code to detect a broader range of files.
Cleared photo association when deleted. When a room or amenity that is attached to a photo is deleted, it can remain there and cause an error. We took some steps to fix this.
Booking.com scheduled payment using a fixed amount. Just like it sounds. The second payment for Booking.com bookings should be using the "Remaining Balance" option, if possible, but it was using a fixed amount most of the time. This is now fixed.
Skipped is skipped. If a trigger is skipped for a booking, it should say that rather than tell you it "Can't Run Yet."
Missing rates can be clearer. If the LQA tells you that you have a missing rate on one day, it should just list the one day, rather than a range of days. We fixed that.
What remains? If you schedule multiple scheduled payments on the same day, we'll usually run them for you in the order they were created. But what happens if the first one is a "Remaining Balance" payment? Well, we used to collect the remaining balance first because it was created first... but that's confusing and prone to problems. Now we'll run those payments with specific amounts first, and run the remaining balance payment last to catch anything left over.
If there was a problem, wouldn't you want to know? Sometimes we may be unable to complete an action you request, like deleting a surcharge that is used on one or more bookings. There was a bug preventing us from telling you why we didn't delete the surcharge, but we've smashed it.
Big numbers are good! If you're one of those PMs or hosts reporting on very large numbers, you may have noticed that our report graphs breakdown above a certain point. We rejiggered the graph to work with more numbers so you can see how you're doing even when you're doing really well.
Rate calendar arrival window. We found a bug that showed an arrival restriction only on the rate calendar even if you have selected "Allow same day bookings". This was only affecting the rate calendar viewed within OwnerRez, but it was confusing, so we removed that.
Other rooms have beds too! We added the option to list beds in non-bedroom rooms a couple of months back, but the property info page wasn't clear about that. Should be clearer now.
Single property website example. On our Hosted Website overview support article, we referenced a website that had a broken link. That is now fixed.
Hang on-- It's not a New Listing yet! We noticed that it was possible to apply the "New Listing" Discount too soon (ie. before the listing was actually active) which would cause an error. We now show a friendly warning when a user attempts to do that.
"Unpublishd" Typo found on the "Unpublish Listings" page in the channel connections area. Found and fixed.
Hi Dori,
I took a look at your website and blog and don't see any problems.
But it sounds like you're saying that you couldn't write a post because of the URL/slug. Remember that you don't actually need to provide that field - the system will fill one in for you automatically based on the title if you leave it empty.
I went ahead and created a sample blog post for you under your website, and I didn't have any problems. You can see the live post here:
https://www.utvacations.com/blog
And the individual blog post here:
https://www.utvacations.com/blog/hello-world-this-is-a-new-blog
As you can see, I put in a custom URL that is different than the title just to make sure that works.
I'll leave that there so you can see and delete it on your own.
What might have happened is that you put in illegal characters like space that aren't allowed in URLs. The URL should only contain alphanumeric characters or dashes ("-") or underscores ("_") characters.
I'm trying the Blog and keep getting this error:
"The key is invalid. Key cannot contain unsafe URL characters"
I am not using any grammar in the title or slug and I still get this error. Please advise.
Thanks!
Happy weekend, everyone! 🍹 This week, we've released 17 updates including two great new features, the biggest of which is that you can now add a blog to your OwnerRez website! Let's go through it.
Those of you with an OwnerRez website, sit up in your chairs and pay attention - you're not gonna want to miss this.
For a while now, we've been asked "how do I publish news or blog posts on my website" without providing a good answer. Previously, we recommended adding custom pages that were crafted to look like blog posts or using a subdomain (ie. blog.mysite.com) that pointed to a different platform like WordPress. Let's face it - those options stink! Using a separate platform like WordPress means your users have to leave your main website, and you gain no SEO juice from the content you create.
Imagine if it were this simple to add a blog to an OwnerRez website...
Yep, it is now that simple!
We've added a full blogging platform directly into OwnerRez websites, and you can now turn it on and begin writing blog posts within a few minutes. It handles all of the normal things a good blog platform should do out of the box:
To get started, go to your OwnerRez website under Settings and drill in.
To make a blog show up on your website, all you have to do is create a new page for it using the same page selector you use for properties, maps, availability, reviews and everything else. Click "Create Page" and you'll see a new page option for "Blog" showing.
After creating the blog page, you'll see that page show up in your list of Menus & Pages, the re-ordering layout screen and everywhere else your pages show up when configuring your website.
You'll also notice the menu show up on the live website. Go ahead and run over there and check it out!
One click and you already have a blog showing!
But notice that the blog is empty. To be clear, everything we did above was just to add a menu for where the blog will show up on your website - basically just a placeholder. Now you need to write some actual content and flesh it out!
Back in the website settings, you'll notice a new "Blog" tab showing next to Menus & Pages. This tab shows all the time, even if you didn't do the above steps to add a blog menu. Click that Blog tab, and you'll see a new section where you can add blog content and settings.
The buttons there should be pretty intuitive, but let's run through a couple anyway...
The "Write Post" button will help you create new blog posts. Each post has fields for the post title, slug (URL you want to use), published date, body and teaser intro. You can also set a category, teaser image and masthead image.
The only fields that are required to create a blog post are the title and body. Everything else is optional. If you don't provide images, we'll use placeholders by default so that the blog post still looks good.
After saving the blog post, go check out your website. Voila, there it is!
If you don't provide a Published Date, the post won't show live on the blog. This is a good way of working on a post early, before the day you want to publish it, and then making it go live later. You can also set a future Published Date which will make it automatically appear on that day in the future. For instance, you might want to post something on the upcoming weekend, but you want to finish it now while you have more time. You can do that by creating the post now and setting the Published Date to the upcoming weekend. Once that day arrives, the blog will begin showing the post. The "Subscribe By RSS" link does the same thing - it only shows the posts that are published.
Another button you'll see is "Blog Settings" which will take you to a simple page where you can configure a couple of high-level things about your blog. Do you want the index page to show more than 5 posts at a time? You can set that here. Want a default image that is different than the placeholder we use? You can set that here as well.
