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Hi Paul & Chris-
I am truly terrible with software. You took the time to onboard me a long time ago, and Ken is holding my hand through ICal, Channel Bridge, and (gulp) API integration. Your product is worth every nickel.
Alice
I have always thought that your price was beyond belief at the very low price point you were at currently. I haven’t fully taking a look at how your increase as well affect me directly but I can tell you that I am more than satisfied and recommend you every time I get a chance to people who are struggling to manage their vacation rental and to deal with companies like VRBO. The change to put all of my properties with you last October was the best decision of my life. I was with you for a couple of years before with just one property. The learning curve is steep but your concierge service Saved my life. I am grateful for the service you provide and I am happy to pay you for it. Good luck to you and I look forward to many years of a profitable relationship.
Worth it! Your responsiveness alone is worth it, but the platform is really fantastic.
Ella, thanks for your many years of being a great customer (I see your history and recognize you by name). I'm truly sorry that you're disappointed. I hope you had a chance to read the Why We Did This section above. I look forward to your email - please send when you can. ❤️️
Yes! It’s worth every dime even with an increase. Will continue to use it. Love every part of it!
Your product and service are far and above all the others.
I especially support your decision to remain independent and to not get taken over by some investors, angels, vulture capitalists, IPOs, etc.
Thank you!
I will write up more complete email for you guys when I get a chance and have more time. However, not only some of the changes that you've made recently such as forcing us to change to a different pricing model for our properties has proven to be very frustrating, and not user-friendly, not just for me but many other users that I have spoke with, you're now doubling the price. I'm very disappointed in these changes. I've been with you for many years, back when you were in your early beginnings and I'm sad to see the direction that this is heading and no one was grandfathered in to anything, including how things were working, not to mention the prices.
Ella
We appreciate all you do, and especially the thoughtful communication regarding the need to increase the rate to stay healthy and relevant.
We agree!
Your service is still well worth the fee, I am glad to pay it and keep your business structure the way it is.
Worth every penny. Thanks guys.
Hi everyone, Paul here from OwnerRez! As we reach the end of 2020, I wanted to reach out to everyone and explain some changes we're making to our pricing. Yes, that pricing - the monthly fee you pay to use our awesome software.
Some of you have already seen the updated pricing calculator or new Costs & Fees article. Others may be reading this because of an email blast I sent out earlier.
Please note that if you joined OwnerRez before November 2020, the new pricing you see on the website will not affect you for 5 more months. Until March 31 of 2021, pricing will stay the same as before for all pre-existing accounts. If you did just join OwnerRez right now (hey, welcome aboard!) the new pricing model will affect you immediately.
Here at OwnerRez, we believe deeply in providing a quality product that focuses on customer success. As part of that, we have created a "People First" culture, and we believe in having honest transparent conversations with our team (ie. those that work here) and our customers. In fact, as we fill out our new website with Feature and Why pages, we are highlighting our story, team and philosophy as a company, and we hope you take note of those pages as we flesh them out over the coming month.
There are a variety of things we've tweaked, but here's the main differences:
The price for nearly every user will increase. There are a couple of rare scenarios where the price might remain the same or decrease, but those are extremely rare and typically only affect single property homeowners with many premium features turned on.
Simply put - you should expect that your base service fee will increase, typically in the range of 15 - 30%, depending on your number of properties and the features you use.
You can find out the exact amount right now now by going to our pricing calculator and putting in your number of properties and selecting your premium features. Keep in mind that any discounts on your account would not be picked up by the pricing calculator, so your invoice might be less after discounts kick in. Same thing with Add-On's like Damage Protection or SMS usage - those items would not show on the pricing calculator. But you can compare your main service charges to a previous invoice from your billing history.
I know that there will be OwnerRez users who are frustrated by these price increases, and there's only so much I can say to assuage that anger, but I hope that you take a second to read and understand how we came to this decision and why it's necessary from our standpoint.
This is not a naked money grab, and this was not decided overnight. After carefully watching our costs and growth for about a year, we planned on announcing this back in April (to go into effect at the beginning of summer) but COVID forced us to wait.
There is never a good time to raise prices, but they do need to be raised. Here is a peek behind the curtain on our thought process...
