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Who are the other six elite platforms?
Happy Saturday!
This week we announced our new status as a 2021 Vrbo Elite Connectivity Partner. Elite Connectivity Partners are an exclusive group of top-performing vacation rental connectivity providers who offer the highest-quality connection to Vrbo and optimized products and services. Vrbo has certified hundreds of integrated software partners, but only 16 are "preferred" and only 7 are "elite". OwnerRez is now one of those 7 elite partners!
As many of you may know, back in March OwnerRez became an official Corporate Sponsor of VRMA. Paul Waldschmidt, our CEO, wrote an article for VRMA that talks about OwnerRez and the Power of Happiness. The root cause of OwnerRez’s success is our commitment to “create happiness.”
Airbnb has lifted their regional restrictions in New York City and now allows any property type to be listed. OwnerRez users can easily distribute their existing property content, rates, rules and availability directly to Airbnb and receive back bookings and guest information inside OwnerRez automatically. If you are ready to list, check out our Airbnb Setup & Connecting guide.
HomeToGo, in partnership with AirDNA, has published a new white paper (link no longer available). They provide exclusive data and tips to capitalize on the new normal of travel. Sections addressed in the report include: Summer 2021 Outlook, Guest Travel Behavior, Where Guests are Booking, Tips to Capitalize on the Latest Trends, and How Property Managers are Securing Their Future.
As travel picks back up, look out for vacation rental scams. For nearly two weeks, a couple who lived in their Valley home for more than a decade started to receive unwanted visitors due to an Airbnb scam. Vacationers would show up at night to their home with luggage ready to check-in to their bookings. The couple did everything they could to detour these unwanted guests, even putting up a sign which read, "This is not an Airbnb. You've been scammed. Please report it to Airbnb." Airbnb eventually removed the listing and banned the host, but the question of how to combat this best in the future remains open.
Wow that is quite the accomplishment...congratulations!
Awesome, congrats and great job!! :-)
Great job. Keep up the good work!
Wow! Incredible, nice work!
So well deserved, congratulations!!
Congratulations! You earned it. You're amazing.
Congratulations, well done!!
Thanks for the Channel Bridge history! It may be a little thing but I find it super helpful. Cheers!
Today, we’re announcing our new status as a 2021 Vrbo Elite Connectivity Partner. This is a big deal and something very hard to achieve. Vrbo has certified hundreds of integrated software partners, but only 16 are "preferred" and only 7 are "elite". OwnerRez is now one of those 7 elite partners.
Last year, as COVID was taking off, we quietly mentioned that OwnerRez had achieved Preferred Partner status with Vrbo. This was something we were super proud of at the time because it took us a few years to become a partner in the first place, and then many months more to work through the requirements and build the best channel manager integration in the industry. But we weren't finished there. As it said at the end of that blog post: "Elite status - here we come". Well... we've arrived!
Elite Connectivity Partners are an exclusive group of top-performing vacation rental connectivity providers who offer the highest-quality connection to Vrbo and optimized products and services. This designation is a result of our commitment to:
To be clear, Elite status is not a list you can pay to be included in. Vrbo constantly measures partner performance across many metrics - server up time, speed of responses, booking quality, listing quality, error rates, etc - and meets with our team regularly to discuss. Only those that meet the highest quality across all those metrics, across a long period of time, are given Elite status.
What does this mean for you? Quite a bit actually. Elite partners get access to the newest settings and features that are available on the Vrbo IPM/API side, so OwnerRez users will be able to access features before other Vrbo users. Over the next year, we're working with Vrbo to bring reviews, messaging and special offers (ie. custom quotes) to our Vrbo integration. Our reputation carries a lot of weight, and we have important meaningful conversations with Vrbo on a regular basis about these things.
We'd like to thank Vrbo for the great work they've done with our team and their commitment to the vacation rental industry. To: Shelby, Jill, Trilok and the gang - a big thank you!
Hi everyone! ☕️ Before we move into the weekend, here's a quick list of updates (25 total) that we put out this past week. No new features; just enhancements and bug fixes this time around!
Our list of enhancements is scattered, so we'll run through them in no particular order.
