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Ah, good idea! And, this way, they know there isn't really a 100% refund. In your release you mentioned that these rules would push to Vrbo, so they would then see the 97%?
The always applied fee is flat.
If you want to do a percentage, then just deduct it from the refund percent. There's no need for a separate percentage field.
For example, if you refund 50% but want to keep 3% extra then you'd enter 47%.
Or if you do full refund outside 60 days and 50% refund up to 30 days, then choose the "it's complicated" option and create two periods:
60 days, 97% refund
30 days, 47% refund
It's not really a full refund if you're taking 3% fee -- it's a 97% refund.
OK, thanks! I just looked at my average reservation and put $50 in there for now. Would be great to add that option in a future upgrade! ;)
Can only set a flat amount at the moment.
Hey Paul, I just re-read my post and see it might be a little confusing. Is there a way to set the cancellation fee as a %? Like a 3% cancellation fee? It looks like right now you can only set a flat fee.
Hi Glen, on the Cancellation policy set the Fee part as a flat amount at the bottom underneath the refund policy. You can have both at the same time.
Love the cancellation update! Just curious, would it be possible to add in a % fee as well as a dollar amount so we can just recoup our credit card fee on a cancellation? I also tried adding both codes into my RA and they said the same thing. Not sure if that is based on my settings or a bug.
This new Cancellation Policies improvement is HUGE! Thank you, OR team!!
Happy Wednesday Thursday! Sometimes it feels like it takes longer to write about our updates then to build them! Don't tell the engineers I said that.
This past week saw 12 updates with a focus mostly on channel related things. We're particularly excited about a new Cancellation Policy feature which was important to add because of some upcoming features that will rely on it. Start your engines! 🚦
As mentioned, one of the big new things is a new Cancellation Policies feature where you can define your cancellation policy in detail. Whether you give full refunds, partial refunds, charge cancellation fees or all of the above, you can now define that in OwnerRez. Go to Settings > Cancellation Policies to get started. Create a policy and it should be fairly intuitive what to enter. If your policy involves different refunds at different periods, you can define that too.
In this example, I have defined my policy as 100% refund before 60 days, 50% up to 14 days, nothing within 14 days of arrival. And heck, for good measure let's charge a flat $25 cancellation fee as well.
Notice that, as you define the policy, a dynamic policy description is generated defining what you configured. This policy description will be used in other places in OwnerRez to convey your policy. More on that below.
You can define a cancellation policy like this for all properties or break it up so there are different policies for different properties. Keep defining policies and the Cancellation Policies grid will show them all in our normal grid format along with the properties they are associated with.
As with all of our rules and rates, when you create or update your cancellation policies, the system will not automatically update your pre-existing quotes and bookings to match because guests have already seen and agreed to whatever your rule or policy was before. However, we have several batch screens that let you quickly apply your new cancellation policies to properties or batch update the pre-existing quotes and bookings.
You can also see and set the cancellation policy on a property by property basis by going to the property > Rules tab. The same is true for quotes and bookings - look at the Rules tab on those.
After defining your policies, it's important to understand how cancellation policies are used throughout the system. Quickly:
Another new feature we are excited about is our new Channel Blackouts feature. You can now target any specific date range, channel and property (or set of channels and properties) and black-out dates on the calendar just for that channel. Clients have asked for this for a long time - a way to stop someone from booking a set of dates only on a specific channel.
To black-out a set of dates for a particular channel, go to Settings > API Integrations > Blackouts tab. Click create and you're off and running.
Please note that this is not a real block that will be visible on the main booking calendar or any of your widgets. If you look at your Bookings menu - ribbon, month or list - you won't see any block there. The Channel Blackout feature is strictly a virtual block that applies only for the channels you are targeting. When guests see your calendar on that channel, the dates will be blocked but not anywhere else.
Also note that this is not a rolling set of dates. If you're looking to always block a rolling booking window (eg. not before [x] days from now or not past [x] days in the future) you need to define that in our Booking Window setting on the channel or property rules. This Channel Blackout feature is a strict date range that is gone forever once the date range is past. If you want to set many blackout dates, you have to manually do that, one date range at a time.