Chris and I strongly believe that OwnerRez is better off in our hands than outside investors. As they grow and succeed, it's common for small businesses to approach (or be approached by) outside investors who want to invest. Whatever the investment is called - seed funding, capital call, angel investment - the outside investor gives the company money in exchange for ownership. The company gets the money they need to hire more employees, increase marketing, and become a more-mature company. The investor gets a seat at the table and a share of the profits and..... has a say in what the company does.
For years, we've watched as companies have grown and died around this model, or - worse yet - lost focus on their product and customers. This is not what we want for OwnerRez. As a People First company, we want our customers and team to be the sole focus of our attention, not the demands of outside investors and banks.
OwnerRez has been profitable and debt free for several years. As we grow - adding team members and corporate overhead - it's hard to maintain that without compromising quality in our product, pushing our team members beyond a healthy work/life balance or by trading ownership and control for outside investment. We aren't willing to do any of those things, so we realized that we need to increase our prices so that we can continue building a sustainable company, happy team and awesome product.
(Side note: If we did get outside investment, the same type of price increase would happen immediately - and much larger - because that's the first thing investors demand: higher profit margins. Outside investors focus entirely on ROI and profit margins, not the people who use (or are behind) the product.)
Given the state of the vacation rental industry, it doesn't make sense for a Channel Management feature to be an add-on with a separate price. We spent years beating down doors so that all users - both small homeowners and large PMs - can equally use our Channel Manager settings. We lobbied hard on behalf of small homeowners so that Vrbo would allow them to use their own credit card processing and were instrumental in piloting that program for Vrbo, which became a massive success.
All users, regardless of size, can now automatically distribute their listing content, rates, rules, availability on Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com, and the vast majority of OwnerRez users already do (or have told us they are planning to soon). Those users that don't use API integrations typically use our Channel Bridge tool to crawl and download data for their platform bookings. Channel Bridge is part of Channel Management so the cost to those users is the same.
You may not use every API integration or every channel, but Channel Management as a concept has become the default way of life for vacation rental homeowners and PMs. You rely on listing platforms to send you bookings, and you need your vacation rental software to manage that as a serious first-class part of the system in one way or another. And we've done exactly that - invested massive amounts of time into making Channel Management a fast, flexible experience that works really really well. As I write this, we are finishing up testing on new channel integrations that are coming soon, and we remain committed to partnering with others in 2021.
As we considered how much we needed to increase pricing, we realized at the same time that Channel Management should be included by default for everyone.
OwnerRez is more than just an app with features and settings. It's also about quality support. Our support - both what you read online and the responses you get from us directly - is a large part of what makes OwnerRez OwnerRez. We actively spend a good chunk of our engineering time on updating, changing and evolving our support - video libraries, accurate search functionality, careful messaging about updates. We've built systems under the covers that track our call logs, tickets and notes with you, and the problems you're facing, so that we can establish a rapport with users that lives across team members. Being People First means not giving in to "script robot" support systems or paying minimum-wage CSRs to copy/paste answers that you already found yourself.
Quality support has a cost and, as mentioned above, is not something we are willing to sacrifice as we grow. In fact, we're doubling down by adding more support and sales engineers so that our phone support can get better.
Our commitment to quality is also shown in how we monitor and update our system. Every week, we release dozens of updates (some of which are publicly documented) but many aren't documented because they involve infrastructure, networking or background work that would not make sense as a public update for users to read. As an engineer-led company, quality and attention to detail is in our DNA and the reason we want to maintain control of the OwnerRez path long into the future.
Quality and attention to detail has a cost. We know that most of you already pay more than the 20/month minimum, but we have many users that still hover around that price point. Even without Channel Management, that 20/month price point gives you tons of stuff - the world's best calendar import/export engine, widgets, triggers, messaging, CRM, reporting and much much more. But at 20/month.... quality is not sustainable. We are not willing to sacrifice quality, so the minimum has to go up.
