Latest Activity...
Yes, you can create a surcharge that applies only to Airbnb - but, Airbnb rolls it into the rate anyway, so it won't help to do it that way.
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.
If you're using our API connections, or pushing rates using Channel Bridge, you can use those to increase your Airbnb rates by 15% compared to your standard OwnerRez rates. This is generally easier than doing it with a surcharge.
Darn Airbnb.... I'm one of the lucky ones who will pay that host fee starting 12/7/20. In place of raising my rates 15% and outpricing myself out of my market that way, is there a way to add a surcharge just to Airbnb bookings? I'm not a fan of the bait and switch and adding in all sorts of fees, but just looking at my options moving forward.
Q4 of this year or Q1 of 2021. We just had a meeting with their team earlier today about a bunch of stuff and this came up. Messaging and reviews are the big things coming and both are very near-term.
Happy Friday! The world series is just around the corner.⚾ Football season is just getting started.🏈 And the Lakers just won their 17th NBA championship.🏀 Now that we’ve got you all caught up on sports, let's talk about the vacation rental industry.
Murrieta, CA has decided to move forward with an ordinance that allows “hosted” short-term vacation rentals to continue in the city. With the decision comes a new framework for “non-hosted” (owner is not onsite) properties as well. This is the result of increased complaints about vacation rentals causing disturbances such as noise, overcrowding, trash and safety concerns. We’ve been seeing a lot of this lately and have posted about it last week the week before that, a few weeks before that and earlier in the summer… Now why would the city do this, to help out the neighborhood? Or for the city to collect more tax? Surprise surprise - the new ordinance sets up the collection of a Transient Occupancy Tax. This amounts to 10 percent of the rent charged by the operator.
Another one bites the dust. Chicago has officially banned single-night rentals in response to the ongoing COVID party issue. Airbnb has implemented policies to combat this but they’re not always easy to enforce. Imposing a minimum stay seems to be the only way to detour partygoers. But some would ask, won’t this hurt my business? The short answer, yes. According to a report from AirDNA, one-night stays on Airbnb earn an average 17% more revenue throughout the year than those with longer minimums. As more and more cities adopt these guidelines, we urge those partygoers to take a chill pill.💊
Aspen City Council has passed legislation that requires short term rentals to have a business license and a vacation rental permit. This enables the municipal government to collect more revenue, which is currently set at 2% lodging and 2.4% sales taxes, because the license and permit will track who is actually renting out property. The business license will also include a $100 fee, so Aspen is getting their money’s worth all at once.
Did you know that violating short-term rental rules in Miami Beach could cost hosts between $20,000 and $100,000!? These fines were routinely considered the most severe in the country. As of Wednesday this is no longer the case. A reduced fine structure has been implemented at $1,000 for the first violations and $5,000 for repeat violations. This is the first time since 2016 that the fines have been lowered. I guess if you start out high enough, they do go down once in awhile.
If you haven’t already check out the Product Update we posted yesterday. Also if you missed our Vrbo Over the Years post check it out, you can see 25 years of homepage changes! That’s all for this week, have a great weekend!😁
We're pleased to announce that we have partnered with Touch Stay. The integration allows OwnerRez users the ability to provide digital guest welcome books. This will empower your guests and stop the questions, leaving a smile on their faces.
About Touch Stay
We’re all about happy guests! #MakeGuestsHappy
Touch Stay digital guest welcome books help holiday and short-term rental hosts and managers put a smile on their guests’ faces. Because happy guests leave great reviews. And happy guests remember, refer, and book again.
Place everything your guests will ever need to know before and during their stay just a click away in your Touch Stay app. Finally lose that rather tatty and unloved paper binder from your home!
Completely customized to your brand, including your snazzy colors and slick logo. Share insider tips and supply practical information with easy and intuitive navigation.
Our software aims to make guests’ stays more relaxed and more informed. Using Touch Stay, lodging owners can create beautiful digital welcome books that provide guests everything they need to know about the property and surrounding area.
Here is a list of reasons why you should use Touch Stay:
All your content is stored in one single online location. The Touch Stay mobile web app packages that content in an easy and beautiful form. You then share your guest welcome book by sending guests a link (no sign up or app to download!)
Get started with Touch Stay by following this link: https://touchstay.com/
Check out the OwnerRez support doc here: https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/Touch_Stay
Is there a timeline associated with VRBO being included in the unified inbox? I'm most excited about the unified inbox and streamlining communication between apps, devices, etc. This will be a huge step forward!
Yep. Most likely Vrbo first. Lot more API usage there, and we have a really good rapport with the Vrbo IPM team.
