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Happy Friday! 😃This will be our final industry news for 2020, since the holidays are next week!🎄We hope everyone can spend some safe, quality time with their families. We will be winding things down until after the new year, but don’t worry! We’ll still be around if something catastrophic happens.
We would like to thank everyone for a fantastic year, despite all of the craziness that has been going on. We have a lot of exciting things planned for 2021, and look forward to seeing what the future holds. One thing you can sign up for now is our upcoming webinar with Airbnb on January 12th. We’ll discuss how to optimize your properties for listing on Airbnb. The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez/Airbnb webinar link to register. Now, let's get into this week's industry news!
California has made vacation rentals illegal. The new travel restriction put in place makes it illegal for owners to take reservations from people traveling from another state. The exceptions to this rule are that guests may stay if they quarantine for 14 days prior to arrival, or if they are traveling for essential purposes. However, most of the state has even tighter restrictions, only allowing guests to stay for essential travel. To make matters worse, guests who book through vacation rental sites are being told there is no guarantee for refunds.
Airbnb has placed a ban on one-night stays for this upcoming New Year’s Eve. This comes as no surprise, as Airbnb has done this before with other holidays to prevent large one-night parties. We’ve mentioned this in the past here, here, here, here...I think you get the point. Some people may be angry over this, but it’s either this or your place gets trashed and your neighbors are pissed.🤷♂️
The new travel trend, Remote “Workcations”, has come about because of Covid. Some cities, such as Miami Beach, Florida have begun to invite visitors for longer periods of stay in 2021. Future "workcationers" will be able to take advantage of special incentives and unique experiences with extended stay packages. If you can work remotely, why not work somewhere with perks you can enjoy in your off-time?🌴
Now to wrap things up with hope for the future, there’s a Covid-19 vaccine! The first trucks with the vaccine left the Pfizer plant in Michigan on December 13th. They are expected to deliver 2.9 million doses this week! This will dramatically impact the vacation rental industry and the entire economy for that matter. We hope everyone who wants to can get vaccinated ASAP and things can get back to normal. Thank you to everyone who makes OwnerRez the best vacation rental software out there!
Happy Holidays!🎄
Agree HTG have to offer OR clients a better rate. Airbnb are 14% and I don't have to pay any payment fees. So airbnb will always be cheaper than a HTG client. Its a similar scenario for other OTAs. If HTG are serious about getting clients to book direct then I would like to see a rate of around 10% or less.
Could you please tell the time zone?
On Tuesday 1/12, OwnerRez will be hosting a webinar with Airbnb to discuss listing optimization.
We'll sit down with Caroline Robbins, Connectivity Partnerships Manager at Airbnb, to talk about how to optimize your properties in OwnerRez for listing on Airbnb. We have so much information on this topic that we decided to break the webinar up into two parts. This will provide enough time to thoroughly answer any and all questions live during the webinar.
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.
Fees at 14% after the free period is not a viable option for those of us looking for ways to book with little or no fees. Vrbo has continued pushing higher fees, thus the need for direct options for customers with little or no fees. We need to continue to push direct partners that are more reasonable in pricing.
Last night's Google outage is still causing shockwaves through some of their services. Gmail is sending back wrong bounce messages that say stuff like "email address doesn't exist" when in fact they do!
If you're getting a lot of bounce messages from OwnerRez today, please note that we are watching this and reactivating these email addresses for you.
When the smoke clears, please look at your Communication History > Email tab for emails that bounced and need to be re-sent. We do not have a mechanism for re-sending failed messages in bulk, so unfortunately you'll have to look at them and the ones that need to be resent one by one.
This was their response.
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The professional offer is at this stage offered only for integrated partners selected by the account managers. Instead of 5% commission, the partner will pay 15%.
Marketing emails are sent to account emails when new features are introduced. Account managers are always informed about new features and can always be approached. Otherwise visit also check https://www.vrbo.com/discoveryhub for updates for more information.