For more awesomeness, check out the new Condensed View for charges. This is another one that has been asked about for a long time and by a lot of people. This feature allows you to change how charges (the line items on a quote or booking) look to the guest both on quotes and bookings, but also on widgets. You can adjust them differently between quotes/bookings and widgets.
To find it, go to Account > Preferences and scroll down. You'll see a section called "How Guests See Charges" with settings for each type of charge - rent, surcharges, discounts and taxes.
You'll select which type of charge to condense and the word to use in the condensed line item. If you leave the charge in "detailed breakdown" mode, we'll show the guest the full line item description that you see when viewing the charges internally. If condensed, they'll only see the word.
Notice again that widgets have their own copy of these settings. This is because widgets typically want to be condensed even if the normal quote/booking charges are not. This allows you to show something like this on the widget:
While showing the full-breakdown on the quote when the guest moves further in the process:
Please note that this is a guest-side display-only feature. The charge line items are not actually changed in any way, and when you view the quote or booking in the control panel, the original description and line items will always show. This only affects what the guest sees and only on OwnerRez quotes and bookings. This does not affect anything on channels.
Also note that surcharges in "categorize as rent" mode will be condensed into the rent line with any other rent line items.
The last new feature is in our Airbnb API integration. You can now offer a non-refundable cancellation policy (for a discount) on Airbnb. Airbnb added this recently and we raced to get that in place. This is exactly what it sounds like - you might offer the guest a 15% discount on their stay if they agree to no refunds if they cancel. It's up to you decide what the discount percentage (%) is and you can set it on the Airbnb API settings page directly in OwnerRez. It will apply to all of your Airbnb API-integrated properties across the board.
If you have properties in different states, the "Location" field in the Availability/Property Search widget will now show the state in addition to the city. This is helpful so that, for instance, your properties in Florida stand out from the ones in Colorado. Instead of just showing "Jacksonville" and "Denver", the list would say "Jacksonville, FL" and Denver, CO". In the near future, we are planning to add some tagging and grouping that will allow you to categorize properties better, but for now this will help reduce confusion.
Our Vrbo API integration got some small tweaks to the pricing logic. When generating surcharge criteria for Vrbo, we are now skipping surcharges if the date criteria on the surcharge is in the past, and we are only using arrival date for season date criteria. These two things should help streamline and reduce confusion in how surcharges are selected and calculated for Vrbo bookings.
We tweaked our "special offer" quotes for Airbnb so that taxes are now being included in the special offer amount. There has been a longstanding issue where Airbnb does not include or collect taxes when a special offer is generated even if you have custom or pass-through taxes on Airbnb, so we wanted to address this ourselves to make sure tax amounts were being covered.
The booking mode for Vrbo API can now be set on a per property basis. So if you have one property that needs Request To Book instead of Instant Book, you can now do that! Head to the property directly, click the Channel Rules tab, look for the option on that page. If you set it there, it will override the mode at the global level but just for that property.
German dates on widgets. We fixed an issue where German dates were not showing in a correct format on widgets.
Converge transactions failing. If you ever saw some Converge payments fail with a weird "XML" message that was happening because some control characters ere being passed for bookings that had properties with complex names. We sanitized that out, so it works like normal now.
It seems like every channel and PMS has a unique name for their customers that own or manage vacation rentals: clients, hosts, owners, PMs, etc.
It's not really correct to say "owner" because that excludes the PM crowd. Saying PM excludes the mom and pop crowd.
Airbnb says "host" but that denotes more of a house-sharing scenario and not a business. On the business side, is "client" or "merchant" appropriate? Isn't a guest a type of client though?
"User" is equally ambiguous because guests use these platforms as well. Besides, the term "user" conjures up images of someone with a drug habit.
We were recently debating this internally and figured we'd ask you. What do you think? Please let us know below what you would like to be referred to as.
(make sure to scroll to the bottom and click the Submit button)
If the survey form didn't load, use this link instead:
SURVEY - What is the right word to call you?
Be cautious with the promotion. I used it and found that it is applied by Airbnb to 7 consecutive days for advertising, but Airbnb will apply it to 1-7 day bookings.