Are you a nerd that wants to mess with the photo slider on your hosted website? Great, step right this way! As we work to make our hosted website more configurable, we updated the photo slider on property pages to be accessible via scripting. You can now control the photo slider speed, and its other properties, via the window.lightSliderInstance object. If you have no idea what any of this means, just tip-toe on by and act like nothing ever happened.
Inquiries are associated with guests (or contacts) just like quotes and bookings, we updated the yellow bar on inquiries to include a "Conversation" link so that you can go to the guest's conversation thread.
We added a link to the Renter Agreement template in the booking Legal tab. This will help you jump quickly to the right template if you need to make changes and have a lot of different agreement templates.
When submitting information or searching for something, our buttons typically show a little spinner so that the user knows the page is working. We added a similar spinner to the widgets and website pages on the guest side so that they get the same feedback.
Ever wanted to see the import history for your Channel Bridge import files? Now you can. We added an "Imports" tab on the Channel Bridge page (Settings > Channel Bridge> click into Airbnb or Vrbo) which will show you the history of every Channel Bridge import you've ever done and the original file for you to download. Note that if you have API integration in place, the Channel Bridge area will not be shown. This is only available for users without API integration at the moment.
Last little thing... We modified the links on the properties on the PM > Configuration Dashboard page so that you see the current configuration instead of the edit page. It was confusing before to click on those properties and drill right into a configuration change without any context.
SmokyMountains.com is Instant Book only. We noticed that our SmokyMountains.com channel integration (still in private invite-only mode) had a Request To Book option, but that isn't actually supported, so we removed it. If you'd like to be included in the SmokeMountains.com channel integration, reach out to our help desk at any time!
Houfy no longer needs a manual inquiry email address. Houfy now uses the email address that we provide them, via the channel integration, to automatically send guest inquiries to OwnerRez. Because of this, there is no need for you to change anything manually in the Houfy control panel. Our Houfy channel instructions mentioned this, so we removed those clauses to avoid confusion.
Don't allow resetting charges if unable to generate charges. When resetting charges on a booking, there are situations where the charges cannot be generated. We know this but still let you hit the "Yes, Reset Charges" button. We now hide the button so that a crash doesn't occur and tell you about it ahead of time.
Reduced contention on QuickBooks syncing. if you do multiple things that change the financial info (charges, payments, expenses, fees) on a booking, it can cause the booking to sync to QuickBooks multiple times which, in turn, can lead to sync actions stepping on each other.
Cards haven't failed unless they've failed. In certain situations, it's possible for a booking to store a credit card (ie. card on file) that has not actually been verified. There are good reasons for this. However, we noticed that those cards are then shown as "failed" even though they were never tried. We fixed this so that they don't show as failed unless they were actually declined.
Order of inbox history. We found and fixed a situation where the inbox history was not displayed in the correct order from newest to oldest.
Portal user with no properties and holidays. If one of your portal users had no properties assigned (perhaps they were associated with an owner), holidays would not render correctly on the calendar. This has been fixed.
Faster reviews list. Have we ever mentioned that we care about speed around here? 🚀 We are constantly monitoring and measuring our page performance, and we recently noticed an issue where the Review list was doing an extra lookup when showing reviews that was slowing it down needlessly. We fixed this. Vroom, vroom!
Filtering by Booked date should show all bookings. When filtering by Booked date, the date range would cut off the end date. This has been fixed so that the date range is inclusive of both the start and end dates.
Auto select gross for "PM will pay channel fees" setting. If you use our PM module, there's a setting on each owner record that lets you specify whether channel fees (eg. Airbnb host fees) are expense'd to the owner or the PM pays them. With that, there's another setting that determines whether commission is given back or calculated on the gross revenue of the booking even though the fee is being expense'd. Typically, if the host fee is expense'd to the owner, the commission is calculate on the owner amount and not the gross (so that the owner is not hit twice) but we let each user decide on an owner by owner basis. However, we noticed that when PM pays the channel fee, the second option was still being set to owner amount which no longer makes sense. We fixed this so that gross is selected.
HomeToGo bookings are now always instant book. Under some circumstances, we were creating HomeToGo bookings in Pending status. This has been resolved. All HomeToGo bookings should be created as confirmed.