My suggestion is to ask if the accounts you manage are eligible for the professional offer as account manager are trained to ask questions regarding strategies, new updates, and future planning. They can also tell you more about the pay out details and financial advantages.
There are no advantages over ranking on the website this still only depends on the quality metrics like:
-Reviews
-instant booking activation
-flexibility cancelation policy
-acceptance rate
-the amount of bookings
-response rate
A lot of IPM's prefer the performance offer to be able to globally control prices over different platforms.
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Interesting - seems like both AirBNB and VRBO will be looking passing different expense to owners.
Just to run the numbers on the $500.... if you rent more than $3300 on VRBO... the $500 is a deal. Currently paying much lower than 15% on even the smallest of properties.
We've talked with VRBO and quite soon they're going to introduce 15% Host only fee. Awaiting an update since only VRBO Account Managers got that article regarding parameters and benefits.
What do you do with overlapping rates where you would use the rate priority? Do you now have to adjust your date ranges to not overlap?
Happy Friday!
To start things off, PropTech Outlook magazine has published an interview with our CEO, Paul Waldschmidt. The article talks about OwnerRez and our vision for the future. Paul explains how OwnerRez is an engineer-led company that focuses on parameterization at every step, and does not follow any particular vendor specification or parameters. He states, “As OwnerRez is built in-house, we can offer the best prices and features to our users without compromising on the speed or quality.” Go check out the article to read more about your favorite vacation rental software.😉
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that Airbnb has gone public. The share prices more than doubled on it’s first day of trading, from the $68 per share price set the day before IPO, to $146 per share.🤑 Did any of you Airbnb hosts get in on the early host-only share price?
Looking in the other direction, Vrbo has made the decision to pause any new participation in new subscription models. They say they understand the value partners get from using subscriptions, and they currently have no plans to stop those PPS from being able to renew. PMs that already have a subscription will be able to renew, add new subs or convert to PPB. At the moment, these are the countries that only offer PPB (no PPS at all):
If you have vacation rental properties in California, times are tough. On Sunday, December 6, 2020, the Stay-At-Home Order was put in place by the CA Department of Public Health and will last a minimum of three week. This prohibits short term lodging for recreational or leisure purposes, but they are still allowed for “essential purposes” such as pandemic response of critical infrastructure. Short term rental can also remain open for people who cannot return to their home due to displacement, stranded travelers, people who need isolation or quarantine, or for protection of the homeless.
Have you noticed the webinars we started doing? We've completed two in the past couple of weeks, and the feedback has been great! We've got an upcoming one with Airbnb, so check that out (and register for it) on our webinars page.
Each week, we'll be hosting a webinar that is a high-level demo, focusing on overall functionality, getting started and other things that new users need to know. However, we'll also be hosting webinars about special topics and more-complex areas of the system. What special topics would you like us to discuss? Use the following survey form to let us know!
(make sure to scroll to the bottom and click the Submit button)
If the survey form didn't load, use this link instead:
What webinar would you like to see next?
Your platform and service are second to none and this price increase is a no-brainer. Thanks for all that you do!
Happy Wednesday! The product update is really tiny this week - just a couple bug fixes - so we'll knock that out lickety split, and everyone can get back to their lunch.
Rate table and LOS calculations. As mentioned frequently over the past few weeks, the rate table widget now has a number of options for what columns to shown (eg. week, month) and how to calculate those amounts. We noticed, though, that some week and month discounts were showing even though a LOS discount was never defined. That can happen if your spots rates make the weekly or monthly amounts smaller than the nightly average during the same time period, and the rate table showed that as a percent (%) discount. We changed this so that it will never try to show a discount unless you actually define one.
Currency symbols in charges editor. When selecting surcharges from the Item column in the charges editor, the amount often shows in the surcharge description depending on how the surcharge is calculated. We noticed that some currency symbols were being encoded and not showing correctly, particularly EUR and GBP currency symbols. This is now fixed!