After changing the default teaser image, notice how the blog looks when we go back and refresh the index page.
The little "news" image that I set as the Default Teaser Image in the Blog Settings area is now the default that shows for all blog posts, both next to each post in the index but also in the sidebar.
And the sidebar is the same both on the index page and individual blog post pages:
The last blog area we'll talk about is "categories". Back in the Blog tab, notice on the far right the "Create Categories" button. Click that button, and you'll see a list you can fill out with whatever categories you want. Categories are basically just tags or labels that you can apply to blog posts that are similar. For instance, you might have categories for "Promotions" where you talk about discount codes you are giving out or promotions by other vendors in your area. You might have an "Events" category where you talk about your annual schedule, parties, conferences, get-together, local or regional events and so on. You can create any kind of category you want - it's completely up to you how you want to categorize your posts.
Create a couple of categories, then click save.
Back on your blog posts, notice that your new categories show up for selection. Select the category that applies to the blog post and save.
If you refresh your website, notice how and where the categories show up.
The sidebar will show a categories section, along with a number count for how many posts there are in each category, and allow you to click on each one to find just those posts. Each post will also show a label for the category.
The post page, itself, also shows a label for the categories that are assigned. There can be multiple categories assigned to the same post.
Categories can also have default images configured so that all posts of that category have a certain teaser or mastheads image showing instead of the site-wide defaults.
After adding a couple of images to the categories page, notice how the blog index, post and sidebar areas change.
The above teaser images changed without updating anything on the blog posts themselves. Because two of the blog posts were assigned to categories, and those two categories have teaser images, the blog posts automatically use the same images.
Keep in mind that each blog post can have its own individual teaser and masthead image, overriding the category, so each post can be unique regardless of the assigned category.
For the latest blog post about "Fall leaves are my favorite..." I want to give that some unique images, so I'm going to set a teaser and masthead image that looks like leaves on that blog post specifically. Here's a quick landscape (ie. horizontal) image I found on Google for "leaves", and I set it to be the masthead image:
And here's a little square leaves image I set for the teaser image on the main page:
There are other things to point out about the new blog feature, but this should be enough to get you started! Enjoy, and as always, send us questions (or comment below) about what you like or dislike.
One last pro-tip on blogs... If you decide to temporarily hide your blog, you don't need to delete or un-publish all of the posts. Just disable the Blog menu in the Menus & Pages list and the entire blog will disappear. All of your posts and content will still be in the system, under the covers, but the menu won't show on the website.
As awesome as the new blog is, there's another new feature that I am excited to talk about! You can now associate your property photos with rooms and amenities, and that will sync across to Airbnb as well.
Some of you have noticed that Airbnb now shows all rooms for a listing, not just bathrooms and bedrooms. To demonstrate my point, this is what Airbnb listings used to show for bedrooms and bathrooms on live listings:
There was a little set of tiles for each bedroom with the beds that each bedroom contained.
Now, Airbnb lets users define all the rooms of the property, like kitchens and dining rooms, instead of just bedrooms, and you can put beds in those other rooms as well.
If you recall, we released an update of our own a few weeks ago to add "other Rooms" to OwnerRez so that you could do the same thing in our system. This update adds to that by associating photos with those other rooms that you create and pushes the photo and room combinations to Airbnb. If you do that, you get photo tiles on Airbnb instead of the little cartoon drawings (shown above). Here's an example of an OwnerRez user's listing on Airbnb after the photo and rooms were tied together:
When you click on that bedroom photo, you get a screen that shows all the photos of the house broken down by room. It looks like this:
Airbnb has some improvements to make with how they show the default room tiles on the main page, but it's super cool that this is now possible. Your guests can now see exactly what each room looks like by clicking on rooms instead of panning through dozens of images and having to figure it out on their own.
To make this work in OwnerRez, go to any property and click the Photos tab to see the photos that you uploaded for that property. You'll notice a new button next to the caption that looks like a tag image.
Click that button to open a window with more details about the photo. You'll see a large input box where you can change the caption, but under that is a Room drop-down where you can select the room that the photo goes with. In this case, I clicked on a photo of the dining room, so I am going to select "Dining Room" under Other Rooms in the drop-down.
Don't have a "Dining Room" option in your drop-down? That's because you never created that room! Go over to the Rooms tab and create rooms like kitchen, dining room, living room and then come back to the photos.
Please note that you need to flag all of your bedroom and bathroom photos to the correct bedroom or bathroom that they belong with, so take the time to do that as well. If you don't associate the bedroom and bathroom photos, the other rooms won't show. We're not sure why Airbnb chose to do it this way - it might be a temporary thing - but our testing shows that bedroom and bathrooms need to be associated or the other rooms won't show up.
It will take some time to run through and properly create rooms and associate photos with the correct rooms, but once you do it once, you're all set! And in the future, we're planning to add this to Hosted Websites and other channels that support it, so you won't have to do it again - it will just work.
Remember the design cleanup work we talked about in the past few weeks? We were back at it again this past week updating the design of the booking area. All pages under the booking area (the booking "tabs" or menus) are now newly updated to reflect our latest design and are mobile-friendly. This includes pages like the booking notes, travel insurance, damage protection, messages, scheduled email, pending and confirm-booking pages. It includes the cancellation page as well, but we'll discuss that in next week's update as part of that is still being tested and worked on. All of these pages now reflect a mobile-friendly modern design.
Notice that, like with the quotes pages, the "Notes" tab has been moved to the overview page of the booking for fast immediate access.
Notice the Messages tab as well. It now looks more like our system message and system alerts pages with a Status column and the action buttons on the side under an Actions drop-down.
To see more information about the status, hover over the status and some pop-up text will show.
To skip, un-skip, preview or send now, click the Actions button on the far right.
If you missed the blog post earlier this week, note that our SMS pricing is changing. We tweaked our billing and invoicing engine for the new pricing changes and began showing "segment" pricing on invoices. The new pricing doesn't go into effect until January 1 for everyone, but our billing system has been updated now in anticipation of that change.