All legal lodging should remain open and follow safety guidelines.
If STR guests are a threat, so would hotel guests as all of them would be going to beaches, shopping, and dining! It is discriminatory to close STRs, and let hotels operate.
Yep—I’d love to see triggers for Airbnb messages. A lot of the stuff I email to the proxy now (checkout reminders and instructions, etc.) is better suited to the Airbnb message stream. Hope that’s coming soon!
https://www.ownerrez.com/blog/product-updates-airbnb-messages-inbox-seeing-owners-merging-cancelled-bookings-channel-amenities-for-cleaning
😮🎉
Watch our blog for Product Update posts every Wed. Lot being pumped out of the factory right now.
EDIT: Maybe you knew about that and you're referring to deeper integration - like automating triggers for that. Very high on our To Do list. we have some great stuff dropping in the next couple weeks but unified inbox, SMS and website changes are very much front and center.
What’s the current status of integrating OR with Airbnb’s messaging system? Is this change accelerating those plans?
Happy 4th of July weekend!🎆🎖️
Conspiracy theorists, cover your eyes…. The Kauai government (Hawaii) made agreements with Expedia and Airbnb, which has been in the works for nearly a year, to track and regulate vacation rentals by directly sharing information about properties and bookings.
Last week, Mayor Kawakami signed a memorandum of understanding with Expedia Group requiring vacation rentals to display a government-issued tax map key, or TMK, in order to appear on the platform. Properties already listed without a TMK number have 60 days to provide one, or they will be deactivated. New properties must provide a TMK number prior to being listed. On Monday, Kawakami reached a similar agreement with Airbnb, who also signed a memorandum of understanding to require that its hosts provide a valid TMK. Airbnb has agreed to remove properties that do not comply. Expedia Group and Airbnb have both agreed to provide monthly reports to the county featuring the TMK numbers.
It was only a matter of time before this happened. Governments are going to increasingly expect large booking platforms to give them direct insight into who is renting what, mostly so that they can verify who is paying taxes. #DirectBooking movement, anyone? For the record, we encourage all of our clients to always follow local lodging laws and remit the correct taxes.
I wonder if those same governments will expect hotels to provide the same booking data? Or is it assumed that, due to their size, hotels have to get business licenses and other things that make it difficult for them to avoid paying taxes or complying with lodging regulations?
Have you been looking to expand your vacation rental business? Here are the 5 cheapest places according to Forbes to buy real estate now:
UPDATE: Received email from houfy, they advised to "pull" rates again. After I did, they now show correct. They must have fixed something on their side.
We are pushing prices, but I don't think Houfy is using those prices yet - that's my understanding. I can verify that we are def. providing the pricing feeds to them, but I noticed in the listings I was playing with that none of that pricing info showed up on the Houfy side (even though the pricing was right in OR). We'll get it updating soon though - the Houfy guys have been communicating with us frequently. Thanks for everyone's patience.
Paul W said:
I updated pricing manually on a listing that was just mapped to Houfy (ie. updated pricing on the Houfy side) and it published through okay. The live listing looks correct and provides the right quote. I'm wondering if maybe you didn't finish enough of the pricing? You may want to turn off seasonal pricing if you set a basic per night/per weekend rate. We'll get pricing syncing with them via API, but for now that might solve it for you.Not sure what you mean by "not finished enough of the pricing". My OR rates go to 2021 so I thought that gets pushed to houfy. Interesting thing is that I can see rates table on houfy listing . Listing 2724. I think some rates showd up now,willdouble check, thanks
Paul W said:
We're still working through pricing integration and a couple other things with them. We are pushing rates, but they've asked for some changes to fit how they do things. Let us know what you hear back on the quote issue.
I updated pricing manually on a listing that was just mapped to Houfy (ie. updated pricing on the Houfy side) and it published through okay. The live listing looks correct and provides the right quote. I'm wondering if maybe you didn't finish enough of the pricing? You may want to turn off seasonal pricing if you set a basic per night/per weekend rate. We'll get pricing syncing with them via API, but for now that might solve it for you.