Backwards headers in Excel Expense Import. When importing Expenses, there's a column for whether the expense should be marked as pre-deducted or reimbursed, only the import was doing the opposite of what was specified. It now works correctly.
Hosted website exact map locations. Did you know you can select exact vs. approximate location for your properties on your website map pages? You can set it based on the property default settings or customize it on the website page itself. However, we noticed that the 'exact' setting wasn't actually... exact. All good now!
Merging guest email messages. OwnerRez allows you to merge guest records which is really helpful because many duplicate guest records are often created in the CRM area. However, we noticed that conversation history (eg. email messages) were not properly merging when the guest records were merged, so we fixed that. The entire conversation should now merge across.
Deleting bookings and Damage Protection policies. There was a rare case where bookings were allowed to be deleted with active Damage Protection policies in place. We fixed this so that those bookings can only be cancelled now (so that the DP history is retained for billing reversal).
Good news, it's Friday!
We'd like a moment to toot our own horn. GetApp has ranked us as the #1 vacation rental software for 2020! 😇 They rank the top business apps every year to help people choose the best option. App scores are determined by 5 factors, worth 20 points each, for a possible total of 100. OwnerRez received a score of 99!
@OwnerRez takes the crown in @GetApp’s 2020 Vacation Rental #CategoryLeaders ranking. Congrats! 👑🎉 See the full ranking ➡️ https://t.co/bmDtPq7gvV pic.twitter.com/QEt9M4bz4g
— GetApp (@GetApp) November 25, 2020
We've had a few users reach out to us about Vrbo displaying their hot tub amenities as indoor whirlpools. Sure both have hot water in a tub, but they are very different amenities! Plus, some US accounts are missing the hot tub amenity entirely. We notified Vrbo and verified that this was indeed a bug, but good news - they have already fixed it and your hot tubs, whirlpools and other water features should be showing as they were before.
Earlier this week, we announced our integration with HomeToGo. If you haven't got around to checking them out yet, now is the time! They are currently running a Bounce Back Program with zero fees on all bookings until the end of March. Along with that, HomeToGo released their white paper, which talks about the future of travel for 2021. There are a lot of interesting statistics worth reading about. For example, cabin searches are up +148% compared to the previous year.
If you've ever thought about putting smart locks in your vacation rentals, now is the time! For a limited time, buy any smart lock and receive 25% off your RemoteLock software subscription. Use code UNLOCK25 at checkout. Check out all of their smart locks! Once you installed your smart lock, be sure to check out our support doc on how to integrate it with OwnerRez. Each time a booking is created, OwnerRez will automatically set the door lock code without you lifting a finger!
an SMS question. I have specified "forward to" phone number. I do not see anything forwarded? I only see people replying to SMS under CRM and email. The forward-to number is GV, is that why?
is "SMS Messaging is now available to everyone! " a free service, included in the regular service?
question: can we now set up SMS template/trigger to text link to quote in response to unbooked inquiry? Many of send-quote emails end up in spam folders to inquirer never sees them. I have been doing manually but it is tedious.
Thanks a lot, I've got you now! Regards...
Hi Tarki!
A few months back, Airbnb announced that all parties and events are banned globally. Their press release is here:
https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-announces-global-party-ban
Basically, this is the setting on your listings where you say:
Events Allowed: [ Yes | No ]
Everyone has to have it set to "No" now. If you mention events in your description (weddings, etc) they will block your listings, and we've seen reports of that.
However, they didn't change their API or control panel to stop events from being set - you can still put in that you allow events, even though they are banned by policy.
To help stop users from getting blocked or banned listings, we changed our API code to automatically set all "Events Allowed" settings to "No" automatically no matter what you select in OwnerRez.
Thank you very much for the updates!
Can you please clarify the following? What events are these?