Remember how we recently made it so that your review count and star ratings show up on Google searches? We noticed a couple of issues to tweak. Those star ratings now say "reviews" instead of "votes" on Google. and the home page now shows a reviews count in addition to the property pages.
If you don't see your pages changing on Google yet, give it a week to update. Google's search index can take a few days to update.
If I was to show you a property listing that had "1.5 baths", what kind of bathrooms would you think the property had? One full bathroom and one half bathroom, right? But what if a property had one full bathroom and 2 half bathrooms? How do you represent that in a real estate listing - 1.5.5 baths? 1.2 baths? 2 baths (for 1 + 2 halves)? We noticed that our bathroom math was confusing where properties had more than one half bathroom. It was adding the halves together, coming up with a whole and making the property look like it had additional full bathrooms. We changed our bathroom math so that bathrooms are described as "full" and "half" everywhere they are displayed.
The amenities, summary areas and search pages have all been updated to use this same language.
Copy the listing site on copied quotes. Did you know you can copy quotes or bookings quickly? On every quote and booking, there is a Copy To button that lets you quickly duplicate it into a new quote or booking. However, we noticed that when quotes were copied to new quotes, the listing site on the original quote didn't carry across to the new quote ended up showing no listing site. We've fixed that so that copying quotes will retain the listing site on the new quote.
Stripe tokenized cards can't be reused for travel insurance. Did your guest ask you to add travel insurance, the only card on file is a tokenized card? If you encountered this, you probably hit an error when you tried to purchase the travel insurance for your guest. We don't show those tokenized cards anymore.
Bad security deposit settings prevent booking updates. We've done a lot of work on security deposits recently, and we noticed a bug where certain security deposit settings - settings that predated our recent updates - would cause bookings to crash when other things about the booking changed. Our validation code would check the entire booking, notice the bad security deposit rules and crash because of those security deposit settings even though the user wasn't working in that area. This is now fixed.
Tags, not custom fields. Both of our "Stays" reports now allow you to show columns for tags and custom fields, but we noticed a typo where the tag option was referencing "custom fields" in the help text. This is now fixed.
Hey bro, your { is sticking out. Did you happen to notice that little curly bracket showing up on the bottom of the SMS Numbers overview page? No? Well, someone did, and they reported it. It's kind of like when the mechanic fixes your car but leaves a wire hanging out. The wire is safely tucked back into place now.
Crash when disabling SMS. We noticed a bug where disabling the SMS premium feature (under billing) would show a crash message. Did we do this purpose to stop people from disabling SMS? Of course not. 🤷♂️ All fixed now.
Crash when deleting SMS number. Evidently, trying to leave SMS is pretty difficult around here... If you tried to delete the phone number in your SMS settings, we would show a crash message. All fixed now.
Ghost SMS menu? Yes, that's right - another SMS-related bug. We noticed that the SMS Numbers overview page did not show on the sidebar in the Settings area, only on the Settings overview page. This is now fixed!
It's "Rooms" now, not Bedrooms. Recently, the "bedroom and bathrooms" parts of property content expanded to be "Rooms" in their own menu area and with significantly more options. However, we noticed that the Properties > General Info > Change page still lists the Sleeps overrides as being in Amenities instead of in Rooms since the update, so we fixed it.
Remove spaces from the TO email header. Previously, if an email address contained an email address, it was silently dropped by our email sending systems in the background. The user wasn't notified, the email message just wouldn't go out. But wait, you ask--! How can an email address have a space in it when OwnerRez doesn't allow that? Ah, good question! In very rare situations, an email address was being formed by field codes that would have spaces or other characters in it that were not being removed. We added a process after field code rendering that checks for spaces and removes them. This might lead to the email message failing to be delivered, but at least you'll see the failure now instead of it being silently dropped.
Final Update: Akia called me back shortly after my conversation with the first rep. They apologized for the misinformation from the first rep, then told me the cost is $119 / month for the basic service. I'm still not sure if that is per unit or not, but their pricing is clearly much higher than the OR text pricing.
Just FYI, this is probably the single biggest thing preventing me from signing up for the SMS feature. Just sayin'. ;)
The thread you're responding to is 10 years old. I dunno when it was added, but 10 years later, yes, holds are automatically released as per the settings in your property. :)
Update: I called their sales department and they were very unclear about pricing. The rep told me it would be $3-6 per unit per month, but that there is also a $100 minimum. I asked her to clarify if that was per year, per month, per unit, etc. At first she first said it was $100 minimum per year but they said it "might be" $100 per month. She didn't know if that was per unit or per company. Anyway, she clearly didn't know; her goal was to have me make an appointment and go through the demo process, etc. etc.
What is the cost per month? They don't list pricing.
We are pleased to announce that we have partnered with Akia. This will allow OwnerRez users to have guests register for their stay, receive check-in and checkout instructions, ask and answer questions, all over text-messaging.
Akia is a text-messaging platform designed to help vacation rentals quickly build and distribute customer-facing workflows to streamline their guest arrivals. Users can save time otherwise spent answering phone calls or ensuring every guest receives the correct arrival instructions.
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Get started with Akia by visiting the Akia website and checkout the OwnerRez support doc for how to integrate OwnerRez with Akia.
I didn't realize I had to manually release the security deposit hold--I just get an automated email from OwnerRez stating that Mrs. X'S security hold will be released in 7 days, then tomorrow, then another stating it was released. Is this a problem? Is it just releasing because the hold "expired"? I hold 7 days because my cleaners are terrible at noticing missing or damaged items & we always fly up after each turn to inspect.
We are looking into ways of supporting this, but that requires push notifications which means we need to build a native app or messenger service for phones. It's something we've looked into a few times, and are working on supporting but only in conceptual/design phase at the moment.
The sms messages i receive now go to my computer or phone email, not to text messages on my phone, which is the best way for me to receive them. Can the sms messages i receive go to my text messages on my phone and not to my mail?
