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Happy Friday! Hopefully this week felt like it went by a little faster thanks to Presidents Day.
Next week we have our webinar with NASTRA (Nashville Area Short Term Rental Association), which you can register for here. We also have our weekly Demo Q&A session, which you can sign up for here.
Look out for fake Vrbo vacation rentals! Recently Vrbo user, Paul Trosclair, booked a month long stay at a rental in Louisiana. The host required him to check in at 9:00 pm, which Paul told the host he wouldn't be able to do, but the host turned ghost and Paul showed up the next day at 9:00 am. Turns out, after speaking to the property manager of the address he was sent, there was no vacation rental property and the PM had never heard of the owner. Yikes!
This lead to a back and forth with Vrbo who sided with the owner and denied a refund due to a breach of contract, since Paul did not show up at 9:00 pm for check-in... This lead Paul to reach out to Elliott Advocacy who investigated the claims. Elliott Advocacy confirmed that this in fact was a scam. There was no rental property, even proving that the photos on Vrbo were from an Airbnb listing located in Atlanta, 580 miles from where the supposed property should be.
Once they presented the evidence to Vrbo, a full refund was given to Paul and the listing was removed from Vrbo. Long story short, be prepared to prove you're right or a fake owner will win by default.
Florida has seen a 34% drop in visitors compared to 2020. Visit Florida, the states tourism-marketing agency, released data that showed 86.714 million people visited the state in 2020. That may sounds like a lot, but that's the lowest annual total since 2010. Airbnb occupancy went from 40.33% in 2019 to 37.7% in 2020. If you compare that to hotels, motels and resorts in the area, they dropped from 65.8% to 48.6%.
Arcata, California has passed a new ordinance that places a 100 unit cap on vacation rentals. Councilmembers voted 4-0 to pass regulation in attempt to preserve neighborhood settings. All owners must obtain a permit and provide contact information. Any owners currently operating have a 90 day grace period to abide.
Just got a message from HTG to begin my integration - I signed up after the initial announcement from ORez back in December. The contract says 2.5% commission after the 0% promo period for full integration and 14% for partial integration.
If we use the ORez API to push all info I assume this would be full integration - can you confirm this Paul W? You must have missed being asked this question above so I thought I'd ask again.
On Tuesday 2/23, OwnerRez will be hosting a webinar with NASTRA to go over how to make the most of OwnerRez.
We'll discuss with Alece Ronzino from NASTRA (Nashville Area Short Term Rental Association) all the best practices for messaging guests and more! From sending point of contact forms to easily setting up your own hosted website, we'll demo it live!
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez/NASTRA webinar link to register.
You can find all of our past and future webinars on our Webinars page.
Not liking that the between dates option was removed from Owner Statements. i didn't mind selecting or unselecting a reservations or 2 if they didn't apply for that statement but no I have all previous bookings showing up and PM unlock is not working so I can't unmanage those bookings to exclude them as was suggested. I just found this out today when I need to run statements pay my owners. This is a real mess.
Thanks SO much for these great new features. Just so much appreciate having notes for guests. Makes it easier for all our repeat guests to track things we learn about them.
Good news, it's Friday and Presidents Day weekend!
This week we had our Airbnb tax webinar. Caroline Robbins, Connectivity Partnerships Manager at Airbnb, showed how to properly configure your taxes and answered a lot of excellent questions. If you'd like to watch the webinar you can do so here. Also, make sure to check out our weekly demo webinars. The next is scheduled for February 18th!
Tallahassee is back again fighting the local governments on the regulation of vacation rentals. This fight has been going on for years, but now the revival of a proposal by house and senate leaders has fueled the fire. The proposal would prevent cities and counties from inspecting and providing licensing for properties listed on platforms such as Airbnb. The measure would force listing platforms to collect and remit taxes, only allow properly licensed rentals and provide the state with information about the rentals. Currently the state of Florida has bans in place to disallows local governments from creating ordinances that would outlaw vacation rentals. Grab your popcorn - this is far from over! 🍿
In Expedia Groups earning call this week (you know, the people who run Vrbo) Expedia announced the removal of Vrbo from Google's vacation rental meta product. The reasoning behind this is to focus on driving direct traffic to the Vrbo website. Expedia also stated they had raised their performance marketing spend for Vrbo. Monkey see, monkey do? Airbnb removed their listing from Google back in August. The irony is amusing... The major channels don't want Google interfering with their direct traffic but they have no problem interfering with your (PM and owner) direct traffic.
Hawaii has seen a significant decrease in short-term rentals. Due to the pandemic, the island of Oahu had the largest decrease of about 49%, which is about half as many as 2019. The overall rental supply on the islands has decreased about 43%. Even though Hawaii has reopened for tourism, experts say it could take years for the industry to recover. We wish the best of luck for those still listing in Hawaii.
Ugh not a fan of losing "created by" option. My agreements with clients are "you get paid when I get paid. No waiting like ABB or VRBO." I hold a reserve to cover cancellation issues but honestly this change is not entirely beneficial.
Good news, it's Friday and Super Bowl Sunday this weekend!
If you don't know already, OwnerRez will be hosting a webinar with Airbnb to discuss taxes. Who doesn't LOVE taxes? 😍 We'll sit down with Caroline Robbins, Connectivity Partnerships Manager at Airbnb, and go through how to properly configure your taxes for Airbnb. The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez/Airbnb webinar link to register.
Phoenix, Arizona proposed legislation that would penalize short-term rental hosts that violate their local health and safety laws. This would give local cities the ability to charge fines and other penalties, when a vacation rental becomes a nuisance to the community. Each time a host is in violation of these laws, the penalties will increase. Repeat offenders who have three violations in a 12-month period, can have their short-term rental license revoked by the state.
City authorities aren't the only ones who think this is a good idea; Airbnb fully supports the new proposal. In fact, last year Airbnb removed or suspended 50 listings in Arizona for complaints caused by parties or other policy violations. Look out Phoenix, you better keep your guests in line.
Who doesn't love visiting islands? Now that California is beginning to lift it's stay at home orders, Catalina island, off the coast of Los Angeles, has reopened to tourists. The Catalina Express ferry has resumed daily service for passengers from Long Beach and, on weekends, from San Pedro and Dana Point. Catalina relies on tourism, which is why they are trying to capitalizing on the upcoming holidays, President's Day and Valentine's day (don't forget, fellas), along with Spring Break vacations.
Cape Coral, Florida, wants to make life easier for people who own rental properties. The City Council is discussing a one time payment fee of just $35 for long-term and short-term rental properties. This one time $35 fee would be the lowest among Florida cities that require registration. The city says this would make it easier for Police to address an issue with the PM or owner responsible for the property.
Have a great weekend, eveyone, and go---!! Tampa Bay? Kansas City? 🏈
"YUUUGE" is right! This is amazing, y'all! Thank you!
On Tuesday 2/9, OwnerRez will be hosting a webinar with Airbnb to discuss taxes.
We'll sit down with Caroline Robbins, Connectivity Partnerships Manager at Airbnb, and go through how to properly configure your taxes for Airbnb.
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez/Airbnb webinar link to register.
You can find all of our past and future webinars on our Webinars page.
Hi everyone! We've got a YUUUGE one this week. We released so much, it took two release days that cover a total of 39 updates, headlined by some major PM and owner updates. Let's get to it! 🚀
Over the past 6 months, we've frequently mentioned that our PM area is getting a lot of attention. While we continue to work on other things - messaging, channels, websites - the PM area has a number of fundamental changes coming that will increase your ability to manage bookings and manage owners while simplifying the statement generation and reporting process. Some of these changes will add new functionality, and others will simplify what was already there.
The first major thing we did was to fundamentally change how owners, and their commission settings, are configured against properties. Instead of setting a single owner and commission amount, you can now change owners and commission amounts over time while maintaining the historical timeline. For example, when a property is sold to a new owner, you can now set a new Effective Date for when the new owner takes over while leaving the current owner in place. When the effective date arrives, the new owner's settings will take over for bookings that are arrive from that moment forward. The same is true when changing the current owner's commission amount. If the current owner is staying the same but you're charging a higher commission (yay!) you can put in an Effective Date for when the new commission takes effect.