Anyone have any hands-on experience comparing ResortClean and VRScheduler? I definitely need one of these solutions; I attempted to implement ResortClean two and a half years ago (and AFAICT, I was the genesis for ResortClean integrating with OR after a conversation with Jim there), but I was never able to get my cleaning companies to agree to use it because the learning curve and overhead was too high. Perhaps the UI has improved in the last couple of years--I still have the initial 50 credits I paid for, ha, so it'd be nice to use them.
But before I push my cleaners to adopt it, maybe I should look into VRS instead. Any advice/experience from others here who have used one or both?
I followed Airbnb's directions and sent the cleaning checklists to my housekeepers. We'll see what they say.
That said, I actually skimmed through the checklists and, at least superficially, I don't find them too onerous--certainly FAR better than the enhanced cleaning protocols they were advertising before (which involved removing and washing curtains between every guest...sheesh). For the most part, it's pretty much a good checklist that a professional cleaning company should be doing between guests anyway--and which mine are pretty much already doing. I may be wrong; we'll see what they say when they read my email later tonight. :)
> As we work on adding other channel messaging (eg. Vrbo or Booking.com)
Is that a hint towards any functionality coming soon? :)
Happy Thursday everyone! We've been quiet for a few weeks, but our hands haven't been idle! There was a low-level infrastructure change we had to make that took coordinated effort to make sure there was no downtime for users. With that out of the way, we've spent the last week pushing out a bunch of new tweaks and fixes (36 in total and 5 others in a previous week) that have been tested and ready to go. Buckle your seat-belts! 🚀
The feedback by our SMS users has been great! Tons of great ideas, many of which we've already worked on. However, the overwhelming majority pointed out the same weakness - there was no way to know when a new incoming SMS message arrived. We just added a new system alert for SMS Messages that will fire off an email anytime one comes in.
As with all system alerts, you can turn this off in the Settings > System Alerts area. In the future, we plan to upgrade this system alert (along with others) to provide other alert mechanisms such as in-app, text or push notification. For the time being though, this email alert should make sure you don't miss any important SMS messages.
As we continue to improve the inbox, conversation thread and communication history in OwnerRez, we strive to make as many small changes as we can every week, even in weeks where we aren't focused on messaging. In the past couple of weeks, we've tweaked a number of messaging related things to add clarity and simplicity.
There are now "Send" buttons from the SMS and Airbnb triggers on bookings (in the Email tab) which will link across to the guest conversation with a prefilled template of what the trigger would send. This is similar to how email triggers have always worked where you can instantly see, and send, email triggers for a booking if it was missed or if you want to send it again.
And when you get to the guest conversation area, notice the "Use Templates" button that is now available. This provides a quick list of templates that you can apply to the current guest and booking (if there is a booking) right inline.
The list of templates is currently limited to only SMS and Airbnb templates because email cannot be sent from the guest conversation area. If you don't have any SMS or Airbnb templates, the template will not be shown (or might be empty). In the near future, we plan to add email functionality to this area as well.
You'll notice that we also added an Airbnb icon to messages that are transmitted via Airbnb platform versus SMS or email. In a unified inbox, there can often be confusion as to what message came from where. We hope the Airbnb icon adds clarity. As we work on adding other channel messaging (eg. Vrbo or Booking.com) we will show icons for those channels as well.
SMS and Airbnb messages now link to the communication history area, like emails, so that you can see the original message, why it was sent, the exact time and so on. This follows what email has shown for a long time, so we wanted to make it consistent across all types of messaging.
The message action button (shown in the above picture) will contain more functionality in the future, so click on it every so often and see what else you can do.
By the way, did you know you can use the action button to move SMS messages from one guest record to another? This is helpful for cleaning up the inbox when incoming SMS messages get associated with the wrong guest record (eg. you might have two guests with the same mobile phone number).
Over on the communication history grids, we updated the columns for the SMS and Airbnb grids to make better use of screen real-estate. The From and To columns were collapsed away and the Message column now shows a much more-readable concise format and trims everything after the first few hundred characters. This looks better on both desktop and mobile.
We noticed that SMS and Airbnb templates did not have a Used By column like email templates do, so we added that as well. Your SMS and Airbnb templates will now tell you where they are used (eg. on triggers and how many).
If SMS messages fail to send, we now highlight the failure reason on the email alert that you get. Please bear in mind that failure reasons are provided to us by our telephony carrier and are sometimes generic in nature. "Not available at this time" or "Currently unreachable" may not be clear, but it's the only information we get. Typically, this means that the phone number is not a mobile phone or SMS has been blocked by the recipient.
That's it for messaging. Let's move on to rates, channels and other updates.
Our Listing Quality Analyzer tool is an important resource for seeing your properties at a high level and knowing what is wrong or incomplete. We just added another check to Listing Quality Analyzer to see if you have any minimum night rules that are longer than your maximum night rules including scenarios where minimum nights are set in seasons or spot rates down-stream. If you haven't run Listing Quality Analyzer in awhile, give it a quick spin to see what it says about your properties. You might be surprised!
