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I just got a phone call from Airbnb with the same messaging as Syed ("I see you've put in your listing that you are collecting a security deposit, which is fine, but this must be done through the Resolution Center and collecting funds outside of Airbnb is a violation of the terms of service").
I asked the agent to contact me through Airbnb or email with a follow-up (I wasn't able to find the help article that effectively authorizes this [https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/2827/what-is-the-airbnb-policy-for-collecting-fees-outside-of-airbnb] in time while the agent was on the phone), so we'll see, but I may need to reach out to your support for help if they insist I'm wrong.
So freaking frustrating dealing with Airbnb. I've started marking my Airbnb rates up to try to push more traffic to Vrbo instead, but all that seems to be happening is I'm getting fewer bookings total. :(
I found this webinar most useful, but I still have a lot of questions. I think it would be beneficial to go through each PM setting commission setting to learn how each work, to ensure we are choosing the right setting and able to use to Owner Statements. Seems like a great feature, but I get lost easily. Thanks!
On Tuesday 9/14, OwnerRez will be hosting a webinar with VRScheduler to discuss Cleaning Services, how they work & why they are useful.
Some larger operations have more complicated scheduling needs, including housekeeping, maintenance, and other support staff calls. To meet this need, OwnerRez has partnered with VRScheduler, the calm way to manage vacation rental staff and operations. We'll sit down with Jill Mason, CEO of VRScheduler, to discuss how cleaning services work & why they are useful.
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez/VRScheduler webinar link to register.
You can find all of our past and future webinars on our Webinars page.
Is there a way to add a Tag to email addresses that come into OR from StayFi?
We're pleased to announce that we have partnered with StayFi. This will allow OwnerRez users to easily provide their vacation rental guests with a Wifi access point that asks for their name and information before connecting (like you see in hotels and airports)!
StayFi allows you to provide a better WiFi experience for vacation rental guests. StayFi uses a cloud-managed mesh WiFi system that is easy to install and simple to monitor. You can easily monitor all your networks remotely and prevent WiFi complaints from guests.
Create your own custom branded WiFi splash page that every guest uses to log into your vacation rental’s WiFi.
Use code OWNERREZ when signing up for StayFi to get 50% off your first 3 months of service.
Get started with StayFi by visiting the StayFi website and checkout the OwnerRez support doc for how to integrate OwnerRez with StayFi.
Join us in San Antonio, Monday October 4th from 6:00pm-9:00pm, at Prost Hous!
Since a lot of industry people will be in town at the VRMA Conference, we wanted to get a chance to mix and mingle with everyone. Bring your friends and don't be shy! Come say hi while enjoying a cold brew and a mouthwatering appetizer buffet on us.
The Little Rhein Prost Haus is located at La Villita overlooking the San Antonio River Walk. (231 S Alamo St, San Antonio, TX 78205)
Please RSVP using the form below or by going to the event page. Lock in your spot before tickets run out!
Hi Scott, you would need to check with InsuraGuest about what their prices are. We don't publish price sheets (or other pricing info) for our partners - that's really on them to do. I agree that they should show clear pricing somewhere, and we'll pass along a note on our side to request that they add that. In the meantime, I'd send them a message if you're interested in using their service. This blog post was only intended to alert everyone that, if you want to use InsuraGuest, you can now do that directly via an integration.
Again, where is the information on how much this would cost? Why the whole blog about it without sufficient info provided? Their website is super vague on every page! They want us to sign up before even having a clue what the costs and terms and conditions are. Really frustrating!
Is this available for European hosts?
https://www.insuraguest.com/
No info on details (price etc). Only a sign up form
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.