Owner configuration was moved to the property itself, so you'll notice a PM Settings tab on each property with the owner configuration inside it. Head over there to take a look. You'll see the owner along with their current settings. Click the Change button to make a change with an upcoming Effective Date.
Let's assume that today is January 1st. In the above example, we're saying that as of the upcoming date of March 1st, the owner is switching to "Cardigan Capital" and the commission to 20%. The current owner is not being changed and will remain in the system for all time relative to the time that owner owned the property. After saving, we see the current owner with how it will change in the near future.
As time moves along and the effective date passes, the same page will show the new owner as the current owner and the previous owner will show as in the past. Any series of changes will be shown in the Ownership Changes table below the current owner.
Spin through your properties and make sure the owners and commission amounts are correct for your properties going back in time. If you once removed an owner, because the property was sold to someone else, you can now safely put back that original owner and note when the new owner took ownership. Please note that ownership configuration changes have to be made in order, so if you're putting back a previous owner, you must first delete the current owner, correct the owner before that and then put back the new owner.
While we were changing this area, we added another super cool feature. When you change your owner configuration, OwnerRez will now instantly evaluate all your existing bookings and recommend immediate changes based on what you changed. If the owner is changing in a few months, shouldn't the bookings that arrive after that point also be changed so that they belong to the new owner? If you're increasing or decreasing commission, shouldn't bookings reflect that as well? Now we show those recommendations inline and give you buttons where you can immediately take action.
In the above example, we see a common scenario where the property has changed owners effective as of some date in the future. At the time the change is saved, OwnerRez instantly looked at all bookings within the affected date range and shows bookings that appear to be wrong. Since the owner is changing to Cardigan on February 1, these bookings (shown above) that still belong to the previous owner JSK Properties should probably change to Cardigan since these bookings arrive after February 1. OwnerRez won't change them without your confirmation, but you can now see the recommendations right away and change them in a single click. The same is true if you changed commission amounts or some other setting.
In case you were wondering, the Configuration page under the PM menu still exists, but we changed it to be informational only. You cannot change owners, or owners' settings, from this area, but you can see all the properties side by side and see their owners. You can also see future updates.
In the above example, we see that Bear Timbers is getting an owner (ie. going from un-managed to managed) on March 1, and Expedia Property is changing commission amounts. Clicking the green property link on the Configuration page will take you to the property's owner configuration area where you can see and make changes.
Now let's talk about statements! We spent many weeks debating internally how to stop a number of common statement generation problems. One of the big problems we faced was the issue of old/historical bookings coming up on new statements when you first go to generate owner statements. If you've spent any time generating statements with our PM module, you probably know what I mean. Another problem was the issue of overlapping bookings where the PM expects bookings that overlap two months to be picked up but pro-rated and then picked up again the next month.
In the past, to give PMs a quick way of cutting up months, we had a "between...and" selector that would let you select the start and end date of a month (or any other date range) which would then only include bookings in that range. Over time, we realized that the "between...and" selector was insidious and caused more problems than it fixed. Not only did this not address proration accurately, but it dropped bookings that should have been picked up in multiple statements. To create a path of success, we made the decision to remove the "between...and" selector from statement generation completely. In its place, we streamlined the other options, which highlight the real world scenarios PMs face, and we added a Batch Update tool that will allow PMs to bulk un-manage (ie. turn off) old bookings that keep appearing. We'll talk about the Batch Update tool in a minute, but first let's look at the new streamlined generation options.
When generating statements, you can now select one of four criteria options for including bookings shown below:
The first two options are similar in that they pick up any booking with an arrival that occurs prior to the statement date. The only difference is that if a booking overlaps and has a departure after the statement date, the first option will pro-rate the owner's amount while the second option will still remit the full owner amount.
The third option is similar but it looks strictly at the departure date only. So if a booking arrived prior to the statement date but departed after, that entire booking will be ignored until the following statement.
The last option will include all bookings regardless of date. If you're wondering why this is an option, there are some PMs and owners that have an arrangement to remit all booking money, even for future bookings a year out, because the owner does not want that money sitting with the PM for long periods of time. Perhaps, the owner has 10 or 15 properties under management and is worried about a large amount of money held in trust. If those future booking are cancelled, the cancelled one is taken back in future statements since the booking would have zero owner money but was already remitted. OwnerRez keeps track of how much was remitted to an owner versus what should be remitted and can correct both up and down.
The most common option is the first one, and if you're not sure what to use, we recommend that you use the first option. To be clear, only bookings with an owner balance are picked up by statements and only if the booking meets a number of other checks. If you're wondering why bookings aren't showing on a statement, take a look at our help article on why bookings aren't showing on a statement.
If you're wondering how to "cut off previous bookings" because old bookings are showing up on a new statement, that should be handled by setting those old bookings to "un-managed". Up above, I mentioned how setting the owner's effective date on each property will automatically show you old bookings to be turned off, but there is now a way you can batch update many bookings at once to be un-managed. To do that, take a look at the Batch Update Bookings for Commission area under the PM menu. This tool already existed, but we expanded it so that you could select what you want to do - manage, un-manage or recalculate - to the group of bookings you're targeting.
If old bookings shouldn't be included in owner statements, use this tool to select those properties, set a starting date in the "On or before" option and then run the update to un-manage those bookings. OwnerRez will find those bookings and turn them off. Then, go back and generate a new owner statement, and those bookings will no longer appear. Be careful when selecting dates and properties to target the correct bookings. If you make a mistake, no worries - you can use this same tool to find and "set managed" the bookings that were accidentally turned off.
While we were in here, we tweaked some other statement-related things.
As mentioned in our help article about why bookings aren't included in statements, we look at payment data on each booking to determine if a booking has been paid by the guest and, if so, how much. This is important because OwnerRez does not want to remit money to an owner if you (the PM) have not actually received the money from the guest. There are a number of situations where this can occur. So each booking is checked to make sure that payments have been entered, with past dates, for each booking that is picked up.
Over time, we noticed an interesting pattern... PMs often generate statements at the beginning of the month for the previous month. For example, the PM might be generating statements on February 4th for all of January so the statement date is January 31. As explained, the statement generation engine looks at payment dates to see what payment have come in by the statement date (which in this example is January 31) but often there are payments that came in for bookings at the beginning of the month. In this same example, let's suppose a booking arrived on January 28 but the payment was recorded on February 2. Since it's now February 4 the payment has actually come in and the PM has the money in hand. But the statement engine was only looking at the statement date of January 31 so the booking was excluded. This caused quite a bit of irritation. To help with this, we've tweaked the statement logic to check the generation date when looking at payments and include any bookings with payments that occurred before the generation date instead of the statement date.
Another highly requested feature we added is a new PM report called Owner Statement Bookings Remittance that shows the booking detail from your statements across any date range. This allows you to look at (or export to Excel) all the details of your owner statements across any property, owner or date range, and you can use our standard reporting tools to group by owner, property or date. Think of this like opening individual owner statements and exporting the guts to Excel, but instead of opening them one by one, you can now use a report interface to query it all in one go.
Here's an example of where we queried several owners across several months and exported it to Excel. The highlighted cells show the difference between the owners, properties and statement dates with all the booking data to the right of that. This is an extremely important report because it gives you (the PM) the ability to see individual or multiple owners and properties together with all the booking data next to it. You can use this to provide End of Year reports to your owners or do in-depth analysis.
We noticed, while designing out the PM roadmap, that owner records needed more tracking fields, and then we noticed the same with contacts (ie. guests). The ultimate goal is for all major business objects in the system (bookings, inquiries, guests, quotes, properties, and so on) to have the same type of tags, notes, attachments and custom fields available through a common menu element. While we work towards that goal, we decided to go ahead and add a bunch of these things to owners and guests.
We added tags, notes and custom fields to owners, and we redesigned the owner pages to have tabs so that they can be viewed and managed separately. Navigating to an owner, now shows an overview of the owner's contact info, preferences, tags, notes and custom fields.
Notice at the top we also show where this owner is used throughout the system and what other features this owner is associated with such as a portal access login. This is similar to what we started doing with email templates and it's a pattern we like and are expanding to other features.
Clicking the top Change button takes you to the tabbed view where you can make changes.