We recently released Custom Views for Owner Statements, and it's been a big hit, but we noticed that expense description columns stopped showing attached files if you used the custom Description column instead of the default views. We updated the custom Description column to use the same language and attachments that the default uses, and we plan to add more custom columns that allow you to pick and choose which type of description and attachments to show. For now, the Description column will display what you were used to before.
Airbnb has a number of description fields that don't always line up with OwnerRez's description fields. We have a support doc that shows the field differences, but that still doesn't cover all scenarios. We noticed Airbnb's listing nickname field - the one that they show internally in the Airbnb control panel - was only allowing 20 characters, so we changed our mapping to use the first 20 characters of the property name as the Airbnb nickname if no property code exists. By default, it will try to use the property code.
If you use a pending/confirmation or Request To Book process for your bookings, you might have gotten questions from guests about why Travel Insurance doesn't work. If guests selected Travel Insurance during booking, but the booking was set to pending, the Travel Insurance request would have to be made again, and that was often hidden from the guest. We changed our Travel Insurance request process to store the request and process it after the booking is confirmed, and we made sure it works with a variety of confirmation processes and timelines.
We also added Travel Insurance options for non-USD bookings. If your booking is in a non-USD currency, the guest can still select Travel Insurance and be presented with a screen that will allow them to select a USD amount for their trip costs. This way, their booking can still be covered if they're a US resident and wish to pay for US-based Travel Insurance no matter where in the world they are traveling.
We also tweaked the standard booking billing information (ie. what the {BBINFO} field code shows) in our booking confirmation email to mention CFAR Travel Insurance and be more accurate as to what can be purchased and when. This should reduce guest confusion.
Last update on Travel Insurance - we now transmit Travel Insurance dates to the carrier based on the property time zone. This is important because it means that UTC (ie. London Time) is no longer a factor in determining if the Travel Insurance purchase date is the same calendar day as the initial booking date. Your own time zone (ie. the time zone of the booked property) is now what makes the determination. For instance, properties in California will now have 8 hours of extra time, than they had before, for the guest to see and purchase Travel Insurance before the calendar day ends.
Over in the world of channel integrations, we made several small but important changes.
New cleaning amenities have been added and are synced to Vrbo via the Vrbo API. Some of these cleaning amenities may have existed for Airbnb but were not tied into Vrbo. Others are completely new. We also added industry association and standards so that you can advertise that your listings meet certain industry or regional standards.
Be careful when selecting these associations that you actually comply. There may be negative repercussions with certain governing bodies if you select them without actually meeting the specifications that are set. As with taxes and other legal settings, OwnerRez is not responsible for and does not transmit anything to governing bodies based on selections like these. This is for your advertising purposes only.
If you use manual payments on Vrbo API or "Request to Book" mode, we've updated our payment logic to be more intuitive and follow your property rules. For starters, if payments are manual, we do not schedule any automatic second payments and we make sure payment reminders are set to go out. This will make sure your bookings are in keeping with how your direct booking rules are set. Again, this is only for properties that have second payment rules set to not collect automatically.
Once you've confirmed a pending or "Request to Book" booking, we then follow the OwnerRez payment schedule instead of the one in Vrbo where they conflict. If you manually clear the pending flag, OwnerRez will clear the auto-payments on the channel rules for that booking as well.
If you use the default OwnerRez renter agreement for your bookings, give that a quick look when you get a free minute. We changed it recently to a bigger better style with more stuff in the header and first couple of paragraphs. This is a format we've been using for awhile in our Concierge Setups, and we wanted everyone to have it.
To see what it looks like, go to Settings > Legal Agreements, click Create, click Prefill From > Default System Agreement and then click the top Preview button. No need to save the agreement because the system will use this by default if you don't have one on file.
Ever wonder why an Expense isn't showing up on a Owner or PM Statement? Previously, you would email the help desk and ask why not. We'd spend a bunch of time digging into it and then explain that it was already remitted on a previous statement. You can now see this for yourself. Every Expense now shows the Owner and PM Statement it was remitted on or multiple statements if it was picked up several times. It will also link to the statement so that you can click over and see it.
In case you missed it, please be aware of the changes we made recently to the Affiliate Program and the upcoming changes to Legacy Rates and CC Processing Fees. That blog post covers everything that will happen in detail, so please take some time to read it thoroughly.
And hey, did you notice you can comment on blog posts again? In the recent blog overhaul, comments accidentally got removed. Don't worry - we really do like hearing from you. Go and and get back to commenting!
Last bit of housekeeping news... Continue watching our Support Home and All Videos pages. We believe deeply that support is part of engineering, and our dev team works every week to add features that benefit our support area. You'll notice that our support home, articles and video pages change constantly, usually every week. You can now see the Latest Video uploads on the Videos home page so look back for new ones to watch.