One of the interesting things we noticed when analyzing our pricing was how we are, even after the price increases, still significantly cheaper than most of our competitors - many of whom have weaker products. Flashy designs notwithstanding, most of our competitors have clearly inferior products - the options are limited, the settings are buggy, updates take months to come out and support is nowhere to be found. We know this because we've tested their products ourselves and because we have a constant stream of new users telling us this, having left them behind. Why then, are those competitors charging 2-3 times as much as we are?
To be clear, we did not increase our prices to match competitors. That's not how we roll. But we feel strongly that OwnerRez is more than the "value product" in the industry and should not be selected because it's a bargain. These price increases allow us to comfortably take care of all the issues above while still being 25-30% less expensive than our competitors.
As we continue working on numerous partnerships, integrations, unified inbox, hosted website pages, PM overhauls, QuickBooks overhauls and other powerful updates, we will continue to outshine our competitors while leaving you satisfied that you're not over-paying and that your software is in the hands of a happy team that is focused on your success.
That's the position we want OwnerRez to be in.
As always, feel free to reach out and comment (here below the blog post) or send us an email with your thoughts. We will do our best to explain our viewpoint if something is unclear. Thanks for being an OwnerRez customer!
Unfortunately, I agree with Jason, also. Hard to do when you have weekly rates for a property. Is there a way to put something on that page that you can just enter a weekly rate, without calculations and discounts?
Thanks, Claudia
Happy Halloween everyone!👻
We'd like to start this week off by congratulating Wildbit on 20 years of business. If you don't know who Wildbit is, then maybe you know some of the products they've created. One of their most prominent products, which OwnerRez uses for it's email system, is Postmark. We love Postmark and have used it for a long time. If you've ever set up a "verified sender email address" in OwnerRez, that's the same Postmark that sends the yellow instructions with DNS instructions.
But beyond the Postmark product specifically, we love Wildbit as a company because of the culture they've created. For 20 years, they've maintained the perspective that companies should prioritize people first - not just "customer" people but also "employee" people. They started out as a small startup in Philadelphia and have grown to a team of more than 30 and over 100,000 customers.
Here at OwnerRez, we partner with many companies and use lots of products to power our software, but Wildbit stands out as a great example of what businesses should strive to be. So congrats on the 20 years, Wildbit!
In other not-so-fun news, we're getting reports that some OwnerRez users have had their Vrbo accounts compromised through successful phishing attacks. Hackers will send a targeted link that looks like it's a Vrbo booking request, which leads you to a Vrbo-looking website, which leads you to input your username and password, which allows them to record and use to access your real Vrbo account,
Needless to say, make sure that the links you click on from Vrbo are actually from Vrbo. Also, this is another great reason you should move to using the Vrbo API connection we offer. Having an API connection makes it much harder for hackers to do anything with your listings. Even if they successfully gain access to your Vrbo account, they can't change your listings, rates, availability and so on. All of that is driven from OwnerRez. In fact, even you yourself cannot change that stuff from the Vrbo dashboard because of how the API mode operates. So just a reminder here to stop using iCal and switch to API!
Airbnb is gearing up to list its shares on the Nasdaq. Earlier this month they aimed to raise $3 billion in IPO, giving Airbnb a valuation of over $30 billion! We heard about the plans to go public earlier this year, but now it's reported that Airbnb wants to do this before the end of the year. While COVID may have put a dent in the vacation rental industry earlier in the year, things are very much up for Airbnb which has recorded record booking days ever since. As of right now there is no official date when the IPO will take place, but we'll be sure to let you know.
Our CEO, Paul Waldschmidt, has been featured in PropTech magazine, a magazine devoted to real estate news, technology and software! He was interviewed a few weeks back, where he gave insight into OwnerRez's goals and how we try to achieve them. The article and profile will be included in an upcoming magazine issue, but you can read an advanced copy here.
Where can we find info about what you write under "As for the Host & Guest Reliability Standards, Airbnb has added new criteria in the following areas"? Meaning, is there anything we can adjust in regards to Unauthorized late checkouts, Unauthorized pets etc?
I'm with Jason, I don't like the change and think it's a step backwards. We are being forced to figure out discounts as oppose to a flat rate for a month or week. I spent days doing this, and now have a multitude of discounts, and none really works 100% as I would want it to, which was VERY simple to accomplish before
mixture of full time and 1099 contractors.