All three of these things - tags, notes and custom fields - work the same way for owners as they do for properties, quotes or bookings. You can see tags on the grid of owners and filter by tag. You can define custom fields at the owner level and then fill different field values for each other. For instance, you may want to denote which owners get statements on certain days of the month or which owners you send a Christmas card to. You can use tags to denote those things. Suppose you need to email the owners' statements to special email addresses different than the normal one on file, or to multiple email addresses. You can do that by setting up a custom field for owners called "Statement Email Addresses" and then set what it should be on each owner and then use that custom field in your statement email template as the TO field.
We then did the same for contacts (ie. guests). Contacts already had tags, but we went ahead and added notes and custom fields to contacts as well. Like owners, the Note field on contact can take up to 10,000 characters and is shown in the list if a note exists. You can also filter for notes as well - did I mention that? So if you forgot which owner or contact you wrote a note on, try filtering the list for only those owners or contacts with notes.
Custom field on contacts work the same as everywhere else, so we won't waste time digging through that. Click into any contact and you'll figure it out from there.
While we were doing all this work on custom fields for owners and contacts, we realized that a bunch of system field codes would be better organized by moving them to the owner and contact level. For instance, instead of specifying the "booking guest email" as a field code, you should specify the "guest email" itself since every booking is already associated with a guest. We made numerous changes to field codes moving all the booking guest field codes to guest and all the statement field codes to owners. Take a look at our master support article about Field Codes to see the latest list. You'll notice new field code sections for Owner field codes and Contact field codes. "Contact" is now what we call guests. The field codes in those Owner and Contact sections aren't new. Most of them used to be in other sections and were moved to their own section. For instance, {ONAME} became {ONAME} and {CFIRST} became {CFIRST} and so on.
A couple points of clarity...
If you're wondering where certain field codes went, when looking at the "Insert Field" window, check the other tabs along the top. For instance, if you don't know why the Bookings list of field codes no longer show guest related fields, look in the Contacts tab. The Owner tab likewise.
If you're worried about your existing templates, and the field codes that you used in the past, don't be. We swapped out all the field codes in your existing templates, so they should continue working without a hitch.
We also spent some time on our search results page. You can now search notes on guests as well as on bookings and quotes, and the search page will show the guest and its contact info and notes above any associated bookings, quotes or payments.
Nothing was removed from the search page, just a bunch of cool new stuff was added!
The last new feature to mention (whew! 🤕) is that you can remove or disable owners from the PM area. Make a mistake in your data entry or no longer need to manage an owner's property? You can turn the owner off for good. Simply navigate to the Owner grid and select the owner(s) to disable, or drill into the owner and use the "Disable" button there. The owner and their associated history will still remain in the system but you won't be bothered by that owner's name in drop-down lists, reports and so on.
While moving PM stuff around, we cleaned up the PM menu. All the reports that used to show in the PM menu are still there, same as ever, but they no longer clutter up the sidebar menu. You get one "Reports" tab and that takes you to the real Reports menu where the PM reports are located.
Tags have been well-received by users because of their power and versatility, but we noticed that they were a little confusing on triggers. What does "everything but" mean when selecting tags or "only" for that matter? Does the booking need to only have the selected tags and no others, or are the tags the only ones examined? We changed tags on triggers into two separate lists labeled "Has Tags" and "Doesn't Have Tags".
This makes it much clearer what will happen when the trigger runs, and this allows you to target bookings with good and bad tags at the same time. For instance, you might want to send a post-departure marketing email to all bookings that have the tag "large group" but not if they also have the "bad guest" tag. You can now do that!
Last week, we mentioned that Airbnb Infants are now shown on bookings, only they were showing a little too much. They were showing up on Party Size and other areas, causing confusion. Is an infant a "guest" in the sense that it's a human being like everyone else? Well... not really because the guest count doesn't include Infants in Airbnb land. To reduce confusion, we stopped showing the infant count in party size or guest labels and only show Airbnb Infants on the booking itself if it's an Airbnb booking.
From the beginning of time, we've never sent "new inquiry" alerts if the inquiry comes from Airbnb via an API connection. This is because Airbnb already alerts you when someone sends a message. However, some users have shown us scenarios where getting the OwnerRez alert will be beneficial, so we now have an option in the Airbnb API settings to turn on the "new inquiry" alert if you want to get it.
The inquiry/booking widget has gotten smarter too. We now block selection of unavailable dates on the inquiry/booking widget to make it harder for guests to screw up when putting in their arrival and departure dates. Before, the unavailable dates were colored as unavailable but still select-able. We also changed the date selectors to stop navigating to previous months.. When it comes to dates you can't book, don't look and don't touch!
Another great enhancement is the new rate setting that lets you specify, globally, if your night rules should be based on arrival day or all the days of the booking. To find this, go to Settings > Rates and click the top Settings button.
You'll see a new Evaluate Rules field with those options. This matters because users often want to align their rates and rules with what channels (eg. Vrbo) do. OwnerRez is inherently a lot more flexible and versatile than the channels - our rate and rules options are ten times more powerful than anything the channels support. This sometimes creates problems because what guests see in one place will be different than somewhere else. if you want OwnerRez to continue evaluating rules based on all nights of the booking when the guest books direct, leave the option as "All Nights Of Stay". If you'd rather simplify your rules so that guests have the same experience everywhere, go ahead and choose the "Arrival Night Only".
In recent times, we've added the ability to view and edit cards on file, and we've continued expanding that feature. We've just released some updates to work with non-verified cards so that pending bookings can "try again" using a failed or unverified card without bothering the guest or needing a brand new card entered. Failed or unverified cards are still stored and still usable. Likewise, the system will now allow you to schedule a future payment or security hold using a failed or unverified card so that it can try the card and, if it still fails, email the guest again. Bottom line - we no longer assume a failed or unverified card can't be used for future things.
I answered it! Our new "Create And Send Quote" button is a big hit, but it wasn't actually marking the original inquiry as answered, so we fixed that. Now the button will quickly take you through creating the quote, sending it and answering the inquiry all in one step!
Renter agreement signing. We found an issue where renter agreements were being signed by the guest, and on-signed triggers were firing, but the PDF wasn't fully archived yet. The guest would get the trigger email, but the PDF link didn't exist yet, so part of the email was empty. All fixed now!
Card on file with booking created triggers. We fixed a timing issue where bookings would store cards on file but the on-create triggers would not run correctly.
Deleted tagged entities. A lot of things can be tagged nowadays, but what happens when something is tagged and then that same thing is deleted? The Tag Usage grid was crashing because it was still trying to find the tagged item. This has been fixed. And hey, if you don't know what the Tag Usage grid is, check it out over here. It shows all the items in the system that are associated with any set of tags, no matter what type of item it is. Pretty sweet.
Card editing redirect. We fixed an issue where cards on file were redirecting improperly and showing the wrong validation after being edited.
Missing Stripe fee. As of right now, Stripe is the only gateway that returns fee data to OwnerRez automatically with every transaction, and our Stripe users really like that. A recent update introduced a bug where multiple failed Stripe transactions would create a scenario where the next successful transaction was not returning fee data. This has been fixed.
Long phone numbers and QuickBooks. We fixed a bug where really big phone numbers were crashing when the booking synced across to QuickBooks. Evidently, Intuit has a problem with phone numbers that are typed as "I'm at (912) 555-1212 and my hubbie is 202-444-526 but use ext. 47" 😂
Unicode names and QuickBooks. Apparently, this is the week that QuickBooks wanted to get finicky. It also choked on names that have tildes and other unicode characters outside of the basic alphabetical one the western world is used to. Fixed!
Numbers should be numbers in Excel. Excel will show values as numbers even when those values are not stored as numbers, but it gets irritated and tells you to change them and it won't allow you to do number stuff like sum, count or average. We fixed this so that our export is outputting real Excel-approved numbers.
Slow reviews and thumbnails? Never! In case you've been living under a rock, we here at OwnerRez care a lot of about speed. We measure everything and are constantly improving our features and pages to be fast and efficient. We recently got a whiff of some slow reviews and property thumbnails and did a bunch of work to make them fast again.
HomeToGo is a channel too. Our Channel Rate Tester tool lets you pick an API channel to test rates for, but HomeToGo wasn't an option in the list of channels. We fixed that.