Filter contacts by Added date for real. The Contacts (ie. guests) list already had a filter for finding guests by Added (ie. Created) date, but it wasn't working properly, so we fixed it.
Prevent duplicate lock integrations, but properly. We already were checking for duplicate lock integration accounts, but there were some false negatives. We've transformed those to true positives.
New triggers not firing until the next day. We noticed an issue where time zones were affecting when booking-created triggers were running, and they were waiting an extra day. This is now fixed!
Use account theme "From Email Address" for hosted website "My Email" links. If you have put in a "From Email Address" different from your user email address on your account theme, we'll now use that From address on your hosted website headers when you select the "My Email" link type.
Validate that maximum guests is higher than maximum adults and maximum children. If you want to allow 10 adults and only 8 guests, you're out of luck. Not even OwnerRez can do that math! 🤪
Don't save discount code when not using a code mode discount. Did you enter a code for your discount, then switch the discount to Manual or Automatic mode? Previously we would keep the code around behind the scenes. However, that prevents you from using that code on a different discount, so we decided to clean those unused codes out completely.
Mislabeled discounts in direct rate tester. The Direct Rate Tester was mislabeling some discounts as "surcharges." A gentle scolding seems to have corrected that behavior.
We're pleased to announce that we have partnered with Key Data. This will offer OwnerRez users real-time vacation rental market data for their properties.
Key Data is a trusted data & analytics provider of real-time vacation rental market data for the short term rental industry. Thanks to a direct integration with OwnerRez, Key Data provides business performance and intelligence insights. Key Data combines other property management system users in your market into one seamless, anonymized comparative data dashboard that you can use to compare your insights against your market competitors.
Key Features & Add-Ons Include:
Get started with Key Data by visiting the Key Data website and checkout the OwnerRez support doc for how to integrate OwnerRez with Key Data.
That is for a number of good reasons!
Happy Friday, everyone! Before you head into the weekend, I wanted to share some exciting new updates (29 total) that came out last week with a focus mostly on PM statements and payouts, but also enhancements to Booking.com channel integration. Let's get started! 🚀
The exciting news of the week is about our new PM updates for owner payouts. Owner payouts have been around a long time but tend to be less understood (and less used) because statements and expenses get most of the attention. Payouts are basically a record of money actually being transferred to the owner. The statement tells you what the owner gets. The payout is the amount you actually sent to the owner. Aren't those the same thing? No, there are situations that make them different. For instance, an owner might have a negative statement for a particular month and, instead of the owner sending you a check, you just hold over the negative statement to the next month. The next month, if the owner has a positive statement, the owner payout is the result of both the negative and positive statements.
The problem with payouts is that they were one by one. You could only record a single payout for one owner at a time. If you manage on behalf of 50 owners, it takes a long time to manually enter 50 payments. So we built a special "Record Multiple Payouts" for owner payouts feature to take care of this problem.
To see it in action, go to PM > Owner Payouts like you normally would, but notice that there is now a Record Multiple Payouts button at the top.
Click that button, and you'll get a special batch page that will show you all the statements that need to be paid (ie. any that still have an "unpaid" or "partially paid" status) and what the owner will get.
You can select the type of payment (bank transfer, check) for them and a note that will apply to all payouts. If the owner has multiple statements, the payout balance for that owner will be the delta of those statements' unpaid balances.
If you want to skip an owner, use the checkbox on the left to de-select that owner. Click the Record Owner Payout button at the bottom and the payouts will be saved. To be clear, as when recording individual payouts, our system does not actually send a check or ACH money to the owner's bank account. We assume that you will do that at the same time. And if that part (sending the actual money) has frustrated you in the past, keep reading!
The next big piece of news flows right along with this. You can now push owner payouts directly into QuickBooks as bills or checks. This means that you can use the tools in QuickBooks, like the Checks To Print queue or Pay Bills Online feature, to send money to all your owners quickly after recording multiple payouts.
This tool can also be found in the PM > Owner Payouts area above the Payouts grid. You'll see a "Send to QuickBooks" button that will either be enabled or disabled depending on whether you have a QuickBooks account connected to OwnerRez. To be clear, this only works with QuickBooks Online, not QuickBooks Desktop, and it has to be an active connected QuickBooks Online account which you can connect using our QuickBooks setup and connecting process.