It's Hump Day, so time to talk OwnerRez updates! 🐫 This week, we only have a few enhancements and bug fixes (about 9) to talk about, so it should only take a couple minutes to plow through it!
After rolling out Tag Groups last week, we noticed some tweaks that needed to be made. You can now see tags grouped by group name when setting or removing tags and select entire tag groups at once. We also remove tags from mutual blocks to reduce confusion.
The rate table widget also got some updates. If a property has a 7 night minimum rule, we are no longer showing the nightly rate column, and we're always calculating a week rate even if there's no LOS (length of stay) discount. That being said, we noticed after pushing this release that some users still want to show nightly rates, between properties, even if a particular property has a 7 night minimum, so we're going to add settings to the rate table widget to make this explicit. Look for that update to be out in the next few weeks.
The "Use Template" drop-down list on guest conversation threads was being cut off on the right side of the screen, so we are now right-aligning the Use Template drop-down so that it expands towards the left side of the page. Some of you like to use really-descriptive (ie. really long) template names! 🤨
Quick bit of news on HomeToGo... We are close to wrapping up the beta period for HomeToGo users and making this available to everyone. Please note that "Request To Book" mode will not be an option for HomeToGo. Only "Instant Book" will be available up front. However, if there is a large amount of demand for Request To Book, let us know, and we'll try to get that in later.
Seasons without arrival/departure days. Believe it or not, you can configure seasons in OwnerRez to not allow arrivals or departures. In other words, the guest has to arrive before the season and depart after. There are good reasons for this. However, our validation logic showed a whacky message like "Winter requires arrival day to be on___" with no day of the week showing. We fixed this. The same validation message now shows "Winter does not allow arrivals".
Identifier Mappings broken links. A recent update made it so that you could not create new settings in the Identifier Mappings area. If you don't know what what I'm talking about, check out this article on Identifier Mappings. If you had existing mappings in place, you could change them, but you couldn't create or set new ones. This is now fixed.
SMS message guest matching. When matching guests to inbound SMS messages, we were sometimes using the wrong guest record. This is because you can have many guest records in OwnerRez for the same physical person. You might have created the same "Joe Blow" guest record five times when Joe booked your cabin 5 times, and all 5 records have the same phone number. By the way, if that's the case, you can find and merge guest records together, so do that from time to time to keep your CRM clean. At any rate, we are now using the last updated or created dates on guest records to find the latest guest and match inbound SMS messages to that conversation instead of the older ones.
No Airbnb guest conversation. There are situations in which an Airbnb booking is made (and pushed to OwnerRez) but no conversation or message thread is included. This is the result of (a) the guest booking without saying anything and (b) Airbnb changing some things in their API without mentioning it to their hapless partners. We fixed this so that a conversation is now started and you can say something to the guest even if no message thread was started on the Airbnb side.
I miss the ability to adjust the particular unsigned rental agreement with additional details. Something like an edit functionality before send the agreement to the guest for signing.
If you've got a weekly or monthly discount -- https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/length-of-stay-discounts -- the rate table will show that weekly rate column. It will also show a weekly rate column for seasons or properties with a 7 night min rule set.
I'm not really liking the new rate system. We need monthly rates and weekly rates as we had it before. I'll do my best with it now, but will need another alternative if this is the best it will have available. I honestly feel like this was a step backwards. Now it doesn't even show up on my website and most guests wanted the weekly rate or monthly rate for off season.
Good news it’s Friday!
Airbnb has recently released a couple of important host updates. The two key topics are COVID-19 Safety Practices and Host & Guest Reliability Standards. We mentioned this two weeks ago, but we wanted to make sure this has been brought to your attention. For the COVID-19 Safety Practices, hosts will need to log in to Airbnb in order to attest. You can do so right now by going to the attestation page. Hosts that don’t agree to these requirements by November 20 may have their calendars blocked from future bookings. So go do it now!