Optional surcharge seasons. In recent weeks, we changed our season calculations on surcharges to more-accurately reflect what surcharges or discounts should apply to a booking where it overlapped multiple season. Our optional surcharges (ie. the add-ons selected by guests during quote acceptance) got no such love unfortunately. We fixed them so that they follow the same season calculations.
SMS forever. We fixed an issue where an SMS message was triggering to multiple phone numbers but, because one of the numbers was failing, the entire loop was running again.
PM Lock blocking security holds. We noticed that bookings with PM Lock turned on were not allowing security holds to be scheduled or reserved. All better now!
This week, our latest videos are about payment processing. First, we released a high-level overview of what's available for payments in general, and then we added a video about credit card processing. We have upcoming videos, actively being worked on, that are about checks, PayPal, security holds and pending confirmation. When you get a second, take a look at the first two:
Good news, it's Friday!
If you don't already know, we're hosting a webinar this upcoming Tuesday 2/2 at 8:00 AM PST. We'll give a high-level demonstration of how OwnerRez looks across all of its menus and features, and have a Q&A section to answer any questions you have. The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez Demo webinar link to register.
In December, short-term rentals were allowed to operate again on Oahu Hawaii Island and Kauai. Maui County had over 250,800 available vacation rentals, making it the largest vacation rental supply out of all four Hawaiian counties. In December, they had a 41.9% occupancy rate with an average daily rate of $277. Meanwhile, hotels only had an occupancy rate of 23.8%. Shocker: travelers like vacation rentals more than hotels.
Jersey Shore is seeing high demand for vacation rentals in the wake of coronavirus. Not only are they seeing high demand, tourism highs in the fall have broken the previous year's records with a revenue increase of 6.5%. In Cape May County, 47% of homes are considered second or vacation homes, so lack of vacation rentals is not an issue. This increase in demand is being fueled by the flexibility associated with remote work and online schooling.
VRM Intel released a customer survey on how many people traveled in 2020 after March or - as its better known - the start of the craziness known as Covid-19. The survey showed that out of 1,860 participants, 21.5% had traveled somewhere. Of those people, 31.1% chose to stay in a vacation rental versus the 53.3% who stayed in hotels. When you compare age groups, the group that most often chose vacation rentals was the 25-34 age range at 39.4%. Travelers 65+ chose vacation rentals the least often at only 21.1%.
The 4th annual #BookDirect guest education day is February 3rd. This day is meant for vacation rental providers to promote the message that there are a lot of advantages to bypassing third-party channels and booking direct. OwnerRez supports the #BookDirect movement! If you don't know already, you can have your own direct booking hosted website through OwnerRez. We are continually working to add more features to our hosted websites and we have some exciting updates coming out very soon!
Happy Wednesday, everyone! We have 31 updates to talk about, most of which are enhancements and bug fixes like last week. Let's go through the details!
Just one new feature to mention this week - we opened up our SMS feature to Canadian users. If you're a Canadian user, you can now search for a Canadian phone number to claim and use in your OwnerRez account. This will give you a phone number that is local to your area and matches your geographical location and brand. It may also help your guests avoid long distance charges if they are local to your area. Are long distance charges still a thing? 🤔
To use a Canadian phone number, follow our SMS instructions but select Canada as your country and enter the Canadian area code you'd like to use. You can search on any range of numbers (or even alphabetical letters) and our carrier will return any available numbers that match.
To be clear, any user, whether Canadian or not, can register and claim any type of phone number they want regardless of their geographical or business location. For instance, an American user can claim and use a Canadian phone number and vice versa. The same is true for our South American, African, European and Asian customers. However, it is recommended that you use a phone number that aligns with your geographical or business location.
We recently announced our support for 3D Secure 2 ("3DS2") which allows our European users to successfully take credit card payments while following 3DS2 legal requirements. Over the past few weeks, as we've worked with European users, we've enhanced our Stripe Connect and 3DS2 support with a few more updates...
After moving to Stripe Connect, we noticed that Stripe security deposits (ie. holds) were not allowing users to capture funds if the Stripe transaction was captured a certain way, so we fixed that. We also updated the Request New Card guest form to allow the guest to choose a different card if the first choice failed and the OwnerRez user was using Stripe Connect.
Over on the channel side, we noticed that Vrbo might send 3DS2 information to us, with a new booking, even if the OwnerRez user doesn't have a Stripe Connect account that supports it, so we skip the 3DS2 process in that case.
Some of you may have gone through the process to connect your Stripe account to OwnerRez and then wondered why it didn't save. After coming back from Stripe, OwnerRez asks you to set some basic settings and then save. We changed this to save the Stripe connection right away and then ask for the settings after the fact. That way, if you click away, the Stripe connection is still saved.
We'll keep our eye on all the new 3DS2 stuff, but if you see something that seems off, let us know right away! Even if you're not a European merchant, keep an eye on your Stripe settings and processing history in OwnerRez and let us know if something seems off.
We're doing some research to help our website customers create much nicer custom pages in their OwnerRez hosted websites. This will allow you to select page layouts for many different styles as well as have mobile/tablet responsive layouts built-in by default. But until we get that out, we made a tweak that makes large images and long lines of text automatically adjust to mobile layouts automatically. This will help in the meantime until our custom pages have better options.
We notice a lot of little things each week that can be improved. For instance, this past week:
We noticed that you couldn't sort the Triggers grid by the Description or When columns, and some of you have a lot of triggers! We updated that so that sorting works on both the Description and When columns.
We noticed that inquiries from Vrbo were allowing you to send quotes back to Vrbo with the links stripped out. We changed this so that the double-blind proxy email address isn't stored on guests in OwnerRez but only on the Vrbo inquiry record itself, and then we changed the answer process for Vrbo inquiries to not allow normal email answers.
We noticed that PMs with hundreds of properties were getting really slow results when guests searched for availability across all of them. We figured out that this was caused by our system generating a to-the-penny amount total for each property it returned and it was returning all of the properties. We changed the availability widget for properties to return limited page sizes and then show a pager below the properties so the guest can move forward to the next set of results. This greatly increases speed while giving guests an smaller set of properties to scan before moving on.
We noticed that our hosted websites can have a home URL address but it would only go to a page with an actual URL of "home" if it existed. We changed this so that the "home" URL auto-redirects to the real home page.
We noticed that stored cards on file weren't showing as successful if the last transactions was a security hold. We updated our stored card logic to consider security holds as successful transactions (assuming the credit card is approved, of course).
We noticed that Airbnb sends an "infant" count that isn't part of the guest list and doesn't increase the number of children. The Infant number doesn't really change anything about the booking, but you might want to see it nonetheless. We updated the booking overview page to show the Airbnb Infant field if the bookings happens to have an infant count denoted.
To be clear, this only shows up on Airbnb bookings and only bookings where the guest has included an infant count. The Infant count does not increase the total guest size and will not show up in the Party Size information as well. There is currently no way of searching for bookings that have an Infants count.
If you use our PM system, at one time or another, you've probably had to turn off historical bookings that crept into owner statements the first time you ran statements. And you may have had to do this again. By "turn off" I mean you went to the booking, clicked the PM tab and set it to be "un-managed". This takes the booking out of the PM system so that commission and earnings are not calculated at all. The booking ceases to exist for PM purposes. However, there was never any way to do this in bulk. So if you had many months of bookings that had this problem, you had to radio our help desk to take care of it.
We've updated our Batch Update Bookings for Commission page to support "un-managing" bookings en masse. This works just like it used to only instead of turning bookings on, you can now turn them off as well.
Have you ever tried to select and set a lot of rates on the rate calendar at once? If so, you may have noticed that it would take a few seconds to finish. We updated our "spot rates" to work a lot faster. You can now set a couple of years worth of rates in less than 1 second. 🤯
Oh hey, if you use the Norton Safe Web community, OwnerRez has now been whitelisted as a safe app/website to use! No, never heard of it? We hadn't either, but evidently it exists and some of our users were getting bugged by a "THIS MAY BE UNSAFE!!" warning whenever they got our emails or logged into OwnerRez. We submitted all of our domain names to be whitelisted in the Norton Safe Web directory so our Norton users are all set now!