Please advise.
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Great question, Mary. We are actively working on adding better visibility and clarity on segments inside the app. Our segment counter will be more accurate and also provide tips on how to "clean" your messages to avoid any extra charges. Some reports would be nice too - great idea.
Thank you for the information on something I didn’t know about. Is it possible to add a report for sms messaging to get data on our sms segments per message template and messages per various periods of time? This might help us make better informed decisions on tailoring our messages to reduce costs vs benefit of larger messages.
Last year, before we debuted our SMS Messaging feature, we spent a while coming up with a pricing model that would make it worthwhile for OwnerRez to support and maintain a solid SMS platform across thousands of users while not asking users to pay an outrageous price.
SMS is an important communication tool for any modern vacation rental host, and predictably, hundreds of OwnerRez users immediately jumped on it.
Over the past year, we've been carefully watching and analyzing our SMS costs. If you didn't know already - telephony carriers charge apps (like OwnerRez) per individual message and call (they actually charge per message segment and call leg) so we carefully collect millions of data points so that we know what every communication is costing us. As we've watched that SMS usage, we've been forced to reevaluate how our SMS pricing works.
Our existing pricing model is based on a flat fee ($15/month) that covers most users and is designed to give you a basic package you can operate out of without feeling nickle and dimed. As usage grows in size, there is a usage charge that kicks in. Inbound messages are always included for free, but outbound messages start to incur an add-on fee as usage increases. We felt like this would help us deal with the larger usage of big PMs while also creating a low barrier to entry.
That overall pricing structure is staying the same with one small exception - we are now counting outbound messages per segment. The original flat fee of $15/month is staying the same. The usage cost of 3 cents per outbound send above 200 is also staying the same, only per segment now instead of the whole message.
Before you read further, take a second to click on the following link which will explain what a message "segment" is. It's very important that you understand this:
SMS Common Questions - What is a Message "Segment"
Okay, you're back now which means you've read the above link, and you understand that an SMS message is made up of multiple "segments" based on the size of the body and any image you include. You understand that really large SMS messages can be as much as 10 segments in a single message body.
You will see the same prices and break-outs on your invoice, only the add-on usage charge will include the number of segments.
Contrary to what you might first think, this is not a shameless attempt to jack up our revenue! If we wanted to do that, we would increase the overall price per segment, or include fewer outbound segments for free, or increase the flat fee. We are doing this to address a very real problem.
Here is the crux of the problem.... There is a group of OwnerRez users that send large-body SMS messages to each and every guest and often several times per booking (before, during and after the stay). These messages are many paragraphs long, are 8-10 segments each in size, and these users typically send thousands of these messages per month. Our telephony carrier charges us hundreds of dollars for each of these users per month, so we've been losing a lot of money. We've been watching and tracking those losses for 6-8 months.
We had these two options:
1) Disallow SMS messages (and templates) to be more than 160 characters in size. In other words, force every message to one segment or less.
2) Or, somehow, charge those users more than everyone else
We didn't want to do #1 because a hard limit of 160 characters would restrict what you can do in OwnerRez with sending images, attachments or messages that are slightly longer at times. We did not want to remove functionality from a well-received flexible SMS system. So we went with #2.
Do you send large message bodies in your SMS messages to all of your guests? Do you spell out your house rules, lay out pre-arrival information and so on - all within an SMS message? If so, then yes your SMS pricing will probably increase.
There's no need to guess! Go to the SMS Communication History under the Tools menu. Open one of the SMS messages you send to guests (look for a template-based automated message you send to everyone) and look at the top. We now show the length and include a segment counter as well.
If the above example makes you chuckle, believe it or not this is actually pretty common. Because emails get lost or ignored, some of our users have converted all of their informational and instructional emails into SMS messages which leads to messages like the above example. As you can see, the above example is 8 segments long in a single message. 200 outbound segments will run out quickly if this is what you are sending to guests on a regular basis.
Short answer: no. You can continue sending large-body messages to your guests, and many times throughout the booking, as long as you are fine with paying a higher rate every month.
However, we highly recommend that messages be short and concise in nature, pointing to emails or web pages where the guest can go to view instructions and information. We have several "guest guidebook" integrated partners that offer third party apps where guests can view your information in a clean organized manner. If you send large-body messages, not only will your costs go up significantly, but your deliverability rate will go down. Some carriers will delay or block SMS messages if the sender sends a large amount of volume or if recipients begin to block the sender on their phone.
Government organizations and telephony carriers have come up with new standards to address SMS spam and ways of assigning reputation to your brand. This is already in effect in various pilot programs and something OwnerRez is actively working on supporting. It's called "Direct Brands" for A2P 10DLC messaging (application-to-person messaging using regular 10-digit phone numbers) and will be announced in OwnerRez in the near future. You'll be able to create a "brand" for your phone number that will carry real reputation across the carrier networks (Verizon, ATT, etc) and be shown on the recipient's phone as a trusted sender. You will have to maintain you reputation, and not send large amounts of unsolicited messages, or your deliverability rate will suffer.
For new users (ie. those that join OwnerRez from today forward), the new SMS pricing is already in effect right now. In fact, you can see that live on our pricing page and our Cost & Fees support docs.
For existing users, your SMS pricing will stay like it was until the end of 2021. On January 1, 2022, your SMS pricing will join new users and everyone will be billed per message segment equally.
Hi Jim!
Yes, nothing has changed about the API channel integration side.
Only future contacts are auto-merged. The existing ones were not touched. We are going to be adding some tools to show you where there are duplicates you can merge, but that's not out yet.
Hi, everyone! We're back with a fresh batch of product update! This past week, we released 17 updates that enhanced and fixed some existing features.
By the way - over this final quarter of 2021, you'll notice that most of our updates are "maintenance debt" focused, meaning that we're looking back at areas that need to be cleaned up, redesigned and streamlined instead of putting out new features. Don't worry - some great new toys will be under the Christmas tree soon enough, but this is a time of year when the OwnerRez team likes to do some house cleaning.