Airbnb recently banned all events completely, but they didn't change their interface and control panel from showing events as an option. So you might allow events in OwnerRez which would push across to Airbnb but end up getting you in trouble since events aren't allowed. We changed this so that events are set to "no" across the board for all Airbnb API listings no matter if you allow the in OwnerRez or not.
Happy Hump Day! 🐫 We were enjoying some turkey last week, so the product update got pushed back. Today, we're going to discuss two weeks of updates (35 total from 11 this week and 24 the previous week) so buckle your seat belts and let's dive in!
Want to send text messages to guests but didn't get into the private beta group? Now you can! SMS Messaging is now available to everyone! We only provide USA phone numbers for now, but any user can add a phone number and send/receive messages no matter what country you're in. This might affect delivery charges on the recipient side, so read our help section about SMS geographical limitations.
To get started, check out this new video about SMS Setup & Usage. It will walk you through claiming a phone number, configuring it and sending and receiving test messages. It shows how messages look on both the OwnerRez and guest side and how sending files and images work as well as SMS templates and triggers.
After watching the video, read our SMS Common Questions support article which covers a lot of the early questions you might have.
For a long time, users have tried to include links to the signed renter agreement when sending booking emails, and it makes a lot of sense. If you're sending a summary email of everything the user has been charged or paid, you probably also want to include a reference to their signed renter agreement PDF. But our signed renter agreement links only worked on renter agreement templates, not booking templates, because bookings can have multiple signed renter agreements. We changed this to add some additional field codes at the booking level which are:
Notice that the first two fields codes are "links" which mean they render a URL to the PDF directly. If you're styling your email, you might use these as links that wrap around a piece of text that the user should click on.
If you don't know what field codes are or how they work, check out our Field Codes support article or watch the Field Codes walk-through video.
Did you know that you can import expenses from Excel? No? Neither did anyone else, so we added an Import button next to the existing Export button above the Expense grid in the PM area. This follows our pattern of showing import/export buttons in the areas where features are used.
We updated our Vrbo listing import code - the one that looks at your live listing on Vrbo and sucks in all the photos and data - to also import smaller photos from Vrbo. This was confusing for some users, so we're now pulling in smaller vertical photos as well as the normal size and ratios.
Have you ever looked at OwnerRez on your smartphone and wondered what the booking # (ORB...) was for a booking? We hid the booking # because of the lack of screen real estate on small devices, but users kept asking how to find it. We updated the yellow header to show the booking # - but a smaller version - when on a small device.
On the reviews widget, we now show the company name as who is responding for added context. The company name will show the correct name based on the theme for that property.
We noticed that our logos and icons for RemoteLock were old, so we updated them to the new ones. Little things like this bother us.
We also added a Houfy Instructions tab in the API Integration settings, so check that out if you were previously confused. Additionally, you can read our Houfy Setup & Connecting support article for more information.
Have you noticed the Feature Requests forum and how you can up-vote topics you want us to work on? We recently added a new sort and filter drop-down so that you can watch what is trending instead of just what has the most votes across all time.
This will show you an active interesting feature board, so keep your eye on it! You can also change it from Active topics to All if you want to look back at what has been closed or released. For all the nerds that are curious, "Trending" is calculated by placing a higher weight on votes placed in the last 14 days.
We noticed that Vrbo inquiries were creating guest records that had the inquiry email address (ie. the proxy email created by Vrbo for messaging purposes) stored as the guest email. This is somewhat logical because Vrbo doesn't provide a real guest email address on inquiries, but it was messing up CRM with lots of proxy email addresses. We changed this so that Vrbo inquiries now store the proxy email on the inquiry record only. Also, we changed the inquiry logic for "Missing Contact Info" to check the inquiry for a proxy email. Even if the guest doesn't have a real email address, the inquiry is answerable if there's a proxy one.