Booking activity language and formatting. Awhile back, we started calling "security deposits" security holds instead. The booking activity list - that thing that shows a chronological bullet list of financial activity - was still saying "security deposit" so we fixed it to match. We also made sure the date formatting was using the user's preferences.
WordPress Plugin in Allow All mode. There was an issue where the Personal Access Tokens for WordPress plugins would not work if the IP Restrictions list was set to Allow All. This might be the case, for instance, if you re-used the same token for multiple sites. We fixed this to work. However, we do recommend using a unique token for each application you want to connect.
Minimum night rule or gap night rule? We noticed that our Minimum Gap Night rule was kicking in when the Minimum Night rule was shorter, so we fixed this. The Minimum Gap Night override only takes over if it's shorter than the Minimum Night rule. Does it hurt your head to figure out what I just said? Yeah me too, but the engineers say it was a real bug and it's fixed now.
Multiple scheduled security holds. In certain situations, pending bookings were causing multiple security holds to be scheduled. For instance, you might have already scheduled one manually or the guest might have scheduled one using a guest form. Then, you go to Confirm the pending booking and the system schedules them again. We fixed all that so that the pending > confirm process is smarter and double checks what's already been scheduled.
Vrbo Quick Connect link. When connecting the Vrbo API integration, there's a newish "Quick Connect" process that certain users can qualify for. However, we noticed that the link for Quick Connect was showing when properties had no listing data (descriptions, amenities, photos). The user would go mash Quick Connect link and fireworks would happen. We now hide the Quick Connect link unless the property has listing data.
Quote listing site. When editing the quote Info page, changing the Listing Site back to blank (to remove it) and saving did not work. The original Listing Site information would still remain. This has been fixed.
Dutch widgets. Our friend Dennis from LayerFort noticed some translation issues with the Dutch words in our widgets. He graciously gave us the fixes and double checked some other Dutch translations. Thanks, Dennis!
Hey, we cover nadrual diasters ant deelays! We found and fixed a small typo in a blurb about Travel Insurance. It was pretty tiny, but hopefully no Grammar Nazis decided not to buy Travel Insurance because of it! 🤓
Default Property URL for multi-user widgets. Users that use our hosted website feature automatically get a default Property URL generated for each of their properties. They can override this by setting the Property URL to something else but, if that's removed, the system falls back to using the hosted website URL. However, some of those users were also listed on multi-user widgets which are widgets that allow multiple OwnerRez users to display their properties, across the different OwnerRez accounts, on the same single widget. When that happened, and the property had no Property URL, the default URL was not kicking in. This has been fixed.
Discount codes on Renter Agreement previews. When someone previews the Renter Agreement for their quote, the table of charges was not including any promo-code generated discounts. This is because the preview is dynamic and depends on a number of parameters that are passed to it on the fly. The promo code is now being included so that the charges are fully displaying any promo-code discounts that were selected by the guest right before they previewed the Renter Agreement.
PM Lock locks down Damage Protection. PM Lock is designed to protect PM users from accidentally manipulating bookings after they've already remitted the money to the owner. However, we noticed that Damage Protection could still be changed on bookings that had PM Lock turned on. This creates the potential of still changing the owner's balance depending on what happens with the Damage Protection. We updated PM Lock to not allow Damage Protection to be changed if PM Lock is turned on. In order to add Damage Protection manually, you now have to remove PM Lock first.
RemoteLock discount clarity. We fixed the RemoteLock discount message to refer specifically to their branded locks. RemoteLock does not honor the OwnerRez discount on the non-RemoteLock hardware in their online store, only on their own.
What third party? We were flagging the booking as having sent alerts to third parties when no third party alerts were configured in the first place. We now detect that the property has no third parties and don't set that the alerts were sent.
This week, our latest videos are about installing OwnerRez on Android and iOS devices and our integration with TouchStay. Enjoy!
On Tuesday 2/2, join us for a live demo of OwnerRez! This is a great opportunity for you to learn something new and ask questions you have during the Q&A section.
Glen Ruggiero, from our customer success department, will give a high-level demonstration of how OwnerRez looks across all of its menus and features.
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez Demo webinar link to register.
You can find all of our upcoming and past webinars on our Webinars page.
It’s finally Friday! This has been a pretty big week for news. The United States has a new president, created a new vaccine distribution plan, rejoined the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization. Whew - all in a day's week’s work. 😅
Now let’s talk about vacation rentals!
Vrbo caught some heat for not following the lead of Airbnb, which blocked and canceled all reservations in the Washington, D.C., area during inauguration week. Expedia, the parent company of Vrbo, stated they were carefully evaluating bookings and launching extraordinary emergency procedures. In the end, Vrbo decided to block any new bookings starting Tuesday, January 19th, through Friday.
In a Bloomberg report, over 1 billion hotel rooms sat empty in the United States alone during the 2020 holiday season. On the flipside, Airbnb occupancy rates soared during this time. According to the report, hotel owners have seen about $46 billion in lost revenue. If this is any indication, short-term rentals is the direction the market is heading in.
Minneapolis, Minnesota, is preparing to implement a new short-term rental ordinance that will limit STR ownership to only one property, other than their current residence. This is forcing owners to either sell their properties or convert them to long-term rentals. On top of this, no more than 10% of units can be STRs in buildings with more than 20 apartments. Why one vacation rental per person? Seems kind of arbitrary, right?!
For any of you based in Canada that use Stripe, you can now accept payments through the Discover Global Network. This will specifically cover over 889 million cardholders from Discover, Diners Club International, and other cards that are co-branded with Discover. Even better - you don’t have to do anything, this has already been enabled for all standard connected accounts!
A month ago, we released the WordPress Plugin Beta. Some of you have already gotten your hands on this, and we have received a lot of great feedback. Cuvee, a luxury PM (and OwnerRez user), got their hands on this and ran with it. They created a beautiful new website, and use the WordPress plugin for part of the functionality. We look forward to seeing all the amazing custom websites that our users will create and look forward to expanding our WordPress Plugin to support that creativity. We love the new website, Cuvee!
Hi Lisa,
We do not support Agoda in our channel manager system.
I am not seeing you listed in Agoda as a channel manager when selecting the drop down list?
Periodically we like to interview one of our exceptional users. Not only does operating a vacation rental business take a lot of time, but also a huge amount of effort. This week we spoke with Mark from Arizona Luxury Rentals. Mark's website and operation can be found at azvacationhomes.com. Below are the questions we asked and his responses.
Mark: I’m a native of the Phoenix area, born and raised on the west side in a small city called El Mirage. I moved to the Tempe area in 1992 to attend Arizona State University, where I received my BA and MBA. I currently have three kids (25, 5, 2), and my hobbies are work and my two young daughters. I wish I had more time for other activities; however, my family takes up all of my time.
Mark: Right now the vacation rental industry is my only career. I have 18 years of industry experience. I purchased my first vacation rental in 2002 while working in management for Verizon Wireless. I quickly added to my real estate portfolio, so I left the corporate environment to mange my real estate full time. Through networking, my business grew to a large property management company. Our inventory grew to 150 homes. In 2016 I decided to focus on family and sold my share of the business. Since 2016, I’ve managed a small operation ranging from 10 - 15 homes.
Mark: What I love the most about the VR business is the flexibility it provides my family and me. I’m able to manage my business from anywhere in the world. I’ve been able to put together a quality local team that manages operations; therefore, I can take care of my responsibilities with a laptop and internet access. Secondly, the rate of return on my real estate investments is excellent. I’m consistently meeting or exceeding a return of 25%. I’m unable to find another investment that will perform this well (even during Covid-19 pandemic).
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Mark: This one is easy. What I dislike the most about this industry is the power that major listing sites are trying to exercise over our real estate. They heavily favor the guests, which makes it difficult for Hosts to hold guests accountable for noise disturbances, neighbor complaints and damages to the property. Listing sites started as marketing tools, and now have become property managers. They micromanage everything.
Mark: OwnerRez is fantastic. My dependency on OwnerRez is growing by the day, which is a good thing. When I think about OwnerRez, what comes to mind is automation. OwnerRez has done a fabulous job of improving communication features. At one point I utilized three different software products to manage communication with guests. Now, I only use OwnerRez.
Mark: There are many. If I had to choose one...I would go with API integrations. The most valuable to me is the integration with VRBO.