The first time you click the button, OwnerRez will show you a configuration page where you'll need to map some options.
The "As Of Date" field allows you to set the starting date for when payouts should be pushed across to QuickBooks. After all, you probably don't want to push old payouts if the money for those payouts has already been sent. You can also specify whether you want to create Checks or Bill records in QuickBooks. If you want to print checks, use the "Check" type. At the bottom, you'll need to map the owner in OwnerRez to the vendor or customer in QuickBooks. This will allow OwnerRez to know what vendor or customer name to use when creating the check or bill in QuickBooks. When you're done configuring everything, click Save and you'll be ready to go.
After configuration is over, you'll see the actual page to send payouts to QuickBooks, and it will look and act like all of our other batch pages.
The page works in two stages. First, you'll use the top options to find and show payouts that need to be sent to QuickBooks. Then, after seeing the payouts, you can select or confirm the ones to send and OwnerRez will immediately push those payouts into your QuickBooks Online account as checks or bills. Let's step through the process...
Go ahead and click the Show Payouts button. By default, it will show any payouts that were never sent to QuickBooks in the past for all owners and for all dates back to the starting "As Of Date" you selected in the configuration area. The payouts will show right below that in the same page.
By default, all payouts will be selected, but you can de-select any that you don't want to send across to QuickBooks. If you need to change the criteria, simply do that at the top and the click the "Refresh Payouts" button. The payouts will reload at the bottom, and you can re-confirm the selection.
When you have the group of payouts showing and selected that you want to send across, click the bottom "Send to QuickBooks Now" button, and OwnerRez will create check or bill transactions in QuickBooks while you wait.
You can double-check your work by jumping into QuickBooks and clicking on the Expenses menu. You'll see the check or bills that OwnerRez just sent over.
Drill into one of those check or bill transactions, and QuickBooks will show the detail inside. Notice that if the payout is for multiple statements, both statements are referenced with the correct amounts.
After your payouts are in QuickBooks, you can use the Checks To Print or Pay Bills Online queues in QuickBooks to send money to the owners quickly, greatly eliminating the time to enter and send owner payouts.
This past week, we also added some "In Period" columns for owner statements. Most PMs only show the owner the money they earned and not the booking totals, and if the booking overlapped the period, many PMs only like to show the money earned inside that period. You can now do this for many revenue fields.
The new "In Period" columns are only available in custom statement views; they do not appear in any of the default system views. Go to PM > Statement Views and create a statement, and you'll see the new columns showing in the drop-down.
These columns show the exact same thing as the regular ones only the amount is pro-rated for the time the booking is in the statement period. To be clear, it's possible for these columns to return $0 if the booking is not inside the statement period. For instance, suppose a booking occurs in April and is remitted 100% in April. Later in May, after the booking has long departed, you discover that the guest owed more money and the charges and payments were changed on the booking. The booking would have a new remittance balance and be picked up in the May statement. However, because the booking originally occurred in April, the "In Period" columns would all show $0 even if the "Remitting Now" column had an amount to remit to the owner.
While we were adding columns, we also added two new statement columns for Zero Commission Charges and Non-Standard Commission Charges. These columns will help you show your owners the total guest charges that had zero commission or non-standard commission on them. This is common for things like cleaning fees where the total was passed through to the owner or expense'd to the PM. If you have this situation, you can select the Zero Commission Charges column, name the header "Cleaning Fees" and then the owner will see how the gross minus cleaning fees leads to a net that your commission is applied to.
While you're messing with the custom statement views, notice that there's a new "Prefill Columns" button at the top.
When you click the Prefill Columns button, you'll see the three system views and any custom views you've already created. If you select one of those views, the page will fill in with all those columns so that you can hit the ground running. From there, make your changes and then save.
Last thing on PM... We noticed that the "Included Expenses" criteria options, when creating owner statements, did not accommodate certain situations and booking expenses would fall through the cracks or be delayed in getting picked up. So we updated the Included Expenses options to have two sections of criteria - one for general expenses (ie. non-booking expenses) and then one for the booking expenses.
This gives you the ability to fine tune your selection and pick up booking expenses exactly when you want no matter when the expense date occurred.