As for the Host & Guest Reliability Standards, Airbnb has added new criteria in the following areas:
Cook County, Minnesota passed a new tax bill that applies to all vacation rental properties. For the estimated 600 properties in Cook County, a 15 to 20 percent increase in taxes will be applied. Along with the tax increase the properties will no longer be classified with their original tax designation as ‘seasonal rec’ properties, according to Jim Boyd, the director of the Cook County Chamber of Commerce. Due to this, these properties are liable for school levy override tax burdens, which they were formerly exempt. Yay taxes…
The Florida Supreme Court has finally made up it’s mind on who remits the Florida “bed tax”. Owners must now be the ones to collect and remit taxes. This legal feud has gone back and forth on whether or not vacation rental sites can be the ones to collect and remit taxes on behalf of the owner. In a 2-1 decision, the court determined that a dealer is “one who can grant a possessory interest in the property,” which only owners can do. That being said listing sites no longer have the power to collect and remit taxes for owners, even though back in 2015 they were okay with that...
The island of O'ahu is once again allowed to operate short term vacation rentals. It has been seven long months since these vacation rentals were forced to convert to long term rentals. Owners were left desperate, having to drop their monthly rates which were only generating about half of what they make with short term renters. Hopefully the 8,000 passengers that landed on the 1st day of the new pre-travel testing policy can help with this.
Yep. Branson (my market) isn't exactly party-central, but even so, when I tested allowing one-night stays during gap periods, I found that a good quarter to third of them left the place relatively trashed. That was an experiment I put to an end quickly.
Even in the off-season when I lower my rates to "stupid cheap" levels, the cleaning fee makes my place more expensive than the equivalent number of hotel rooms to my bedrooms. Someone arriving in the evening and departing in the morning really isn't there to take advantage of the benefits of a vacation rental (e.g. cooking meals, using resort amenities, etc.), so why else would they be interested in renting but for a place to treat as a place to engage in too much, er, revelry?
"But some would ask, won’t this hurt my business?". No. In my market there is no restrictions on one night stays but I would never do them anyway. One night stays in traditional tourist/resort destination scream "party" and invite trashing of the property by a party goers. I do not know why would anyone even consider one night stays and for what purpose. They need one night - they can book a hotel room.
Tracy P said:
Thank you for the response. I will price myself out of my market by raising 15% when people search by nightly rate. Just thought if there was a surcharge only for AirBNB that might be a way to do it so I at least get people looking at my property vs. others.
Chris L said:
I followed Airbnb's directions and sent the cleaning checklists to my housekeepers. We'll see what they say.
Love using the Bad Guest Tag to not send review and future promotional requests.
Happy Thursday! We've got a great little group of updates to talk about (about 20) so let's get right to it!
We recently rolled out Tags and, in typical OwnerRez fashion, we immediately thought of 47 things we should add or update. This past week, we rolled out another batch of updates for tags that really kick it up a notch.
The first big part of this is Tag Groups. Tag Groups are just like they sound - categories you can create to group similar tags together for a purpose of filtering or displaying things. For instance, let's say that you want your properties to be displayed by "Style" on your website and allow website visitors to filter by different styles, and you want to define your own unique style options like "Luxury" and "Rural" and "Small and Cozy", Tag Groups let you do that. To get started, go to Settings > Tags and then click the new Groups tab. From there, you'll create your group name which in this case is "Style", then go to the tags grid, select those tags and use the Set Group button to find and set your group.
Tag groups have the potential to be used in a number of places, but let's demonstrate how they work with website or widget content. In the above example, we created our tag group and have properties broken down by luxury, rural or small and cozy, so we now want to display this on our website so visitors can select property by style. We'll go to the Hosted Website home page and set the tag group we want to show.
The Availability/Property Search settings on the home page now has the option to set a new Tag Group Filters setting. Here we'll select the Style one we just created.
You can select as many as you want. Remember that we're selecting tag groups here, not tags themselves. The idea is to present website visitors with filter options within which are the tags themselves. After we save these settings, we now can go to the website and refresh it, and we'll see that the tag group is showing in the filter bar. Selecting a tag will limit the search results to only those properties that are tagged with that tag.
Adding tag groups isn't the only thing we did. We also added Title, Description and Color settings to tags. This allows you to control the styling and presentation of how tags look around the system. Want your "bad guest" tags to show in bright red? Now you can do that!