>>>>>>
Thanks, Mark!
We wish Arizona Luxury Rentals much success as they continue to manage their business and thrive in the vacation rental industry!
Operating a vacation rental business takes a lot of time and effort. Periodically we like to interview one of our exceptional users. This week we spoke with Randy from Vacation Condos North Myrtle. Randy's website and operation can be found at thevacationcondo.com. Below are the questions we asked and his responses.
Randy: We purchased our first condo in 2013 with plans to spend winter in North Myrtle Beach South Carolina instead of in northwestern Pennsylvania where the winters are terrible with annual snowfalls averaging 101 inches. Within six months of purchase, we decided to rent it in the summer to help pay the expenses associated with ownership of oceanfront property. Some of our condo neighbors, who were dissatisfied with their property management arrangements, asked if we would do theirs. In order to do so, we took the necessary courses and tests to become licensed in the state of South Carolina to manage property. In the past 7 years, we have grown from managing one rental to a current total of 26 rentals. This growth has been 100% word of mouth, as the original goal was to simply rent our own, and for a couple of friends, but word spread.
Property management is my 2nd job as I am still employed full-time by Hewlett Packard as a database engineer. As I get closer and closer to retirement age, the goal will be to grow the rental business as an income supplement for retirement.
Randy: I had worked in the I.T. sector as a consultant for almost 25 years before joining Hewlett Packard in 2005 as a full-time teleworker. Working from home provided great flexibility which allowed us to relocate from PA to SC without the need to change jobs. While I still work full-time from home, the flexibility of my position has made growing the rental business much easier.
Randy: Positive Reviews. We started out just renting our condo and it has grown to 26 clients as a result of word of mouth advertising amongst condo owners. This is a direct result of striving to do the job correctly. The reason we have 700+ positive reviews is primarily due to the service we provide prior to guest arrival. This starts with communication and ends with making sure the rental unit is clean. Guests are provided with detailed instructions to make sure their arrival goes smoothly. The rental units are cleaned and staged so the first impression of their home away from home is a positive one. If you were to read our reviews, you will see multiple mentions about rental cleanliness and ease of communication.
Randy: Government overreach. The greater Myrtle Beach area’s source of revenue is tourism. The local government is continually enacting new regulations and policies that may very well run the small agencies out of business.
Randy: We are listed on multiple websites, Airbnb, Vrbo, as well as our own OwnerRez Hosted Website. OwnerRez makes it all possible. We use OwnerRez for reservation management, guest communications, and reporting.
Having multiple properties with multiple pricing levels, the Rate Editor is a lifesaver. I will admit, I was a little skeptical at first, but it took some getting used to and the batch copy functionality makes it a great tool.
Randy: Owner Statements and tools to help extract data for annual tax reporting.
>>>>>>
Thanks, Randy! Hopefully the local Myrtle government will read this and relax a little! 😀
We wish Vacation Condos North Myrtle much success in the Myrtle Beach area as they continue to manage their business and thrive in the vacation rental industry!
Every now and then, we showcase OwnerRez users that show outstanding work. This week, we spoke with Dave and April Bruder from Moonshine Cabins. Their website and operation can be found at moonshinecabins.com or on their Facebook page. Below are the questions we asked and their responses.
Dave: We were frequent visitors to the Smokies and love all that is has to offer and are always ready to head back whether for hiking, viewing wildlife, taking our kids for walks in nearby creeks, go-carting, or just driving through the beautiful Smoky Mountain National Park to enjoy the scenery. A friend’s grandfather had a simple cabin in the area that we visited as adults and brought our children along. The idea of a cabin in the area was appealing and if it could be rented, even better.
As owners, we have also become involved in the resort and have held board positions in the Home Owner's Association to participate in the standards, upkeep, and forward progress to benefit all guests.
Dave: We are both from the mid-west with humble beginnings and never dreamed we would have a thriving VR business.
Dave: Owning and operating VPs is a nice escape from our day jobs; we both have full-time jobs and hope this will allow us to semi-retire earlier than we had planned.
Dave: I am a client executive in the tech field and April is a teacher.
Dave: We are from South West Ohio about 300 miles from our rental cabins which are in the Smokies in Eastern Tennessee.
Dave: Proximity, weather, and activities all drew us in.
Dave: Challenges, new experiences, new relationships. We have learned more than we ever thought we would about the VR industry.
Dave: The rare disrespectful guests; unplanned/unexpected property issues that disrupt a guest’s stay.
Dave: We initially invested in OwnerRez to power #directbookings and enable rental agreement signatures. Now it manages calendars, reviews, bookings, and helps streamline responses. We are in the midst of API integration – Airbnb is completed, and we are waiting on Vrbo, so in addition to #directbookings, OwnerRez will soon enable us to process Vrbo bookings.
There are several OwnerRez users in the Smoky Mountains and at our request, they created a multi-property calendar widget so we could all cross advertise. We have about 40 owners and around 60 properties included and decided to create a basic website as a landing place to advertise in travel groups and other areas. That can be seen at smokymountaincabinsbyowner.com.
Dave: For us, it is a single pane of glass - one place for inbox/responses, calendars, property descriptions/photos, rates, etc.
>>>>>>
Thanks, Dave and April! We have a lot coming to that single pane of glass, so stay tuned!
We wish Moonshine Cabins much success in the Smokies as they continue to manage their business and excel in the vacation rental industry!
Good news - it’s Friday!
Inauguration week is right around the corner, and Airbnb is taking precautions due to the recent political events in DC. Airbnb has cancelled and blocked all reservations in DC during that week.
If you are one of the homeowners or PMs that this will affect, you lucked out! You will be 100% reimbursed for the money you would have earned. No guest to host and all the money - what a deal!
If you are one of the guests that booked a house in DC for the inauguration, you’ll be refunded by Airbnb, but you better hurry over to Vrbo, TripAdvisor or Booking.com to book another property before time runs out!
It seems some people have found other ways to turn a profit using their vacation rentals instead of housing guests. In Cathedral City, a short-term vacation rental was raided by the Riverside County Cannabis Regulation Task Force. They seized 431 marijuana plants, and found the first floor had been converted into a cannabis cultivation center with a commercial generator set up. Obviously this has ruffled some feather with the neighborhood. The residents are asking support for measure B, which would apply restrictions to short-term rental properties.
In Tallahassee Florida, a new bill proposal would largely give the state control of regulating vacation rentals. This would only allow local governments to regulate these properties the same way as any other properties in the neighborhoods. Vacation rental regulations have been common in Florida, pitting local governments against platforms such as Airbnb. This legislative session will start on March 2nd to discuss the new bill, and we’ll be sure to report any news about this once a decision has been made. Let the short-term rental battle begin...again.
Vrbo has announced that they are completely pulling out of Toronto for good. This is due to the city implementing strict short-term vacation rental regulations, which kicked in on January 1st. This decision makes Airbnb the only licensed platform to operate short-term rentals in Toronto. The new regulations make it so hosts can only rent out their primary residences. Investment properties and ghost hotels are now banned. Anyone who wishes to rent out their primary residence must register with the city. The effect of all this led to condo rentals flooding the market with rent dropping to record lows, most of which stayed on the market for months.
Happy Thursday! If you can believe it, we've got 33 updates to talk about but not a single new feature! Of course, how I define "feature" versus enhancement, change, tweak, update, fix might differ from how others define it, so who knows. 🤔
In no particular order, here we go!
Google Analytics recently overhauled the format for their tracking code. The "UA-xxxx" format is from more than a decade ago, and their new format is "G-xxxxx". We updated our analytics code to accept the new Google Analytics format, detect the new format and render the right tracking code. You can use either the old or new format, and they'll both work.
A couple weeks ago, we released a cool update that shows a preview of new charges when a booking moves or changes. We just tweaked the preview to also show email and payment warnings as well, so you'll see specific information that also needs to be addressed like a security deposit that needs to be reset or trigger emails that need to be resent.
While the currency for your account (or one of your properties) might be something other than USD, our Travel Insurance product is always billed in USD currency. We noticed that guests who were booking non-USD properties were seeing messages about Travel Insurance without knowing that the total was in USD currency. We now stop guests from buying Travel Insurance when booking if the property is not USD and direct the guest to a USD standalone page after they book.