For the enhancements and tweaks section, let's start with Booking.com. We've wanted to update our Booking.com channel integration for awhile, but it's slipped down the list because of more-important things taking priority. This past week, we were able to do some work on Booking.com to strengthen the integration. There is far more we'd like to support, like syncing messaging and listing content, but we made some good strides in the limited time we had.
First, if your Booking.com channel integration is in "manual payments" mode, we no longer verify the card. Basically, we store the card on the booking, but we don't do a $1 authorization to test that the card works. So the card could be bad, but you won't know until you try it later. We do still error if Booking.com sends us "partial" card information (like a missing CVV code). This helps in situations where you don't want to alarm the guest by trying the card yet and plan to do everything manually.
Second, we updated Booking.com cancellations to always do refunds manually. In the past, we attempted to refund automatically based on the cancellation, but the refund was sometimes incorrect because Booking.com gave us misleading or ambiguous cancellation information. It was also out of character for our cancellation process since no other cancellations in OwnerRez do refunds automatically. So now Booking.com follows everything else and refunds are left to you to do manually as a separate step in the process.
Also, for Booking.com policies that have a final payment on the day of arrival, we added a "no show" penalty clause. The clause says "If the guest doesn't show up, they will be charged the total price of the reservation" in keeping with how Booking.com advertises their listings and policies.
Then, we've updated our cancellation policies for Booking.com bookings to support their new policies. Booking.com added a bunch of new cancellation policies since we first integrated with them. We have now added support for all of the new ones.
Finally, we added a Final Payment Due setting to our Booking.com channel integration.
There tends to be a lot of confusion, on the part of both guests and users, as to when final payments are due on Booking.com bookings, and sometimes the information Booking.com sends to us with the booking is not what you actually want on the management side. So this option allows you to manually override it to a specific number of days before arrival if the information we receive is not what you want.
In no particular order, here's a few other updates we made over the past week...
There's a "fix up" guest form where you can give guests a single URL and it will ask them for point of contact information, get them to sign the renter agreement and also ask for a credit card if a security deposit needs to be scheduled. However, we noticed that guests were not showing travel insurance information, so we added travel insurance information to the same "fix up" guest form. Like everywhere else that shows travel insurance, it follows your property rules, so it won't show if you have travel insurance turned off.
We clarified the "Surveillance" amenity to also include language about "Cameras". If this option is selected, channels like Airbnb will show that you have cameras on the property. Like all of the other amenities, the Cameras/Surveillance amenity has a note field where you can explain more about the amenity. Use the note field to describe where each camera device is located and whether it is turned on or off.
The Booking Summary report provides a great overview of revenue and you can compare periods to each other like the current year to the previous year. The report offers some date selectors at the top so that you can filter and group revenue based on the correct month. For instance, do you want to show booking revenue based on arrival date, departure date or when booked? To that, we just added a "any stay during period (prorate)" option so that you can accurately show the revenue that occurred in the period versus the revenue that overlapped into a different period.
When importing charges via Channel Bridge, we updated our logic for Airbnb bookings to prefer OwnerRez pricing for guest fees if guest fee pricing exists in OwnrRez. This helps reduce confusion when Airbnb's revenue numbers don't match what OwnerRez calculates they should be. The total charges amount is always the same either way.
If you have Houfy connected to OwnerRez, you can now click on your Houfy listing numbers directly from OwnerRez. We noticed that Houfy listings have direct listings numbers, so we updated our Houfy API channel dashboard to show those listing numbers directly.
Channel Bridge using wrong calculation when expensing surcharges. Interesting little guy here. We noticed that in certain rare situations, the expense settings on surcharges (for PMs) was not being correctly applied, but only when charges were imported through Channel Bridge.
Don't show door codes that are blank. Just like it sounds! We were occasionally showing door codes in places even though the door code was not yet generated.
Crash when deleting bookings with fees. Just like it sounds again. If a booking had fees (ie. channel or CC fees on the transactions tab) and the user tried to delete the booking, instead of getting a nice message saying that you can't delete the booking, the booking would simply crash. This has been fixed.
Business amenities now save and show correctly. We added several new business amenities recently (eg. Desk), but there was a bug that caused them not to save correctly. All better now.