Tags have the potential to add automation to your workflow because they allow you to custom-define and then slice and dice your data. To increase that power, we added tag criteria to triggers. You can now make sure certain triggers are sent (or not sent) based on tags that are set (or not set) on your properties, inquiries, quotes, bookings and guests. This is important because you probably don't want guests with a "bad guest" tag getting your friendly "Hey, would you leave a review?" post-departure email or the "Hey, want to book again for 20% off?" marketing emails you auto-send 3 months later.
We noticed that tag filtering on the main lists (bookings, quotes, etc) was too rigid. It only matched results for the booking itself, not the guest or property that is associated with that booking. For instance, let's suppose that you tagged a guest with the "bad guest" tag because they didn't pay their bill. Previously, if you filtered the booking list for "bad guest", no results would be returned because, technically speaking, you applied the tag to a guest record, not a booking. That wasn't very intuitive, so we changed it so that filtering includes associate guest and property tags. If you searched on "luxury" tags, any bookings that are part of a luxury-tagged property will now be returned. Filtering by tag now matches what users expect from a workflow standpoint.
The other big feature this week is the ability to modify credit card information stored on file for a booking. For years and years, OwnerRez users have rightly pointed out that once a credit card was recorded (or used) on a booking, there was no way to see, modify or change it. This matters because the email or phone on the credit card might be wrong - email templates send to the billing info is then sent to the wrong email over and over again even if you change the booking or guest point of contact info. Or maybe the guest's card expired and the number stayed the same - why not just change the expiration date on the stored card? Well now you can - all that is possible!
The feature itself is pretty simple. Pull up any booking, go to the Transactions tab and look half way down.
You'll see a list of Cards On File, showing any credit card associated with the current booking. If a card was put on file and verified, even if never used, you'll still see it here. To change the card details, click on the row and a window will pop up.
You'll be able to edit everything but the card number and security code - those remain locked on file for all time and cannot be seen or modified. However, every other part of the card info can be changed and saved. Rest assured, this will not change any historical information on previous payments or refunds, nor will it change what the card is supposed to be used for with respect to future payments or security deposit holds.
If a payment receipt email bounces, no problem - you can now go fix it!
Some eagle-eyed PM users noticed that our new Custom Statement Views didn't have columns for attachments or links. If you selected Description, it would only put in the raw original expense description but leave off the attachments and links that the default statements show. We added several new columns so that all versions of description are possible - plain, with attachments, only attachments on their own and even the attachment number. This should make sure your statements have all the content you're looking for!
If you've been using the Houfy channel integration, we've been steadily making improvements while working with the Houfy team. There are now more amenity, description and pricing fields synced across to Houfy. Because of limited time, the Houfy integration will continue to be improved steadily over time, but we hope these updates allow OwnerRez users to keep their Houfy listings more in sync and make fewer one-off updates on the Houfy side.
The tax detail report now shows party size columns (ie. adult/child counts) so those of you that need to file that information with your tax authority can now do that without jumping through hoops. Gotta keep the tax man happy.
Sorry, palm tree, but it's time to go. We are replacing our icons in OwnerRez to reflect our newer design, and be consistent everywhere, so you'll start seeing browser tabs and icons change. As part of that, we have updated our site and app icons and app splash screen on iOS devices.
This past week, we did some work on door locks.
First, we split the grace period settings on door locks so that you can have a different grace period on arrival versus departure. This allows you to give the guest more hours on the departure side than arrival, or vice versa, which is a common request by a lot of PMs. For instance, you don't want the guest to be locked out when departing - the door might swing shut behind them while loading the car - but you want to prevent them from coming in until the exact check-in time on the arrival side.
Second, we fine-tuned the grace period so that you could make it minute based (15, 30, 45, 60, 90 minutes) instead of just hours. This was also commonly requested by PMs because you may want to let the guest in a few minutes early but not a full hour. Please note that not all door lock providers allow minute increment. For instance, eRentalLock only allows hour increments so the minute options do not show for eRentalLock settings.