We're still working through pricing integration and a couple other things with them. We are pushing rates, but they've asked for some changes to fit how they do things. Let us know what you hear back on the quote issue.
Thank you for keeping us updated and informed on this subject.
Our company has stopped all OTA listings for the time being until (or if they ever) reach a place where they stabilize their terms and conditions of use.
The cancellation and payment policies keep changing and we are not comfortable with them collecting the funds and being at their mercy for payouts . . . we are still waiting for payouts from Airbnb from guests who have come and gone . . .
so enabled Houfy integration. Seems like it is not pushing rates (or houfy isn't pulling them). While it shows rates table on the listings, when you enter date as a guest into quoter on Houfy site, it shows nightly rates as 0 and only shows cleaning fee and tax on cleaning. I emailed houfy, waiting to hear from them.
It's Wednesday - cheers on getting halfway through the week! Some major updates came out this past week, and we're excited to finally be about to talk about them. In total, there were 17 updates for the past week, so we better get right to it.
For a long time, one of the biggest complaints about our Hosted Websites has been that they look too plain. While fast and powerful, our Hosted Websites all look the same - meaning your website looks the same as every other OwnerRez client's website. We are on a mission to change that with a lot of upcoming changes and new features for hosted websites.
The first major update was to the header/menu area. We just released a big overhaul that allows you to greatly customize the header & menu area including multiple lines, sections, different kinds of links and buttons and different styles on desktop versus tablet versus mobile. You are now in control of this area and its design.
To demonstrate what can be done, and get you started with different ideas, we also added a predefined template selector that shows three styles and lets you quickly apply one to your header. Here's a quick peek at those predefined templates:
Notice specifically how the headers look - notice where the menus are, other links, logo placement, etc. These templates simply move the header lines and sections around and put your logo and links in different areas so that you get an idea of how headers work. You can add additional styling as well both on the line and section level.
We also put together a 10 minute video walking you though how headers work, so give that a look. Some great material here!
We know many of you will have questions about the new header area, but please watch the video first before sending an email. We're happy to help as always!
If there's a website idea or template you'd like to copy - such as someone else's in the industry - and can't figure out how to do it with our new header area, let us know. Our goal is to support a wide range of header and menu layouts such that most types of designs are possible from a structural standpoint.
To aid with better website design and customization, we also added support for Google Fonts. If you're not familiar with it already, Google Fonts is an online platform that Google created which manages and publishes fonts for designers and website owners to use free of charge. Learn more about it on the Google Fonts website or browse hundreds of fonts directly. There are almost 1,000 fonts available to use completely free of charge.
OwnerRez websites now directly support all these fonts.
If you have an OwnerRez hosted website, click the Fonts & Colors tab at the top, find any font field and you'll see a "type in Google font" option. Click that and then type in the name of the Google Font in the box that appears to the right. Save and you're done!
Over on the channel management side, we've been working on adding some new API integrations. As our clients know, we are very selective about integrating with new channel APIs because it takes a lot of work to build and maintain those integrations, and we have to be careful how we allocate resources. Frankly, many OTA's simply aren't worth the investment given how little vacation rentals actually book on those sites.
But some of them are! We're happy to announce that we just released beta support for Houfy as a new API integration. Houfy is near and dear to many of our clients' hearts because Houfy promotes direct bookings without platform fees and they don't restrict communication.
While Houfy may not currently send you the same volume of traffic that other channels do, we're hoping that, over time, our clients can build volume on sites like Houfy and strengthen the #DirectBooking ecosystem. We are strong advocates of the #DirectBooking movement and integration with Houfy is a part of that. By working with the Houfy team to provide direct API integration, you can keep your listings up to date on Houfy without any extra work.
Please note that our Houfy integration is a limited beta. The integration does not yet support everything you may be used to with Vrbo or Airbnb integrations because we are still in the process of fully fleshing out the integration with the Houfy dev team. After connecting, you may need to manually update some pricing or others things on the Houfy side - those things should be supported by the API in the future. Basic listing content and availability is already supported and your availability will update dynamically on the Houfy side. We are still in the process of updating our support docs, so we appreciate your patience!