Airbnb recently banned all events completely, but they didn't change their interface and control panel from showing events as an option. So you might allow events in OwnerRez which would push across to Airbnb but end up getting you in trouble since events aren't allowed. We changed this so that events are set to "no" across the board for all Airbnb API listings no matter if you allow them in OwnerRez or not.
Speaking of channels, we updated our TripAdvisor API code to force-validate if your second payment rules are less than 15 days. TripAdvisor requires 15 days or more for the second payment rule, so our API integration now checks for this and gives you a friendly message before allowing it to fail when the push happens later.
To reduce guest confusion, we used to never send the booking confirmation email for channel bookings. This was hard-coded across the board because we felt like it would be confusing for guests to book on TripAdvisor or Airbnb and then get a direct email from you, the owner or PM, with confirmation information that had (possibly) wrong amounts or information. However, OwnerRez users are clever! Many of you adjusted your triggers or settings or email language with this in mind and you want you confirmation emails to be sent to all bookings, no matter if they are channel or direct! So we added an email option to Airbnb and TripAdvisor channels so that you can decide if you want the confirmation email going out or not.
The conversation history shows dates and times, and we updated it to show those dates and times in your timezone. Now you should be able to see exactly when the guest was sent a message in your own time zone.
Night and week rules on small rate tables. If you've ever looked at the rate table for your listings on a small device (eg. smartphone), either in a rate widget or property page on a hosted website, you'll notice that the night/week/month columns collapse into a single column for easier viewing. We noticed that it wasn't showing the right night and weeks, based on your settings, on those small devices, so we fixed that to be consistent with larger devices.
Dutch words in widgets. If you don't speak Dutch, you may not have noticed this one. The word "for" in our widgets was using the wrong word for users with Dutch settings, so we fixed it!
Rate widget calculations from the past. The rate table widget does a lot of heavy lifting. It figures out night, weekend, week and month rates, within the context of season, based on dynamic pricing, LOS discounts and other settings that can be very difficult to figure out. To be as exact as possible, we calculate numbers across seasons and then examine the result. We noticed that we were calculating this on season too far in the past (for current seasons) so we capped it to 31 days in the past which allows current "Monthly" rates to be correct relative to the current season.
Pending emails on disabled properties. Did you know that you can have bookings at disabled properties? Well you can. You might have created some bookings then disabled the property to hide it for awhile. The bookings at the property are still there, just hidden! We changed our email logic to skip pending emails if the property is disabled. Once you reactivate the property, the pending emails will work again but only for new bookings.
Payment reminders on disabled properties. Likewise with financial reminder emails.
Payment methods on disabled properties. Likewise for payment methods. Let's say you have Stripe connected and configured to work for 3 of your 5 properties. You then disable one of those properties - what happens with the Stripe payment method? We now clear that property from the method. When you reactivate the property, you will need to reset the payment method to be used on that property.
Stripe capture error. When trying to capture Stripe funds (ie. keep money from a security deposit) there was a rare situation where an error would occur. This is now fixed
Export CC history to CSV. Just like it sounds. If you ran the CC Processing History report and tried to export it to CSV, you got an error. Not anymore!
$0 charges and TripAdvisor. We allow you to create charge line items that say whatever you want including $0 amounts. TripAdvisor unfortunately does not. TripAdvisor requests quotes from our system in real-time all day long which means OwnerRez might generate an automatic quote with a $0 amount in an "information only" charge line item which will make TripAdvisor choke. We fixed this to ignore $0 lines when communicating with TripAdvisor.
Quotes having quotes. We fixed an issue where creating a quote will crash if you're copy the quote from another quote and doing it from the guest conversation sidebar.
Search widget and disabled tab groups. We fixed a bug where the search widget might link to tab groups that are disabled. Don't remember what tag groups are? That went out recently, so read all about it.