Last month, we released an update to security deposits that allows you to do "refundable" or "RDD" style security deposits. The money is collected as a payment and you can hold onto it forever, refunding it back to the guest at your leisure. This was a big hit, but we noticed that several users, that were using their own custom "refundable damage deposit" surcharges, didn't want to upgrade. The feedback was that our new built-in style lacked a couple of settings that they needed, so we addressed those settings. You can now collect a "refundable" type security deposit 120 days before arrival and you can mark it to never be automatically released.
To be clear, these settings are only available if you use the "refundable" style security deposit. "Hold" security deposits are still the same - they have to be automatically released, and they can only be reserved a few days before arrival.
If your security deposit is set to not be automatically released, we will send you one reminder after departure that you need to manually release it, and then you're on your own. Make sure to release it!
These two updates should help you upgrade from using a custom "RDD" surcharge to using the built-in security deposit. We highly encourage all users to use the built-in refundable or hold-based security deposit as it is a much better experience for the guest and is far less confusing for accounting, reporting and other downstream functions. If there are other reasons you have to use a custom surcharge, let us know so that we can work on addressing those needs.
For a long time, we've had an excellent Reviews feature where you can record, request and display reviews - not only from direct guests but collected from the channels as well. You can use our Channel Bridge tool to download a file of reviews from the channels and quickly import those as well. However, other than Airbnb, the reviews that were imported into OwnerRez did not match any specific bookings. This is because Vrbo and TripAdvisor don't include a booking or reservation number that links the review to a booking. But we realized that we could still find and auto-match reviews to bookings based on the channel, property and stay dates. So we did just that - when importing Vrbo reviews now, the system will auto-match Vrbo reviews to Vrbo bookings based on the property and stay dates of the review.
Try it out yourself! Go grab a new Channel Bridge file of downloaded reviews from Vrbo, then import it into OwnerRez. After the import is over, check out some of the reviews by clicking on them. You'll notice a "For Booking" link at the top of the review that shows the booking the review is now linked to.
You can see the same thing from the booking side as well. Open the booking and click the Reviews tab under the booking. The same review will show there because it's linked to the same booking.
We plan to add some tools that will help you find and match other reviews to the correct booking, but for now, this should help clean up your Vrbo reviews. If you're wondering - yes, you can re-import old Vrbo reviews and the system will newly attempt to find and match them against bookings. It won't create duplicate reviews. If you don't re-import old reviews, the existing reviews in the system will not be auto-matched to any bookings.
Back in September, we added a "Check Status" function to our Vrbo channel dashboard so that you could check the live status of your Vrbo listings. We realized that the Airbnb channel dashboard should have the same thing, so we added the same Check Status option to Airbnb as well. Go to your Airbnb channel dashboard in OwnerRez, and open the Actions button on the far right of each property. There is a new Check Status option. If you click it, we'll do a live check of your property on Airbnb and report back the live status.
Our Rate Table widget smartly shows different rates in seasonal periods based on the seasons and rates you have in OwnerRez. To do this, it crunches a lot of rates and then groups them into buckets to show the exact amount or a range of amounts, and it smartly checks whether you have LOS ("length of stay" like week or monthly) rates at all. For a long time, we would show a "Weekend" column of rates based on the rates that the user set for weekdays versus weekend days, but this still caused problems with what users wanted to show publicly. So we finally broke down and added a Weekend-specific setting on the Rate Table widget.
You can now always show it, never show it (ie. hide it) or show it smartly if the property's rules allow weekend stays and the weekend rates are different than the normal nightly rate. For those of you that don't want Weekend rates to show at all, and don't understand why it's showing up, just select the "Hide" option.
Trying to find your channel listing numbers or links while looking at your smartphone? You can do that now. We updated our channel API dashboards to show the listing numbers and URLs even while on small devices.
This is part of our ongoing effort to normalize all functionality between phone, tablet and desktop screens so that you can use whatever device you want, have a comfortable experience, but also maintain all functionality without having to switch devices.
While we were tweaking things, we made the Total and Owed columns on the Bookings list view be links that will take you directly to the Charges and Transactions tab of the booking. You can now go directly to the charges or payments of a booking in one click.
In our ongoing efforts to make the rate calendar more awesome, we've added another bit of data to the display: Booking window rules! You can now see directly on the calendar that no arrival/departure is permitted where a booking window rule is applied.
In the following example, the property requires three nights of lead time (ie. nothing can be booked within three days of today) and today is the 4th of the month. Notice if we hover over the 5th, what it shows:
Even though the time is technically available, a gray ribbon shows because the system won't let guests book directly because of the three-day booking window rule.
Additionally, the hovercard will now show channel blackouts. To be clear, channel blackouts aren't shown directly on the calendar as red ribbons because they only apply to certain channels, not everything, but we do show them on the hovercard.
Last week, we mentioned that the Rate Push tool in Channel Bridge was deprecated, meaning that it was no longer going to be supported in the future. Many users contacted us, concerned that Channel Bridge was going away entirely. Channel Bridge is not going away. The Rate Push tool part of Channel Bridge is the only specific thing that is ending. We have updated our warning messages inside the app to make this clear.
"Who will I be charged by?" At the bottom of the quote guest form, there's a paragraph called "Who will I be charged by" that tells the guest what will name will show up on their credit card statements. We do this to help grease the skids so that there isn't confusion later on when their credit card bill shows up. We noticed, though, that we were mentioning things that may not apply to the current quote. For instance, travel insurance might be disabled or there may not be a security deposit due. This led some guests to contact the owner or PM with extra questions about the security deposit and travel insurance because they read this paragraph. We updated the guest form logic to change the message based on the rules and settings on the quote.
HomeToGo connection form. There's a new HomeToGo signup form, so we updated our link to coincide.