Friendly error messages on Airbnb API. There are some places on the Airbnb API dashboard where we have to make live calls to Airbnb while you sit and wait. You might have pressed a button to check some rates or tax settings. If Airbnb is down or slow, the function used to crash out with an ugly message. We are now checking for that and showing something a bit more graceful.
Slow rate editors. We noticed that the rate calendar and seasonal defaults editor was loading slow on some devices because of a special piece of code for Apple devices. We removed the problematic code and everything should be fast again! 🎆
Hosted Website sub-menu text casing. On Hosted Websites, we noticed that header menus were sometimes not consistent where the sub-menu had a different text casing (eg. upper case or lower case) than the parent text. We fixed this so that they would be consistent.
Double saving on rate editors. We fixed an issue on the rate editors where hitting the Enter key when the save button was already in focus caused the rate to be saved twice.
Rate rounding on rate editors. We noticed a rounding error where all amounts would round to the nearest 5 no matter what the real rate number was. This was happening on both the rate calendar and seasonal default editor. This has now been fixed.
Ignore empty-rate seasons for rates. If a property had a season assigned but no seasonal rate was set for that same property, the rate engine was still picking up that season instead of looking for another matching season that had a rate. We fixed this so that the first season with rates is being selected instead of an empty-rate season.
But don't ignore empty-rate season for other things. The above fix actually caused a new bug where we stopped using empty-rate seasons even though they are necessary for rules and discounts and other things from time to time. Found and fixed!
Listing Quality Analyzer suitability fix location. When Listing Quality Analyzer finds something wrong, it also points out how to fix it. For suitability checks, Listing Quality Analyzer was pointing to the right wrong fix location, but we have changed that to be correct.
Clear numeric entries on rules page. When selecting no pets/children, we are now clearing numeric entries so validation issues don't occur.
No themes on custom field headers. When you create custom field headers, themes never apply, so we optimized.
Renter agreement signed trigger timing. Triggers can be configured to send when a renter agreement is signed, but renter agreements can be signed at the same time a booking occurs. What if the quote is accepted and the renter agreement is signed, but the booking is finished being created? There was some wonkyness with the timing around new bookings, signed RAs and payments. We streamlined this so that trigger events would consider everything before failing or being skipped. And yes "wonkyness" is the technical term for it. Wonkyness gone.
Calendar Import (iCal) cancellation detection. We found a regression bug in our calendar sync engine that was marking time as missing instead of forcing a cancellation through. This should help you get less of those "Calendar sync error" emails that everyone loves. In the near future, we plan to simplify our calendar sync engine to be more streamlined and do less magic. Now that channel API integration is available for all users, iCal is less necessary, so we want to make it more straightforward when it comes to blocking and un-blocking time.
Hosted Website menu names with apostrophe's. Apostrophe's in menu names were not displaying correctly, but that has been fixed.
Custom statement view in portal access. Once you create a custom view for a statement, the owner needs to be able to see it, right? We allowed that in portal access, but we went to far and allow them to also change the view with some buttons that weren't supposed to show. That has now been fixed - the owner can still see the custom view that you assign but nothing else.
Timezone on trigger run date. We fixed the timezone on trigger run date. We are now checking to make sure that the run date and timezone are correct against the date the trigger was created. In case you didn't know, when the trigger was created is compared against the booking dates to make sure that new triggers don't accidentally get fired against historical bookings.
Owner statement negative pro-rate. We fixed an issue with booking pro-rate where certain date ranges would make bookings be included that were pro-rated to a negative amount since the booking dates were past the statement date. This has now been fixed.
SMS billing. If you've been using SMS Messaging, you may have noticed some funny numbers on your invoice. No one was over-charged (in fact, several users were undercharged) so no worries there. But we fixed the counts and numbers to be correct. Historical invoices should also be correct as well.
Stop disabling SMS! This was a funny one. Since SMS Messaging is not open to all users, it's hidden in the billing area. When users changed their premium features, the SMS Messaging feature also got turned off and, because it's not publicly available, they could not turn it back on. Ouch. All good now though!
Legacy Rates upgrade page failing for many properties. We optimized the Legacy Rate upgrade page to handle many properties/rates at once. It used to time-out for PMs that have a lot of properties, but it's all good now.
Trigger grid filter for template filter. The Triggers grid used to explode if you used the "by template" filter. Now it doesn't.
Australian date handling on widgets. Just like it sounds. All set now! A word on this - we know that our date, currency and culture settings are inconsistent between the control panel and guest sides, and it's something we know needs to updated. Thanks for your patience!
Season minimum nights rule overriding property weekend nights rule. Again, just like it sounds. Weekend night rules should always have priority over minimum night rules no matter how many levels of minimum night rules you have. This is now fixed.