Owner dashboard showing un-managed bookings. The owner dashboard, in the Portal Access area, shows the owner a couple of cool charts with their revenue and occupancy. However, it only is supposed to show the owner the bookings that are managed and associated with themselves (as the owner). If there are old historical bookings though, not associated with the owner, they should not be showing up in the dashboard, but they were. We corrected this to only show the associated and managed bookings for the current owner.
Properly un-manage bookings before the first owner if selected. We found a case where adding the first owner to a property would not un-manage bookings before the effective date even if you asked nicely.
Booking list owner filter now works. We discovered that the bookings list did not properly apply the filter for owners. Now it does.
Allow including properties on Vrbo in Request to Book mode. Airbnb requires that all other channels be in Request to Book (RTB) mode to allow RTB on Airbnb. We were not checking the validation exactly right on the Vrbo property mappings so you may have seen a warning while attempting to include a new property. We've fixed that.
Google Analytics tracking on internal pages. We noticed that the user's Google Analytics tracking code (the one starting with "G-" or "UA-") was recently added to some of our internal app pages, but the code isn't needed there. The user's Google Analytics tracking code is only needed on public guest-facing forms and hosted website pages, so we cleaned that up.
Support multi-column sort on properties grid. We now support sorting by more than one column at a time on the properties grid. Hold the CTRL key while clicking column headers to add subsequent sorts. We'll be bringing this feature to more grids in the future, but we thought we'd pilot it here first. There was also a bug we fixed where the properties grid was not following the order of the Display Order column.
Don't show spot rates for inactive or deleted properties. These rates have no impact on anything, but we were still showing them in the spot rates grid. We won't do that any more.
Include $0 expenses on Owner and PM Statements. In the past, we have only included expenses on statements that had a non-zero balance to remit/collect. But some PMs like to include informational expenses that have a $0 balance upfront. You can now create those $0 expenses and they'll show up on the next owner or PM statement along side normal expenses.
Old SMS numbers still being used. In the past, when sending SMS messages, the FROM number (ie. your SMS number) would stick to the old SMS number you had before even if that SMS number was deleted. So new replies from the guest would keep going to the deleted number. This is now fixed to use your new SMS number. This only affected users that deleted their SMS number and registered a new one.
Yup, you deserve it. I resisted you for over a year, hearing all these horror stories of CM SW. Just keep doing what you are doing!
I've been using iCal links with TurnoverBnb for years now. The notes section allows the cleaner to see when a pet has been booked. That information isn't visible in the OR integration unformationely (though I much prefer the streamlined look of it in the Turnover calendar). Is there any chance y'all will be adding in customized options to allow for the pet count to be included as well?
I agree AirBnB guest are historically more difficult than direct and VRBO guest statistically. On top of that when you have an issue AirBnB tends to be extremely liberal in giving the guest benefit of the doubt using their extenuating circumstances clause. I prefer VRBO's stance, buy insurance or face the music of a sickness or storm.
Well deserved!
We're happy to announce that we've partnered with Find Rentals as one of our first class API channels. Find Rentals is an advertising subscription service that drives quality guest leads to be converted into direct bookings.
Since 2002, Find Rentals has serviced tens of millions of travelers with their primary focus to deliver a consistent and meaningful message to travelers of the advantages of booking directly with the locally run vacation property managers.
Our integration pushes listing content, rates, availability, and rules to Find Rentals. When guests inquire about your property on Find Rentals, Find Rentals will send you inquiries via email and then you can quote the guests and have them reserve directly through OwnerRez. The traveler can also connect directly to your hosted website by selecting book now from the Find Rentals side. This allows you to easily handle listings, bookings and guest communication.
Get started with Find Rentals by visiting the Find Rentals website and check out the OwnerRez support doc for how to integrate OwnerRez with Find Rentals.
We're pleased to announce that we have partnered with Turno (formerly TurnoverBnB). This will offer OwnerRez users a smarter way to schedule, pay, and find vacation rental cleaners and cleaning services.
Whether your goal is to manage your existing cleaning team’s schedule or find new cleaners, Turno provides the tools to put your vacation rentals on autopilot.