Don't overwrite billing info on scheduled security deposits with Booking.com virtual card info. Yep, just like it sounds. When billing info was sent to OwnerRez from Booking.com, our system would replace the billing info on pre-existing scheduled security deposits because our system always looks to use the latest best billing info when it's updated on a booking. However, this Was problematic if the new Booking.com billing info was a "virtual card". We now detect if the new billing info is a "virtual card" and skip around the downstream updates.
You keep using that word; I don't think it means what you think it means. For a long time, users have been confused about the Channel Rate Tester tool. The Channel Rates Tester compares what your rates are in OwnerRez to the channel, but users assumed that the "Airbnb" column next to the "OwnerRez" column meant that they were seeing the difference between direct pricing and Airbnb pricing, particularly when they had a rate adjuster in place. That's not what Channel Rate Tester does. Instead of "Airbnb" and "OwnerRez columns, you'll now see "Live" and "Expected" columns. These columns will hopefully clarify that both rates columns are for Airbnb, but one is the live amount currently being shown to the world on Airbnb's public website and the other is what OwnerRez expects the Airbnb rate to be based on your rates and settings in OwnerRez. In other words, they should match (or be close) all of the time.
Display name on Airbnb reviews. This was a multi-part fix, but the bug was mostly seen on Airbnb reviews. Basically, the display name of the guest (ie. first name, username or handle) was often empty or not being imported correctly. Because of this, we would show the guest's actual first name instead of letting that be set. We updated this to allow display names to be set on Airbnb reviews and also made sure the internal Reviews menu and list were showing that correctly.
Optimized season rates. Are you someone with a lot of properties and seasons? If so, you might have noticed that it took a while to set rates on the "Seasonal Rates" season matrix. We noticed too, and it's now fixed. We optimized several things about how seasons and rates are loaded in that area, so it should be fast again.
Trigger messages for quote-based blocked-off time. Previously, we noticed some situations where we were sending trigger messages for blocks that were created by quote holds. As you'll recall (since you read every product update diligently!) our quotes can now hold dates automatically. The system does this by automatically blocking-off time that matches the quote dates and then automatically removing that block when the quote changes status. Our trigger messages were sometimes firing when for these quote-based blocks, so we updated the trigger system to not send messages for these types of blocks.
Clarify Channel Bridge errors and what to do. In the past, Channel Bridge would sometimes show errors like "The field w_Fee must be greater than or equal to 0" which actually means "there's an unknown data issue, and we need to investigate". We now catch those errors and show a more general message of "Unknown data detected. Take a screenshot of the reservation charges and payments/refunds on [channel name] and send that with the Channel Bridge file to help@ownerreservations.com so that we can track down what's going on."
On Tuesday 11/2, OwnerRez will be hosting a webinar with ASTRHO.
Join us for this 1-week power course where you'll learn everything from how to connect your listings to channels, the available smart home solutions, to other types of marketing or operations technology. Find the best-fit options for you!
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez/ASTRHO webinar link to register. If you're not an ASTRHO member yet, please sign up for a free membership prior to registering for the webinar.
You can find all of our past and upcoming webinars on our Webinars page.
You guys must never sleep! LOL, Two questions: 1. I am assuming API connected channels still push rates? 2. Are our current contacts now all merged, or only future ones? Thanks Jim
I had a very nice demo from Superhog and it seems good value, it would enable me to drop any security deposit holds.
My concerns are that there is just too much form filling for guests and that would be a friction point. However with the integration effectively they will have already booked subject to the verification.
This may be awkward to manage via any instant book OTA bookings if Superhog subsequently comes back with a don't rent verification.
For this to really work for me I would like to see either embeddable links from super hog we can put into a rental agreement. Or somehow combining the rental agreement signing within the T & C's of Superhog. (Much tighter integration and data sharing between OR and Superhog). Overall I liked the product and the insurance element is good value for money. I will give it a trial but at the moment I am not sure how to weave it around the OR rental agreement for minimum guest friction.
On Tuesday 10/26, OwnerRez will be hosting a webinar with RentalGuardian to discuss the use and importance of damage protection.
Damage Protection covers your property against the accidental damage a guest might do while at your property, which has saved many of our users over the years. We'll sit down with John Slaughter, Senior Vice President, Growth & Strategy at RentalGuardian, to discuss the benefits of the program.
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez/RentalGuardian webinar link to register.
You can find all of our past and upcoming webinars on our Webinars page.
Scott J said:
May we just get a simple interface for guests to upload their IDs, please?Not interested in AI, and being part of biometric surveillance machine.
Happy Thursday, everyone! This week we've released a monstrous 33 updates which include a bunch of cool upgrades. Let's go through the changes!
The update I'm most excited about is one you can't actually see in the interface! Well, you sorta can... 🧐
For a long time, our CRM area (ie. the menu where you go to see and manage contact records) has had many duplicate contact records. This is because every time a guest books your property or sends an inquiry, OwnerRez would create a new contact record even if the person had booked or inquired previously. The same is true for channel bookings. I'm happy to announce that contact records are now automatically merged for new bookings and inquiries if OwnerRez sees obvious indicators that the guest is already in the system.
If you're curious, the auto-merge process works like this... When a new inquiry or booking comes in (from a widget, inquiry email, API channel integration, etc) OwnerRez checks the phone number, email address and mailing address and compares that to your existing contacts that are already in the system. If it finds one, it then checks for a similar contact first and last name. Only one of the phone number, email address or mailing address has to match (not all three) but the name has to match exactly. When a match is found, that contact record is used for the new booking or inquiry, and no contact records are created. This should greatly reduce the number of duplicate contacts in your account.
If you still see duplicates records, and you might because slightly misspelled names or missing contact info, you can still select the records in the CRM > Contacts list and manually merge them yourself. That process works exactly the same as before.
In the above example, those three Maria contacts would not have been auto-merged because the names do not exactly match even though the email and phone numbers are the same. We designed the auto-merging process to be conservative so that contact records are not merged too aggressively. We feel like it's better to have extra duplicates than accidentally merge together family members or friends with similar contact info that might result in confusion down the road. We are planning on adding some merge tools in the future that will help you find records that look similar so that you can quickly find and merge contacts.