Make sure to check out our latest videos. Up above, I mentioned the All Videos page and how it shows the latest uploads. I'm also going to start dropping them here in the weekly Product Update so that you see them here too. Let's start it off with the latest videos from the last couple of weeks:
6:04m
5:31m
3:10m
10:47m
7:07m
10:35m
10:02m
3:51m
Welcome! It was fun to put together. We will be adding to this over time as we see other changes to add.
As one of the legacy VRBO employees hired back in the "good ole days" when the site was still owned and operated by the original founders, I found this blog post fun to read. All of those home page versions (from 2002 on) are familiar to me and my years at VRBO working for the original founders were the best years of my career at VRBO and Homeaway. Thanks for the walk down memory lane!
I long for the "Craigslist of vacation rentals." Craiglist is still Craiglist because Craig Newmark isn't greedy. VRBO is now swallowed up in a megacorp because all the players down the line got greedy.
As Vrbo celebrates their 25th anniversary, we wanted to take a look back at their long history. Vrbo started the first online vacation rental service back in 1995 and were really the first ones to define what the “vacation rental industry” was. Until Airbnb came along, Vrbo completely dominated the vacation rental industry and set the tone for everyone. Even as competitors started to spring up, Vrbo continued to grow and now provides access to 2 million whole-home vacation rentals in 190 countries across the world.
OwnerRez is proud to be one of Vrbo’s few Preferred Partners. We fought hard for channels to work with us directly, and we fought hard for our smaller homeowners users to get access as well. We meet with Vrbo monthly to ensure OwnerRez is up to date with their latest features and to look for improvements on both sides. Our partnership with Vrbo is strong and we look forward to working with them for many years to come!
We thought it would be fun to take a look back at Vrbo’s humble beginnings and remind our older users about the Good Ole Days. If you’re new to the vacation rental industry, these old images should make you smile as well.
The following images are courtesy of Archive.org. Click on the below thumbnails to see a larger version.
We haven’t always agreed with every decision Vrbo has made over the years. In fact, we’ve held our breath and grimaced along with the rest of you at times. But it’s undeniable that Vrbo did a huge amount of work decades before many of us got started, and we respect the long path they forged. We respect and admire that, and we wish them luck as they celebrate this 25th anniversary.
Airbnb can shove it. They are more trouble (and bring more problematic guests) than they are worth. I wish it finally imploded and went back to renting unpermitted basements and attics and spare couches - that is what they are good at.
Good news, it’s a three day weekend!🌴
Vrbo is celebrating its 25th anniversary by giving out 25 stays for free at highly-rated vacation homes on their platform. They’re including houses, cabins, condos and wait for it...castles!🏰 “We wanted to recognize and show gratitude to our customers who have trusted Vrbo with their family vacations over the past 25 years. To celebrate this milestone, we are inviting families to look back through their old family photos to reminisce on their most precious memories together,” Lish Kennedy, Vrbo’s VP of Global Brand Marketing. If you’re feeling lucky, you can enter the contest by posting a family vacation photo with the hashtag #VrboTurns25 on either Facebook or Instagram. Each vacation will be worth 5k. So get posting!
Do you remember what Vrbo was like 25 years ago? No messaging, no platform transactions, no API integrations, no Expedia, not even HomeAway. For those of you that are new to vacation rentals, think of “Craiglist for vacation rentals”. Someone should put together a montage of all the Vrbo homepages over the years.
Airbnb has decided that all hosts must agree to their Enhanced Cleaning Protocol. This all starts in October and will be rolling out into 2021. The Enhanced Cleaning Protocol started as an opt-in measure back in June, but now Airbnb feels everyone needs to be squeaky clean (or at least claim to be).
So what does this mean for you?
If this all sounds like a lot, well it is...just in case you need to adjust your cleaning fee, check out our support doc on that.
Apparently the Airbnb board room has been hard at work. Starting December 7, 2020 Airbnb is shifting all software-connected hosts to a host-only fee structure called simplified pricing. We mentioned this about a month ago and speculated that it would be pushed to other markets soon. That didn’t take long.
Before you worry, this does not affect hosts with a majority of their listings in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Bahamas, Argentina, Taiwan and Uruguay. So most of you folks won’t be affected, but they’re clearly moving to a booking.com model. For those of you that do qualify, Airbnb will deduct a flat 15% host service fee from each payout and won’t charge a guest service fee. As always, you can adjust the Airbnb rate in the OwnerRez API settings to offset the host fee.😉
Airbnb has also banned one-night stays over Halloween weekend.🎃 Airbnb even went a step further and canceled any existing one-night stays for October 30 or October 31. Hosts with existing bookings that fall into that category would “still receive payment” according to Airbnb. This is all due to the problematic house parties that we posted about last week and a few weeks before that and earlier in the summer...