Ever try to schedule an email in the past? I'm not sure why you would want to, but we are now warning if you try to do that. Maybe you just shouldn't do that. 🤓
Last enhancement - we updated our Airbnb API and Channel Bridge code to detect if a full refund was made, by virtue of resolution adjustment, and make sure that the charges are removed on the OwnerRez side. As you know, we are fanatic about making sure booking financials are right. We push users to always adjust the charges, payments and fees to accurately reflect the current state of the booking - especially true after the booking is cancelled. This update should help automate that a bit more for Airbnb cancellations that were adjusted by a resolution or Airbnb admin.
Rate table week/month discounts. When displaying rate periods and types (week, month) on the rate table widget, we noticed that some LOS (length of stay) discounts weren't being calculated correctly, particularly when they were mixed with other discount criteria. This is now fixed!
Converted blocks need an owner. When channel bridge merges a block to a booking (converting the blocked-off time to a full booking) the property management settings, like owner and commission, were not being correctly applied. We fixed this - converted blocks now have the correct owner.
Templates used by old stuff. Templates have a cool little thing where each template will show you, if you click into them, what part of the system uses that trigger. For instance, it will say something like "Used by trigger Welcome Package sent 2 days before arrival" right above the template. However, we noticed that this was being gummed up by a bunch of old historical references like scheduled booking emails, so we cleaned those off so that it only shows active relevant references.
Where are the articles and blog posts? In case you hadn't noticed, our website has a great search area that will find content across all blog posts, support articles, forum threads, videos and more. We've taken time to make this produce accurate results, but we recently noticed that some blog posts and support articles weren't getting included, so we fixed that. Let us know if you see anything else not coming up! We pride ourselves on top-notch support 'round these parts. 🤠
Wrong text colors on Hosted Website widgets. There are pages on Hosted Websites that use widgets. In some cases, they are built-in or hard-coded widgets but the underlying functionality is the same. We noticed that some of these website widgets were not following the color settings of the parent website, so we fixed that to be consistent.
Seasons not saving if days are deselected. In a season, if you deselect all the allowed arrival/departure dates, it wouldn't save. This is a rare but legit use case, so we fixed it to allow this.
This week, our latest videos are on quote statuses, the Listing Quality Analyzer tool and a great little overview on calendar import/export (iCal):
We're happy to announce that we've partnered with HomeToGo! We hinted that this integration was coming for awhile, and now it's live for everyone!
HomeToGo is a "first class channel" in the OwnerRez channel manager, meaning that OwnerRez will be the channel manager, end to end, for your listings and bookings on HomeToGo. You can sync all content (photos, amenities, descriptions), rates, rules and availability, and you can take live bookings using your own credit card processing.
Even better - HomeToGo is currently running a Bounce Back Program with zero fees on all bookings until the end of March. Full syncing from OwnerRez, no fees, no commission, use your own credit card processing... what is there to lose?
Update: Bounce Back Program is no longer available.
As the world's largest vacation rental search engine, HomeToGo compares over 18 million offers from more than 2,000 trusted partners. From apartments, cabins, boats, castles, hotels, hostels, and everything in between, HomeToGo combines price, destination, dates and amenities to find the perfect accommodation for any trip worldwide. They operate 43 websites, including brands such as Tripping.com and Wimdu, across Europe, North America, South America, Australia, and Asia-Pacific.
HomeToGo’s CEO Patrick Andrae said, “We are thrilled to announce this integration, increasing our network of properties within the United States. OwnerRez is a reputable, well-positioned property management software and HomeToGo users will benefit from more competitive pricing when planning their next vacation.”
Our CEO, Paul Waldschmidt agreed, "Partnering with the world largest vacation rental search engine is a no brainer. This will provide our users more exposure on a global scale."
Join now to expand your reach to millions of new customers. Fast payout, direct guest communication, tailored cancellation policies, and fast integration – that’s how HomeToGo helps property managers maximize bookings and diversify their revenue streams.
Get started with HomeToGo by completing this connection form, or check out our HomeToGo setup and connecting guide.
Am I really the first to respond? I use Minut in my VR. Its great. Though I'm not too worried about parties/noise (Not enough parking nearby), its been helpful for tracking temperature, smoke alarms & occupancy. It makes a terrific burgler alarm; alerts when motion sensed (silent or alarmed).
Thank you.