There's a standalone Renter Agreement guest form that you're probably aware of. You might use it when emailing channel bookings about the Renter Agreement they need to sign. The Renter Agreement guest form will let the guest add or update their POC (point of contact) info but only if it's before arrival to keep them from changing historical data on an old link. These checks are good but were a little too strict because same day bookings need signatures too. We updated this logic to be smarter. The Renter Agreement guest form now checks the property time zone, gives one day of grace period after arrival but does not allow signing after departure (in case it's a one night stay).
Speaking of grace periods, we noticed some other areas that could benefit from increased time. Specifically some before-arrival triggers weren't firing for last minute bookings based on the time of day, and some on-booking-created triggers were having the same problem. We added a few hours of grace period to both before-arrival triggers and on-booking-created triggers to continue checking if they were able to be sent (and sending them) before no longer sending.
And speaking of triggers, we fixed another edge case we kept running into... Previously, for Request To Book bookings, or Booking.com/Vrbo bookings that don't have credit cards, we didn't fire on-booking-created triggers at all. That means that if you create a trigger specifically targeting Pending=Yes criteria, wanting to hit that state, then it won't fire. We now do a check for these types of bookings (RTB or Booking.com/Vrbo with no cards) that have on-booking-created triggers with Pending=Yes and attempt to fire those triggers (but not other triggers). This allows you to make sure your channel or RTB bookings are still emailed if you want them to be. Pending is a criteria on all triggers.
This next one isn't something you'll see on the surface, but I'll mention it anyway. We found that there are cases where property addresses are being added to OwnerRez without being geo-coded. Geo-coding is the process where we go out to a location service (like Google Maps) and fetch the lat/long coordinates for an address. You might notice the lat/long fields on the property location tab under the address. We now automatically geo-code all property addresses in OwnerRez automatically with lat/long data when they are entered. This reduces down-stream errors and lets us show more information by default for services like our Hosted Website.
From the beginning of time, a setting called "Professional Hospitality Business", that shows up on our Airbnb settings, has confused OwnerRez users to no end. Aren't I a professional business? Don't I work in hospitality? It's common to think this setting applies even with the warnings we slather around it. What this setting really means is - you're a hotel and you need specific hotel features that change how your properties are billed and displayed on Airbnb. Very few users need this. In recent times, it's gotten more confusing because Airbnb has started touting a host-only fee that is similar to a host-only fee that the Professional Hospitality Business setting creates. To clarify all this, we've removed the 15% host-only fee language on the Professional Hospitality Business setting because Airbnb is now changing fees for both groups regardless of this setting.
We are now including the email address from any credit card payment or refund in the booking or guest's contact info automatically if we notice that it's different. This is something we used to do a long time ago but stopped doing when our guest/contact system was overhauled. We have added it back.
Those of you that use our new SMS Messaging feature know that you can also configure forwarding and voicemail settings - after all, guests might just pick up the phone and call your SMS number directly. If they do, OwnerRez will properly handle that call by either forwarding the call or sending it to voicemail. If the call goes to voicemail or is a "missed call", we send you a system alert by email about the call. We just updated this email alert, for both missed and voicemail calls, to use our new alert format.
Have you ever noticed that some bookings list other guest names in the title, channel information or other parts of the booking? We did too. But how do you find those names? We updated our global search to also store and index those other channel names and titles, so that if you search on those, the bookings will show up in the global search results. If you're looking for an example of this, check out your Booking.com bookings. Some Booking.com bookings show other guest names in the channel information (as part of the overall guest list), and our search will now show those other names.
We recently added direct channel integration with HomeToGo, and this past week we tweaked a few things for the HomeToGo integration. We added special instructions for non-US connections to HomeToGo, so if you're a European customer, you can still sign up and connect to HomeToGo. You'll just need to use a different sign-up form. We also added some new checks in our LQA tool (Listing Quality Analyzer) specifically for HomeToGo which will point out if your properties will create conflicts with HomeToGo. By the way, we have a special webinar coming up with HomeToGo, so make sure to reserve your seat. Never heard of the LQA tool? Step right this way.
Over on the Portal Access dashboard, there's a couple of charts that show revenue and occupancy if you've turned it on for the user to see. Occasionally, we get questions about the comparison data that is shown. To add clarity, we replaced the "compare as of today" with an option for "compare all time" or "compare as of today" on the Portal Access charts and it defaults to all time.
Did you know that OwnerRez provides a global account area where you can upload files of any kind? Yep, go to the account button (top right) and look at the Files option. You can drop any kind of file here and then use it later in emails or other places. We noticed that the Copy link on those uploaded files was a little confusing so we clarified it. The way it was written, it could be confused with the browser right-click option. We changed the menu text to "Copy Public Link", we updated the support article that talks about this area and we noted that you can now simply upload files directly into email templates (without going to the global area first).
Get all the QuickBooks references. Some QuickBooks users have many Product or Service Items, but QuickBooks only returns the first 100 items to us by default. Because of this, everything after the first 100 was getting cut off. This is now fixed so that all references are being returned, and for all reference lists, not just Product or Service Items.
Which booking is locked? When Channel Bridge skips over a booking because it's PM Locked, it wasn't showing the ORB number. We fixed this to show the number so that you can click on it and go right to that booking.
Property URLs and hosted sites. Those of you who use our Hosted Website service might have noticed that your properties have URLs but sometimes... not. When you set up the website, your properties will be mapped to the property page on the website, and that property URL will work for a number of things. But there were things that the automatic URL's were not working for. We found and fixed those area.
Survey...? What survey!? Our standard security deposit release email template has had a blurb at the end of it for a long time to "look for a survey coming!" even though we've never actually sent one. Most users just remove this with an email template, but we figured it was time to remove this line from the default too.
Don't unlock the door yet. Our door code automation is smart and will watch when bookings are created, change dates, move properties, check-in times change or the booking is cancelled. Any time these changes happen, the door codes will change if necessary. However, what happens if the booking is pending? You don't want door codes being set for bookings that may not actually be confirmed. We fixed this so that codes wait to generate until the pending status is removed.
Fast channel sync grid. Do you watch the Sync Actions grid on your channel settings? If you do, you may have noticed that it is slow in returning results, particularly when you filter it for certain properties or errors. We fixed this to speed it up.
All custom fields show regardless of property. You can set property criteria on custom fields, but we were still showing all custom fields on the booking no matter which property that booking was associated with. We corrected this to not show custom fields on bookings that don't apply to that custom field based on the property criteria.
Expenses attachment icon. When the attachment (ie. files) on an expense were removed, the little paperclip icon on the grid was still showing. This is now fixed.
More misspelled CC vendors. Sheesh. We found a couple other CC vendors that weren't spelled correctly (extra spaces) and fixed them.
No WordPress cache to bounce. Maybe you like pressing buttons and hit this one already? The "Bounce Cache" button on WordPress Connections was failing if a WordPress Plugin was setup but not fully activated on both sides (OR and WP both). We fixed this to detect it and do nothing instead of crashing.
Vrbo second payment scheduling. When Vrbo pushes bookings to us, over the API, we follow their instructions when setting the scheduled second payment - and those instructions include a specific date. However, if the booking is changed, that date should be moved. We changed this logic to detect if the specific date is the same as the "[x] days before arrival" rule in OR and, if so, use the relative days instead. That way, the date is right but if the booking moves, the scheduled time will move along with it.
Bedroom pricing upgrade error. If you were one of the 17 people that used bedroom pricing (ok, more like 3) you may have gotten an error when upgrading from Legacy Rates to the new system. That error was fixed.
Show more charge types when editing. When you're manually changing charges, on a quote or booking, the Type drop-down will show all the surcharges and discounts that apply to that quote or booking, and some criteria is used to determine which ones to show. We are now ignoring the listing site and allowing surcharges that are set to specific listings site to show because you there are times where the listing site might be wrong on the quote or booking.
Don't dupe the property code. Did you know you can quickly duplicate properties when you're creating a new property? That's right, go to a similar property, click Duplicate and then use that to start your new property. However, we noticed that we were also duplicating the Property Code field, so we emptied that when the duplicate process runs.
When was that property added? Properties can have their own time zone and when a property was added should be reflected in the correct time zone. It wasn't before, but now it's fixed!