"maybe I should turn this on"
Do you have listings in Australia, New Zealand, South Korea or Thailand? It's currently only available in those markets and will be forced on everyone there.
However, they've announced that they're expanding this in the past few days, so we expect it to move to many other markets soon.
Keep us posted. I'm curious how this goes as some neighboring states (eg. VA) are rumored to be preparing the same.
At the moment, no on rounding up, but that's something we're looking into. Thanks for your feedback, Ella!
I am still thinking that something is not working re latest TN tax change. I removed TN and County sales and only left 3% lodging in place. The total tax amt seems to be overstated still on quotes. Have ticket opened already.
Hi Paul, can we round up discounts to the nearest dollar? For example when creating week long stay discounts using %? It would look cleaner and simpler.
Pandemic parties continue to abound! Parties at a San Diego downtown high-rise are stirring up trouble. Numerous complaints of loud parties at vacation rentals have been made to the San Diego Police Department. Compared to all of 2019, these parties nearly tripled in the first eight months of this year. As soon as the county began to relax its COVID-19 lockdown orders, disturbances skyrocketed. According to San Diego City Attorney Mara Elliott, vacation rentals are illegal in residential areas, but city officials are not currently enforcing it.
Which begs the question - how do you enforce party bans? Airbnb stopped all listings from accepting more than 16 people…. Which immediately blocked tens of thousands of lodges, wedding halls and multi-group venues from advertising on Airbnb. Epic fail. Besides, 3 or 4 people can book a property then message all their friends to show up after.
Proactive monitoring is one possible solution. Vrbo and NoiseAware have partnered to offer a modern noise monitoring option for homeowners. The goal is to provide a way to wirelessly monitor the decibel level inside vacation rentals. If noise levels reach past a certain threshold, homeowners and PMs can be notified and take action. So go ahead, mic up your rentals and tell your guests to pipe down.
Curious - how many of you already use NoiseAware or Minut? Leave a comment below or send us a message. We’ve considered integrating with them, and I’m curious how many readers already have these in place.
If you have been waiting to take a trip to paradise, the wait may soon be over. At long last, Hawaii officials have stated that they feel “confident the state is ready” to reopen the islands. After three possible reopenings that didn’t occur, the state is ready to reopen tourism on October 15th. Travelers can now avoid that 14 day quarantine by testing negative for COVID-19 within 72 hours of arrival. Hop off that 8-12 hour plane ride and proceed directly to swabbing!
To kick things off all County and State Beach Parks on Hawai‘i Island reopened at 7:00 a.m Thursday. If you plan on traveling straight to the beach just remember, all beachgoers must wear masks, social distance and gatherings can only be up to 10 people max. Maybe just keep your snorkel mask on the whole time you’re in Hawaii?
Who here likes to be nickeled and dimed? No one? Strange! Escambia County, FL has voted Thursday to tack on an extra penny to the current four cents on every dollar spent on hotel beds through the Tourist Development Tax. This tax change goes into effect April 1, 2021, but don’t worry - that extra penny will improve your quality of life! Another week, another government increasing lodging taxes. It would be interesting to see what tax types are increasing at the fastest rate - meal, gas, lodging, etc - over the last few years. Lodging tax has gotta be near the top of the list.
Hi Ella,
Yes, the fee/discount setting on the payment method will be removed but you can establish a discount that can be applied on certain quotes from the surcharges area.
For the LOS pricing, remember also that you can use Condensed View to make all rent lines to show in one line only so that the guest only sees one "rent" amount after weekly discounts.
I for one will miss the "Legacy" pricing. I don't see an option to have a set week or month rate anymore besides applying discounts, which is not what I want. I'd like to be able to set a flat rate for a full week (7 nights) not only a % which calculates to weird numbers.
I also had a rate for 3 nights weekend, and now again only can apply a discount, and numbers don't look as clean as when there was a flat rate.
Also enjoyed having a "custom payment method" for a discount. So this will now be removed as I understand?
It took all day to try to play with new rate set up, and I did not come close to the simple set up I already had. :(
As we begin the final quarter of 2020, we're gearing up for some great new features and updates in the new year. As part of that, we're retiring several old features that have grown long in the tooth. Out with the old, in with the new!
At the end of the year, we will no longer support Legacy Rates and all accounts will be upgraded to the new Seasonal Rates and Spot Rates.
We don't want this to take anyone by surprise, so we're posting about it three months early and we sent out personalized emails to everyone affected to call your attention to this now.