Last but not least, we now support Schlage door lock when using the RemoteLock door lock integration. If you have Schlage door locks, you can now sign up with RemoteLock and then connect that RemoteLock account to OwnerRez and we'll set your door codes automatically.
When it comes to rates and rules, OwnerRez is a lot more flexible than the channels are. You can customize our surcharges into pretzels, targeting only certain time periods or other custom criteria. The problem is that this creates conflicts between what we support and what gets pushed to the channels. We typically have a "best guess" approach that maps our more-flexible options against their less-flexible ones. To aid with this, we recently changed fee criteria and minimum night checks to go on arrival date only to align with channel criteria. While this means the fee and rules won't "split across" the booking like it does with OwnerRez direct bookings, it will also reduce confusion in what the guest (and you) expect on the channel side.
The new Airbnb Messages inbox has been tweaked to wrap messages, load more quickly and some other minor things. Keep sending your feedback on that. The inbox is a prototype of some great things to come.
When creating or changing website content, you often want to save something and then preview the changes in a different tab or window. It was irritating to save and be redirected away and have to click several times to come back every time. We added a "Save & Close" and "Save" button on website pages so that you can save while staying where you are.
Similarly, we noticed that website pages typically showed a lot of general settings at the top and the body content was pushed way down the page. General page settings aren't changed as often as body content, so we moved those page settings to other tabs and made the body content front and center.
Confused about the fireplace icon that we used when showing the fireplace amenity? We were too. It kind of looked like a smoking sign which gave off a very different impression than desired. We changed the fireplace icon to something that looks a lot more like a campfire.
The rate table widget was also changed quite a bit to promote clarity and information. We are now only calculating contiguous rates when analyzing date ranges. We no longer calculate longer rates for the table if the rates lap over into other seasons. And we are only showing the discount percentage if there is one.
Sorry, Internet Explorer 11, but you are no longer welcome at OwnerRez. We removed access for IE 11 browsers entirely on the client side (guests can still use it). To be clear, this is Internet Explorer and not Edge. Edge is a great browser and very much supported. Let us know if this puts you in a bad way, but it was time to be done with Internet Explorer for good since it is now an obsolete browser. Feels like the end of an era, doesn't it.
Duplicate Airbnb new booking emails. We removed the duplicate sending of Airbnb new booking emails if cancelled again.
TripAdvisor API incorrect LOS discounts. If you were API integrated with TripAdvisor, you might have noticed that LOS (weekly, monthly) discounts were calculating incorrect. This has now been fixed.
Line Item Summary report incorrectly grouping other surcharges as not rent. This was fixed.
Airbnb weekly/monthly rates. If there were other LOS rules, we were sometimes skipping the weekly and monthly discounts for Airbnb. This has now been fixed.
Vacation rentals are a lucrative business that is constantly changing and adapting to the times. Covid has brought opportunity to purchase properties at a bargain. We would like to hear what your plans are for expanding your business. What size of business would you like to get to and how many properties are you planning on adding?
(make sure to scroll to the bottom and click the Submit button)
If the survey form didn't load, use this link instead:
Do you plan on expanding your vacation rental business?
After I accept the booking I ask guests via Airbnb to provide their email address so I can send them rental agreement. 99% of the time they do and if they don't I use the Airbnb provided email address. After that I still get their email address as mentioned when they sign the rental agreement.
When I click on link to opt-in to the promotion for 7 day discount, I just go to a page that has a couple standing beside an open air dining table. I don't see anywhere to opt-in? Am I missing something?
Winding down Airbnb. Every time they do some stupid #$%* I think I cannot hate them more, yet each time they prove me wrong and outdo themselves. I sincerely wish they went back to renting illegal sublets, basement rooms and attics and butted out of traditional vacation rentals that they obviously have 0 clue about.
I don't see how this would work for us. We send out our Welcome Note with Activity Guides as an automatic trigger with airbnb bookings, followed by a RA. Now, we aren't even going to be able to proxy email our airbnb guests?
Good grief. Doesn't the Professional Hosting Tool require a different OR subscription? And if there's a secret way around this new edict, what is the purpose?