If you do run across a situation where a contact was accidentally merged and should be split out again, you can do that by going to one of the contact's bookings or inquiries and using the Guest Record > Associate with different guest to find or create a new guest record.
After creating the new guest record, you would then need to go each booking or inquiry on the old contact and make sure each one was associated with the correct contact record.
While we were in there working on auto-merge for contact, we also fixed a bug where manually merging was dropping parts of the contact record. You can read more about that about that in the Bug Fixes section below.
A couple weeks ago, we overhauled our security deposits, fixing the accounting and adding "refundable" types. At the same time, we added a new Security Deposits detail report, but it wasn't super useful as it was. This past week we upgraded the Security Deposits report to have new filters for amounts and statuses and fleshed out the details to show better information.
You can now search for specific "kept amounts" or look for security deposits that are Collected, Fully Released, Partially Released or Pending. The report rows show more information as well including all the dates, statuses and amounts from what was reserved, released and kept.
The rate calendar also had an "update after the update" this week. A few weeks ago, we worked on the rate calendar, significantly overhauling the colors, formatting, click behavior and more. The user response has been super positive, but we noticed a few things and wanted to take care of them.
First, we noticed that users really appreciated seeing rule-based virtual blocks (the gray lines) that showed no one could arrive or depart on certain days, but there are other things that prevent a day from being booked, like missing rates, so we wanted to add that too. The rate calendar now shows a red warning icon on any day with a missing rate to clearly mark that day as unavailable.
Then, we added a virtual block for the booking window so that minimum days before arrival will show up as not bookable on the rate calendar just like gap rules.
Have you ever wanted to find bookings that are channel connected? Now you can. The main Bookings list has a new filter that lets you search for channel-connected bookings.
To be clear, channel-connected bookings are bookings that were pushed directly to OwnerRez via an API integration and did not require you to send a quote or answer any inquiry. So, for instance, if you have Houfy or FindRentals connected as API-integrated channels, the bookings from those channels would not be be considered "channel connected" because those channels send inquiries that you answer with a quote before the guest books with you directly. Vrbo, Airbnb and Booking.com are examples of channels that send channel-connected bookings.
Speaking of channels, we also changed our property mapping process for channels to follow common business workflows instead of combining the connecting, disconnecting and mode-changing operations into the same page. When you open a channel now, you'll notice that the "Change Property Mappings" button is now a drop-down with with workflow options. The drop-down options are different depending on the channel you're working on.
For Airbnb, you have six options which is the most of any channel:
Clicking on any of those options will take you to a page where you are solely focused on that one thing (un-publishing, disconnecting, changing modes) and nothing else. We did this because we realized that users never need to connect, publish or change modes at the same time, so it was better to be clear about each of those things then combine them all together.
On Booking.com, the mapping options are limited to connecting, disconnecting and changing sync modes. On channels like Vrbo, Houfy and others, the full mapping page still shows as there is no way to change connection status or modes for those channels on the fly.
As we continue to update old pages and normalize the design, we are trying to clean up a few things each week so that we finally get the entire app on the same design palette and everything device-responsive. Accordingly, this past week we upgraded several areas that were still using old-design pages. We cleaned out all the old pages under the Properties, Account and Quote areas. The functionality and pages still exist, but the design is new.
If you're looking for an example, take a look at Third Party Alerts. Go to any property and drill in then click on Third Party Alerts on the sidebar menu. Notice the list and create/change pages.
All shiny new. Same with the account close page and everything under quotes. While we were cleaning up some of the quote pages, we moved the Notes tab to the overview page and made it a window that opens inline.
About those Third Party Alerts... While we were in there, we fixed the system alert that tells you "the third party has unsubscribed" to use the new email design, and the Settings > System Alerts area now shows it as an option to turn it off.
Couple last little tweaks to mention...
Most of you receive inquiries, like email and SMS, many times per day. Showing the "received" date is helpful but not as much as showing the time. In the past, we added received time to the communication history area, and we decided to add received time to the Inquiries list as well. The time will show in your account's time zone, so if you're wondering why the time appears ahead or behind, check out your time zone setting and make sure it's correct.
A long time ago, before we had direct channel integration with Airbnb and Vrbo, we built a "Rate Push" tool that crawls Airbnb and Vrbo's websites (if you're logged into those channels) and updates rates for your listings. The tool only pushes some rates (no period rates, no discounts, no fees, no taxes, no stay rules) and only works on some Vrbo and Airbnb accounts depending on where you are in the world and what type of rate settings you have on the channel. It was never designed to be a permanent solution or trusted forever. For now, the tool continues to work, but we have marked it as "deprecated" which means we will no longer upgrade or support the Rate Push tool moving forward. If you are one of the few dozen users that still relies on the Rate Push tool, we're sorry that you'll be losing something you use, but it's been a long time coming. If you're wondering why we're doing this, the Rate Push tool costs far more for to maintain than it's worth, it causes channel problems, and it's is a violation of the channels' Terms and Conditions - channels that we are official partners of. In addition, there is no long any need to use the Rate Push tool because our direct channel integrations sync rates with the channels via API which is a far better and far more-comprehensive solution than what the Rate Push tool ever did. We will leave the Rate Push tool up for the time being, but once it breaks or requires an upgrade (because of changes in the channels' websites) we will be removing it for good. To be clear, this does not affect the Channel Bridge tool in general - downloading bookings and reviews will still work, same as before.
Calendar sync clarity. We noticed that users are often confused when they see an error, coming from calendar sync, but then see nothing in the calendar sync event list, or they are confused when calendar syncs merges and they don't see that either. To fix this, we now check if the last success time is after the last item in the list and we add a dummy calendar sync event called "Synced Successfully with No Changes". And when associating a booking with a calendar sync by match, we now create a "Booking Merged" sync event.