Turno automatically syncs with your bookings to automatically schedule your cleaners. If you need to find a new cleaner, simply describe your needs and get bids from over 35,000 service providers worldwide on the TurnoverBnB cleaner marketplace. Cleaners use their own app to receive updates, use checklists, report problems, track inventory, and send messages.
Turno offers flexibility for your business as it grows with no lock-in contacts and affordable pricing.
Get started with Turno by visiting the Turno website and checkout the OwnerRez support doc for how to integrate OwnerRez with Turno.
Congratulations OwnerRez team!
So well-deserved! 👏🏼💃🏻🎉 Thank you for the amazing product and customer service y'all offer!
So hey, check this out! OwnerRez was just ranked as a "Front Runner" by Software Advice in the Vacation Rental software category. But not just any ole front runner - THE front runner. That's right, OwnerRez is number 1.
And not only are we number 1 overall, but we're number 1 in both of the categories they measure - customer satisfaction and usability. We're super proud of this!
The vacation rental industry has been exploding in growth over the last decade and the products and services that are available have exploded in growth along with it. Software Advice now tracks 67 products across the vacation real rental industry including PMS, channel management, pricing, websites and more. Out of those 67 vacation rental products OwnerRez is the #1 overall product in both Customer Satisfaction and Usability. Yes, I know I'm repeating myself here! 😇
Here are all the front runners, showing OwnerRez on top in both categories.
If you are not currently an OwnerRez user, find your software on this matrix (or perhaps it's not a front-runner at all?) and ask yourself what the differences are. Are you saving money; are there features you don't care about? Why are you staying with a product that isn't the market leader? Reach out, and we'll be happy to talk to you about switching over.
And for all you OwnerRez users, thank you for your support! Share this news with your friends!
Le Touquet Holid said:
A vague politician style answer from Rachel about commisions and no time scales.. They don't need to offer payment processing they just need lower rates.
A vague politician style answer from Rachel about commisions and no time scales.. They don't need to offer payment processing they just need lower rates.
Listened to replay. 14% commission (they can dream on) plus whatever I have to pay for CC. NO GO. It will never book when I raise my rates by 17% on that channel. Bye HTG.
every time I read the "best cities" type of stuff, I chuckle. Who TH will buy in Cleveland as a VR? People are fleeing big cities in droves for a number of reasons. And several places on the list I have never even head of.. and probably neither did the tourists.
Climate emergency? it is mostly called "weather". On the other hand, they should get busy stopping CHINA, not Oregon, from polluting, if they REALLY care.
Happy Friday!
This week we had our webinar with Beyond (formerly Beyond Pricing) where we discussed the new era of dynamic pricing. You can watch the entire replay here.
Vacation rentals in Hawaii continue to have higher occupancy than hotels. In March, 62.3% of units throughout the state were occupied, which is only slightly lower than it was back in 2020. Hotels reported only 43% occupancy for the month of March.
Thinking about purchasing a vacation home? Some of the top locations according to LawnStarter’s rankings include Shelbyville KY, Brooksville FL and Buffalo NY. Vacation rentals have been a hot commodity during the pandemic. Many people find them more appealing than staying in a hotel, especially for longer periods of time. The average owner of a vacation rental rakes in around $33,000 a year!
The Oregon Coast Visitors Association joined tourism agencies worldwide in declaring a “climate emergency.” This is the first step in their plans to help the tourism industry and vacation rentals reduce their impact on the environment. The main goal is to provide businesses with a blueprint for how to reduce their carbon footprint. All recommendations are voluntary and were implemented to encourage more environmentally-friendly business practices.
The second annual Shortyz Awards took place virtually this year, with record-breaking attendance and winners announced from every category, ranging from Sustainability to the Best Property Management System. The Shortyz awards are meant to recognize excellence among peers and highlight the best practices in the industry. Over 400 entries were received across all 18 categories, and more than 69,000 votes were cast. Maybe we should enter next year...😉
Agree, what was that email all about? It's the second example of poor communication we have had from them. Perhaps the head of sales can give us some direction and a more competitive pricing model? Factoring in CC payment fees the current deal will always make them more expensive than Air BNB. I keep banging the Google free link drum but HTG is also in that metasearch space so they will have even more competition.
If they really want to be a disruptor Offer a deal at 8% or less and everyone will make some money.