Ready to upgrade right now? You can do that by using our Rate Upgrade tool, and you can read about what the changes are (and what you'll lose from Legacy Rates) by reading our L̶e̶g̶a̶c̶y̶ ̶R̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶U̶p̶g̶r̶a̶d̶e̶ ̶s̶u̶p̶p̶o̶r̶t̶ ̶a̶r̶t̶i̶c̶l̶e̶.̶
You'll want to learn everything you can about the new rate system, and you can do that by watching these great videos:
As you'll see in these videos, we've been hard at work on all the new rate features, both to cover a lot of business cases but also to be fast and simple to use - even across a lot of properties. We think you'll like the new system once you get used to using it! Regardless, the Legacy Rates settings will be removed at the end of 2020, so please don't delay in learning the new rates and moving over.
Why not continue supporting Legacy Rates forever?
We announced the new seasonal rates editor more than 7 months ago, and have worked with many users to upgrade and streamline how seasonal rates work since then. There is a reason we switched to the new system and called the old system "Legacy" - we always intended for it to be removed. We wanted to give users a long period of time to experience and learn the new system before doing that.
There are a number of confusing aspects to how the Legacy Rates system works, and those aspects are baked in deeply. Because seasons and rates are not tightly coupled - and you can create different types of rates (week, month, weekend) for one or all seasons - it's easy for users to shoot themselves in the foot without realizing it. For instance, you can specify that "Summer Season" is not associated with property "Acme Cabin" but then create rates for Acme Cabin that are tied to Summer Season. The result is - your rates never appear, and this was common for users to run into. The rates look right, but the season and property wiring conflicts with each other, and it's hard to see and debug as a user. There were many other confusing aspects to Legacy Rates, and Legacy Rates do not easily sync to channel integrations. While OwnerRez has many powerful features that don't align with what channels do, the rates problem was hard to support.
Over the years, as we've grown and matured, we've recognized where features are making our lives harder and realized that removing those features entirely will make everyone's life easier.
If you're part of our Affiliate Program, thanks for spreading the word! We know that many people have signed up because of the passion of our affiliate group!
Effective October 1, the Affiliate Program is changing its rate structure to a tiered 5-year model. You can read about the new rate structure, along with the other program details, in the Affiliate Program support article.
Specifically, the rate is changing from 30% for life to a 5 year period that drops from 30% down to 10% over 5 years. After 5 years, no earnings will be paid out for the referred user.
Why did we change the rate?
This change has been needed - and discussed internally - many times over the past years. This change was not made lightly. In fact, we tabled the discussion several times instead of pushing forward. We originally planned to make this change more than 18 months ago.
To be frank, the previous earning rate (of 30% for life) is too expensive for us to maintain in terms of the cost to "buy" new users as we grow and expand. There is a marketing/sales cost to every user who signs up for OwnerRez. That cost is paid in many ways - online ads, sponsorships, sales calls, onboarding time, support time and affiliate payments - and is a normal metric that businesses have to evaluate to make sure they are investing in the right ways.
We did some analysis of industry norms for affiliate payments and no one (in any industry) comes close to offering 30% for life. Typically the normal rate is somewhere between 10 and 15% (maybe 20) but only for 2-3 years. While OwnerRez has never worried about what others do, we do have to evaluate and fix bad business decisions. We believe that a 5 year model, starting at 30%, is quite generous for affiliate sign-ups.
What about existing referrals?
I'm happy to say that we are grandfathering in existing referrals. The users that you've already referred will continue earning you money at a 30% rate for life. Again, thank you for your referrals!
While we do have to change policies from time to time and cannot always grandfather in existing users, we try to make sure that expectations we've set are carefully considered before making those changes. In this case, we were able to keep the existing referrals as they are.
What about new referrals?
Any new referrals - that is, users that sign up using your affiliate code from October 1 onward - will be paid out according to the new tiered rate structure that ends after 5 years. Your monthly payouts will include both your old and new referrals together.
You may have configured your credit card payment method (eg. Authorize.net, Stripe, Lynnbrook) to add an automatic processing fee (eg. 3%). That setting is going away soon. In fact, the setting has already been hidden for anyone that didn't have it turned on or for new payment methods being configured. The same is true of the discount side - for instance, a 3% discount on the check payment method.
At the end of the year, this setting will be removed from all accounts, even those that have it currently configured. Please take a second, to read our Charging Guests a Credit Card Fee article to see alternative ways of doing this.
Is there an automated way of having the fee assessed based on the payment method the guest selects?
Currently, no. However, the way we were implementing it before was problematic and did not fully work. For instance, no channel (eg. Vrbo) bookings would levy the processing fee since that's not something supported by any channel. Even on direct bookings, the guest could choose the cheaper check method and then use a credit card weeks later or on a second payment. The booking would lock the payment method rule causing further confusion down-stream.
The alternative method - using regular surcharges - will mean that all guests will see the processing fee so that it applies everywhere. If they want to avoid it, they can contact you and you can remove it on a quote for them when they pay by check. Not a perfect solution, but it's better for the time being.
In the future, will there be an automated fee based on guest selection?