Refunding kept funds on security deposits. A few weeks back, we did a massive update of our security deposit system to fix accounting and add "refundable" types. As part of that, you can now refund kept funds after the fact, so that if you and guest reached a different resolution, you can undo what you kept. However, we noticed a small error with how those funds are refunded for users that use Stripe for payment processing. All fixed now!
Payment receipt emails with wrong totals. We found and fixed an issue where payment receipt emails were being sent for Vrbo channel-connected bookings before the booking total was updated.
Rate multipliers not terminating. We saw a situation where a surcharge was set for every 2 guests above 4 up to 6, but putting in 8 guests made it hit twice instead of just once. The "up to 6" maximum amount should be honored even if there are more guests than the 6. This is now fixed.
Evil emoji? We see it all around here! We noticed a situation where emoji in the property headline (like "Owl's Nest Hideout 🦉") would sometimes blow up when pushing content to Airbnb, but only in very rare situations. We finally figured it out and fixed it. If you're curious, it had to do with how UTF32 characters were being truncated, making pat of the emoji code get cut off.
Double the host fees? Yikes! We found and fixed an issue where Airbnb host fees were showing up twice on the Line Item Pivot report. This only happened with deleted fees, but it still had to be fixed!
Travel Insurance purchases when carrier is down. We found and fixed an issue where travel insurance were being dropped if the insurance carrier was down. Instead of trying again later, the network issue would cause the travel insurance request to think it was declined and fail back to the guest or user that requested it. We now detect the network outage and handle it gracefully.
We have an icon for that. While overhauling the Rate Calendar, we added a nifty little legend above the calendar. After it was released, we noticed that someone on our engineering team, who shall remain nameless, used a question mark ("?") on the legend link instead of the correct icon for that. That person pointed out that someone else, who also shall remain nameless, was unclear in specifying that an icon should be used. After much deliberation, the icon was put in place and order has been restored to the galaxy.
Enhance quote payment method testing messages. Recently, we noticed that users sometimes get confused when they do a test quote that doesn't show a payment method they've configured because the rule doesn't allow it. For instance, the user will have a check payment method configured but the quote doesn't show it because the quote is too last minute for the check method to apply. To help with this confusion, we added some messaging. If the user is logged on when looking at a quote, we now show any payment methods that are hidden by rule so that the user understands why the payment method can't be used.
Saint Martin. Times change. Looks like our country list needs to get with the times. We updated our country list to have the correct country code for Saint Martin as opposed to Sint Maarten. And yes, those are two separate countries that share the same island.
Update Airbnb cancellation policy descriptions. We've clarified the meaning of each cancellation policy based on Airbnb's latest documentation. Check out Airbnb's cancellation documentation on their website.
Quote holds work for Airbnb special offers. Want to send an Airbnb guest a special offer AND hold the dates for them? We gotcha!
Default rental agreement email template should use BUFIXUP. We have field codes that will insert a link to a guest form that the guest can use to do certain actions like make payments or sign a renter agreement. We notice that the default renter agreement email template was using a link asking the guest to sign the renter agreement which sounds... good, right? Except that there's a better form you can use - the "fix up" guest form. The "fix up" guest form will do multiple things including ask for POC info, get a signed renter agreement and collect a credit card for security deposits as well. It does this automatically depending on what is needed based on the booking's rules.
How do you describe this? If an event-based trigger didn't run because the relative criteria doesn't match, the message we show wasn't clear. We clarified it.
Fix property share styling. You don't need two page headers, do you? The new property sharing feature had two page headers showing for some reason. Fixed!
Make widget help article link clickable again. In the widgets area, there's a link to our support articles that explains how to use the Embed Code and other widget stuff. The link was hidden by something over top of it, but all better now!
Quoting historical dates? We strive to stay out of your way as much as possible, but we also try to be helpful when appropriate. If you have ever accidentally put in historical dates when creating a quote, you might not have even noticed, as the system allows that without a hitch (assuming your rules allow it). But this is a pretty uncommon scenario, so we added an extra confirmation step if we notice that the quote arrival date has already passed.
Delete more owners. If you assign an owner to a property, but then delete that property, what happens to the owner? Well previously we wouldn't let you delete that owner, but now you can!
Clean up "Floor" and "Situated In" types. Some minor validation was needed here, that's all. If you don't know where these property details are, don't worry - we'll show you if you run into it.
Merge more guest details. Ever merged a guest? Maybe you discovered that files and notes didn't merge. That's now fixed. We also added tag and custom field merging while we were in there. And hey, thanks to the new enhancements we talked about above (ie. guests now auto-merge) you shouldn't have to manually merge as many contact records anymore!
Recheck Vrbo listing status periodically. We recently added a Vrbo listing status column, that ties into the live listing status Vrbo provides to our system, but we forgot that it may not be up to date unless the user hits the "Check Status" button. We tweaked it to check if the status is empty and update it as needed so that the column can show correct information for all listings regardless of history.
Tell Vrbo the channel is inactive if they try to get the details or send a booking. Vrbo reaches out to our system many times per day and asks us about our users, listings, bookings and so on - this is all part of the awesome integration we developed to make sure you can update Vrbo directly and provide proper content, rates, rules and availability. However, we noticed that sometimes a Vrbo channel integration is disabled on the OwnerRez side, but we weren't saying that to Vrbo. We upgraded our API feeds with Vrbo to return the proper error messages for integrations that are disabled.
Clarify Booking.com connection confirmation errors. Previously, our error email would refer you to a missing confirmation step even though the process had you auto-confirm. We changed that message in the property mapping page of the Booking.com channel settings, and we put a note at the beginning of the error message instead of at the end.
What a shame Europe is not covered as the pricing seems much better than Price Labs.
Can we PLEASE have an "Insert Field" for "Discount". It would be VERY useful in writing templates that discuss the discount given to a guest. There could actual be two. One for the dollar amount and the other for the description. I dont know about anybody else, be when we get quotes come in for dates we normally would not book, we turn around and give them a discount if they book. Currently this is all done manually for the discount information. Thanks OR team, keep up the AWESOME work. I dont how you guys do it!
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