Hey, I already sent that trigger! Have you ever gone to a trigger, on the booking, and used "Send Now" to fire it off early? Or perhaps you sent it because it was showing that it wouldn't be sent based on the criteria. We noticed that when this happened for SMS and Airbnb triggers, the trigger was not marked as sent. Only automatically-sent SMS and Airbnb triggers were marked as sent. To be clear, the trigger message would still go out, but the green "Sent on..." timestamp wouldn't show. We corrected this so that it's now showing for all types of trigger messages.
We also corrected oversized attachment validation on the conversation to show properly.
We just released some new videos about Touch Stay and installing OwnerRez on Android and iOS devices. Check them out!
Excited about these updates and changes!
On the new ability to set discounts to apply only to the rent, do you have plans to make that an option when utilizing a discount code? It currently doesn't appear to be available if that's how the discount is set up.
Happy Friday!
We hope everyone had a great New Year. Now let’s get into the first Industry News for 2021.
Next Tuesday, Jan 12, OwnerRez will be hosting a webinar with Airbnb on listing optimization. The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez/Airbnb webinar link to register. Also, you can find all of our upcoming and past events on our Webinars page.
Some of our users reached out to us at the start of the new year to let us know that Perfect Price has been shut down. After looking into this, we have confirmed this is sadly true. We don't know if there is a transition plan in place for current users, and we are hoping to find out more soon. If you need another dynamic pricing option right now check out PriceLabs or Beyond Pricing.
Starting January 15th, Malibu California will implement a new ordinance governing short-term rentals. Rental property owners are required to pay a $294 application fee annually and submit a permit to the City of Malibu in order to continue renting. Applications can take up to 30 days for the city to review, so get yours in ASAP if you own short-term rentals in Malibu!
The Global Networking Experience (GNEX) has decided to reschedule their 2021 conference to May 17-19th. GNEX is a vacation ownership industry event for senior-level executives heavily focused on networking. The rescheduling is of course due to Covid-19, as they only received around 50% of their expected registrations for a “normal year”. We know most OwnerRez users aren’t rubbing shoulders with hotel financiers but this is an interesting group to watch nonetheless!
On Tuesday 1/26, OwnerRez will be hosting a webinar with HomeToGo.
We'll sit down with Rachel Tabellion, Head of Sales at HomeToGo, and discuss how to capitalize on travel trends in 2021. Ken Taylor, director of operations at OwnerRez, will give a demo of OwnerRez and show what the connection between HomeToGo and OwnerRez looks like.
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez/HomeToGo webinar link to register.
You can find all of our upcoming and past webinars on our Webinars page.
When the guest is first entering their card, we notify the bank that there will be multiple transactions associated with the card and ask them to verify the card knowing there will be future transactions, but authentication for each payment is ultimately up to the card issuing bank.
If a subsequent automatic transaction fails, the guest will get the payment failed email so they can authorize the additional transactions directly.
Once a guest has authenticated once for a first partial payment would they be required to authenticate again for the scheduled balance and security hold?
Hey look - it's the first Hump Day of 2021! 🐫 Time to talk updates. Our list of updates is small this week but includes a huge Stripe/3DS2 update that was months in the making.
A couple months ago, we mentioned working on a large update for Stripe that would support Strong Customer Authentication and the 3D Secure 2 ("3DS2") standard.
To recap, 3DS2 provides an additional layer of security for online credit card payments by forcing the merchant and cardholder to stop and get an authentication from the cardholder prior to the transaction going through. It's complicated to build and support, but European laws now require European banks to support it effective January 1, 2021 (which was a few days ago). We believe that America and other regions will support it in the future, though it is believed that it will be a few years before American banks will fully require it.
Here's a quick animation of how it works:
Anytime the guest is making a payment - whether accepting a quote, on a channel or making a followup payment - the payment process reaches out to the cardholder's bank for active verification and the payment screens waits for confirmation. The transaction cannot complete until the verification has been returned from your mobile app or however your bank verifies transactions with you. This might be an SMS message that your bank asks you to confirm. This might be a link to click on. Whatever it is, the payment processes waits for this to complete prior to moving forward.
To pave the way for 3DS2 compliance, we've been working on setting up 3DS2-compliant payment processing with the processors that support it. We're happy to announce that we made the December 31 deadline!
Using Stripe, you can now fully handle 3DS2 credit card payments if you are a European merchant.
This also works with channel bookings through Vrbo, though that has to be turned on in your Vrbo account first. Reach out to Vrbo and ask them about it if you're a European merchant and use Vrbo to take bookings. Airbnb bookings don't have this problem because Airbnb does all of their own payment processing, so the bank verification process would happen on the Airbnb side where the guest is paying. Booking.com and TripAdvisor do not yet support 3DS2 for their bookings, but we will add it when they get it working. On our side, everything is ready to go.
So how does OwnerRez look? For the most part, the OwnerRez app, control panel and guest forms all look the same as before. We heavily tested all of our payment interaction points to make sure that the verification process happens correctly but the interface remains the same. If you do happen to be the lucky European merchant that needs this, your guests will see something like this when they're confirming their booking:
For most of you, this new 3DS2 stuff will never be used because you're not a European merchant. However, this work lays the foundation for other security enhancements that might affect you in the future.
We're proud to be one of the only vacation rental software platforms that now supports 3D Secure!
While we were working on the 3DS2 stuff, we made other changes to how payments, security holds and failed credit cards work.
We now store credit cards that failed to work when processing new Vrbo and Booking.com API bookings. This is an important change because it allows you to try the card again if the guest tells you that the the failure was momentary - eg. fraud alert, temporary balance issue, AVS problem, etc. Instead of having to enter the card again, you can simply re-run the same card that was stored from the first attempt.
We also update existing cards to have new information if the guest enters their payment information online and the card is the same. In the past, every time the payment information is entered by a guest, a new card is stored. Most of the time the card is the same and only a minor detail - address change or expiration date - is updated, so we look for an existing card on file to update instead of creating a new one.
If you didn't know, you can also edit cards on file at any time to change things like expiration date or address if you need to. Simply go to any booking, click on the Transactions tab and look at the Stored Cards list. Click on any card and you can edit the details. You can also edit credit cards for security holds as well.
Another great update is the ability to take last minute bookings when a security hold fails. This was a common problem for a long time. As an example, suppose that a guest is booking this upcoming weekend and owes a full payment and a security hold. Because the booking is last minute, the security hold is due immediately. In the past, OwnerRez would automatically attempt to take it all and if any part failed, the entire booking would roll back. The guest's card would be hit for both a large payment and the security hold and, frequently, the security hold would fail after the payment succeeded. This could be because of a security alert by the bank or an over-limit issue, but it would cause everything to roll back and the payment to be voided. In some cases, another payment is not possible because the original charge is still "pending" on the bank account, even though it was marked as voided. We changed our process so that security holds no longer stop last minute bookings from moving forward. Instead, we now follow a similar pattern with channel bookings, and flag the security hold as failed and email the guest (and you the owner/PM) to alert you what happened. This gives the guest time to use a different card and fix the problem.
In certain places throughout the interface, we have links to our support center, and we noticed that some of those support links open in different places - new tabs versus same tabs for instance. We normalized that behavior so that the control panel always stays where you are when you click over into the support center.
Occupancy report last day off by one. A shrewd user noticed that, depending on the month and criteria, the last day of the report was off by one and causing the percentages to go over 100%. This has now been fixed.
"I would like to use the Holiday list feature on a per property basis"
No question. This is needed as well as the ability to have holiday-based season (ie. recurring seasons that change their dates slightly each year but service the same holiday name)
"My manual discounts only have the "Percent of subtotal" option"
Yes, that's correct, and this is not an oversight.
Currently, it is not possible to know, at the point a manual discount is applied, what portion of the rent/stay it applies to if the surcharge is marked as "percent of rent" so that option is not available. Only automatic surcharges/discounts have the "percent of rent" option.
We are working on a rate category feature that will affect many things across the system. When that comes out, later this year, you'll be able to more-greatly categorize what surcharges/discounts are levied against and what every charge line item on the booking is in terms of its category. This "percent of rent" setting is a temporary shim while transitioning to that category system.