There is a new method we have discussed building that will add a processing fee on to the booking based on the credit card payment made at the time the credit card is run. This method should be much more intuitive on all sides because it simply increments the payment at the time it's run and the guest understands that there's a fee added on. On the booking charges, a special Processing Fee will show below the taxes. To be clear, this has only been discussed, not developed or scheduled for engineering. We have no ETA on that yet, but we may release it in the future.
While we're talking about changes, we wanted to drop a quick note that our overall pricing will be changing in 2021 as well. This will affect both base rates and premium rates across the board.
All pricing will continue to be per-property, as it is now, but amounts per property will be changing. We have not yet finalized the changes, so I cannot share the exact amounts yet.
One thing I can share is that Channel Management will be included in the base rate and no longer be a premium add-on. Given the way OwnerRez has changed in recent years, and the doors we've opened for small homeowners, it no longer makes sense for Channel Management to be a premium side thing. It applies to everyone and is essential to vacation rental management in one way or another. Unless you are in a very rare business model, you will use one or more of our Channel Management-based features (eg. Channel Bridge), so it makes sense to just make this a base feature that everyone can use out of the box. However, because of the heavy cost of supporting Channel Management, this means that the base rate will also be increasing across the board.
We are happy to announce VRScheduler as one of our esteemed partners. This allows OwnerRez users to have completely automated scheduling with increased staff productivity and overall satisfaction. 
"With our OwnerRez integration already used by over a dozen shared customers, we can definitively say this is a solid bundle for property managers." says Jill Mason, Founder, VRScheduler "We are excited to further our partnership so that more vacation rental companies can take advantage of the efficiencies gained by using OwnerRez and VRScheduler together."
About VRScheduler
VRScheduler is the calm way to manage vacation rental staff and operations. Integrate VRScheduler with OwnerRez and never miss another clean, inspection or any other task, track all of your maintenance issues and save hours in scheduling and payroll. Increase revenue and create happier guests and owners with VRScheduler.
Here is a list of powerful features you'll have at your disposal:
The ability to grow your business without the chaos of scheduling has been shown to save 80% of time spent. Higher occupancy due to fast turnarounds means better reviews and increased revenue.
Get started with a one-on-one demo: https://www.vrscheduler.com/contact-demo
TGIF Everyone!😊
Effective starting January 20, 2021, Airbnb is updating their extenuating circumstances policy for what sounds like a positive change for hosts. The new policy will only cover the following events:
If you cancel a booking during one of these events, the cancellation policy that applies to the reservation will determine the amount the guest receives back.
And hey, if all this talk of cancellation policies gets you thinking you should update your own policy, feel free to head over to our Cancellation Policies Overview page.
For those of you who use Converge as your payment processor, you may have noticed some changes. Users will now see an updated interface the next time they login. Some of the other notable updates include Credit Card Surcharge, Product Catalog, Billing & Invoicing and EMV Sales. Processor APIs typically remain backward compatible, so you shouldn’t notice any differences on the OwnerRez side, but if you do, let us know.
Tennessee has made changes for tax collection. Anyone who books a stay in Tennessee will have to pay the 7% State Sales Tax along with the 1.50%-2.75% Local Sales Tax. Plus depending on the county your stay is in, you will have to pay different tax rates. Knoxville has the least amount of county tax with a 3% Hotel Occupancy Tax. Next comes Memphis has a Short Term Room Occupancy Tax at 3.5%, plus a $2 per bedroom per night Tourism Improvement District Assessment Tax. Hamilton County has a whopping 8% of additional tax if you stay for less than 29 nights. So if you’re planning a vacation to Tennessee, Knoxville might be your best bet.
As usual, it’s all about tax money, not safety or real estate values like county officials like to claim. If they can get everyone operating a short-term rental to pay taxes, and increase those taxes on a regular basis, governments are happy as clams.
Aspen City stopped a new regulation on owner licensing as long as multi-unit facilities were licensed by the facility manager, so that they could get their short-term taxes out and get everyone paying. Mayor Torre says “The city has been behind on this and we are trying to get back into the game and get caught up”. That’s behind on taxes, to be clear, not safety.
Sonoma is purging 400 inactive STR licenses to make way for new ones. Why? Well a few weeks ago, as we commented here, Sonoma set an artificial limit on STRs. They’ve now realized that a bunch of the grandfathered-in existing STR operators are inactive and weren’t paying taxes - can’t have that. Supervisor Shirlee says “It’s really important that tourism comes back”. Well… important that taxes come back, right Shirlee?
And then of course the fees. Why charge a hundred bucks for an STR license if you can charge twice that? Or increase it 3-4 times if you’re Clear Lake City.
We joke of course, but it’s funny to watch the naked tax grabs and the we’ve-gotta-protect-the-people explanations that are used to justify them.