Holidays showing on other owner's properties. When owners access OwnerRez, via the portal access feature in the PM area, they see the same calendar that you do only stripped down. Those calendars show holidays, only some holidays don't apply to some properties, and owners might wonder why they're seeing those holidays. We fixed this to take into account which property is being viewed and which holiday lists apply.
Airbnb rate/listing import and channel tester. Airbnb made some updates to their website and systems that blocked old HTTP methods from being used. We updated our crawling logic - the code that imports listings, imports rates and runs live rate checks - to use the new HTTP methods.
Template preview options being cut-off. When previewing templates, you have the ability to select live properties and bookings to test the template against - this gives you a way to see your templates against live booking data. We noticed that those property and booking lists were getting cut off so we fixed it.
Selecting taxes on channel booking charges. We were checking listing site applicability when showing taxes on bookings in the charges editor. We changed that so that listing site applicability is no longer checked. You can select taxes regardless of the channel.
Calendar dates on rate editor advanced mode. When using the calendar date pickers in the rate editor "advanced" selection mode, we noticed that the advanced window would close when the user typed in the date boxes. All fixed!
Confirm message on quote acceptance check payments. When a guest accepts a quotes or goes through the Book Now process, they can select optional add-ons and use different payment methods. An eagle-eyed user noticed that selecting a check payment method and adding optional add-ons (both) would result in a wrong check total on the final confirmation instructions after booking. This is now fixed.
Rate table season ranges. We fixed an issue with the rate table where season ranges were ending too early when calculating LOS discounts.
This week, our latest video is about setting up and using SMS Messaging:
Sure, so HTG gets paid by its affiliation with those other sites - Vrbo pays them for those redirects. I believe that's how it works. I don't want to speak for HTG, but I know there are distribution agreements like that in place for others, so I assume it's the same for HTG.
In terms of why your Air or Booking.com listings aren't showing on there, you'd have to ask HTG. They may simply not have mapped that one in for your property. They have a pretty huge index of listings worldwide but I'm guessing that some of those haven't been fully mapped to every OTA. Or they simply may not want to show every OTA if the Expedia ones are more lucrative/easier to use.
Agree mostly VRBO and Expedia. I did find my property pulled in from a local French site and Get a Room.
It would be useful to understand the business model of how HTG get paid if a guest clicks through a VRBO or other link? That could impact our pricing decisions for HTG and offer a few percent lower in order to get the guest booking direct. I'm still not clear on the cost for our direct listing. The sign up form suggest the offer is only until end Dec 2020. Its also states after the offer that its 2.5% for full integration and 14% for partial integration.
With the Owner Rez connection are we not fully integrated?
Just checked out HTG website and did a few searches. It appears most of the listings are from VRBO, like 95%+ . Can you dwell on that since they advertise to search all sites. I did not see one AirBnb listing, only a couple of Expedia. I searched big and small markets.
If the traveler does not book direct on HomeToGo, and chooses to redirect through to Vrbo/Booking/other OTA, than there is no cost to you for that other than on the OTA side. When they redirect through, they go to your OTA list, so they are essentially using your other listings.
When the Free part is over, and a guest chooses our property, through HTG, listed on AirBnb, is there double commission? If not who gets paid what?
Hi Le Touquet Holid!
HomeToGo has a brilliant model - they do have partnership with the OTAs where they pull in listings automatically but they're also working with PMS systems (like OwnerRez) to integrate property owners directly. In this way, the traveler can pick between going OTA and direct with the owner. It's an ambitious idea, but pretty cool.
After the No Fees program is over, their fee structure aligns similar to Vrbo's PPB and Booking.com commission rates. It's 14% so a tad lower than the others.
They also have pretty wide exposure, so consider that angle as well. When we started working with them, we noticed how far their reach is worldwide - lot of sister websites and international variants that they operate.
I'm still
My properties seem to be already on home to go via vrbo and other sites. So will my properties be listed effectively as book direct at a lower price than the big otas? What are the charges for Home To Go after the offer expires?
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