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Ken T said:
I'm glad it looks that way, but that's an illusion. Airbnb has never sent real email addresses, just the fake proxy one.We recommend configuring an automatic email template and trigger asking guests to sign your rental agreement. As part of this process, they're asked for their real email address, which is then recorded. I think that's what you're seeing.
https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/airbnb-request-for-contact-info-real-email-address-and-signed-renter-agreement
Are you sure about this? I regularly see (but not always) the guests real email address on airbnb reservations made via API. I don't update it myself, so it's coming from somewhere.
I'm glad it looks that way, but that's an illusion. Airbnb has never sent real email addresses, just the fake proxy one.
We recommend configuring an automatic email template and trigger asking guests to sign your rental agreement. As part of this process, they're asked for their real email address, which is then recorded. I think that's what you're seeing.
https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/airbnb-request-for-contact-info-real-email-address-and-signed-renter-agreement
I'm curious about how this affects API connection with Airbnb. We seem to get the clients real email address now during the data transfer with API. Rick@kismetprop30a.com
We are pleased to announce we have partnered with ASCENT to provide payment processing for vacation rentals.
About Ascent:
ASCENT provides payment regulation expertise, modern and innovative technology programs, customized chargeback and support services for the top reservation software providers and the leading property managers in the alternative lodging space. ASCENT was the first processor in the industry, more than 20 years ago, to integrate gateway/processing within reservation software and to develop security measures specifically for Vacation Rentals. ASCENT remains independently owned and focused on providing customized programs property managers need to grow and protect their clients’ businesses.
ASCENT sets you up as the Merchant of Record (MOR), so a property manager’s funds are FDIC ensured every step of the way, from the guest’s card to the merchant’s bank account. Being MOR gives the most freedom to property managers to set their own policies and practices. This process may require additional documentation, but once a completed application is received, typically an account can be set up within 14 business days.
ASCENT is dedicated to saving their clients’ money, which they do in many ways, including offering interchange pass thru pricing. They have always utilized this pricing program because it is the most transparent model for merchants to know exactly what they are paying for each card type, along with the service fees, dues, and assessments that are passed along by the banks.
Independent sources agree that this pricing program allows merchants to achieve optimal interchange rates, better than other pricing programs like flat rate or tiered. US-based companies get a free competitive analysis at 888-721-9301 info@ascentprocessing.com www.ascentprocessing.com, or OwnerRez clients click here.
Thanks for all your help!
trying to remember and Sending my automated emails manually because the time that are being sent does not work for me. It would be awesome if we can customize what hour of the day these emails are being sent.
By API expert, do you mean developer/engineer? If so, we may be looking for another dev in 6 months or so, but first the CSR and QA side.
Thanks for the input, Ragip! We have a lot in store of messaging, so keep the feedback coming.
Here you go Ken, your software is so good I really don't do anything but check for messages and lookup information on bookings.
Good News! It's Friday!
Oh boy…. Airbnb will no longer be giving out proxy/double-blind email addresses soon. In other words, the "guest.airbnb.com" email address that used to come along with the booking is going to disappear and they’re going to expect you to do all messaging through Airbnb only.
Couple interesting notes here:
There is also a mention that requesting guest contact info violates the "Off-Site Policy" but that is only prior to booking. We highly encourage all hosts to get POC information and a real renter agreement after the guest books!
Another interesting Airbnb thing we came across… Between now and mid-August, Airbnb will showcase a “Discounted Nearby Stays” banner on its home page, directing guests to a dedicated landing page featuring local getaways for domestic travelers.
People are looking for affordable options close to home, so Airbnb created a promotion specifically designed to focus on short lead time to help fill occupancy rates and help you capture that demand. Airbnb sent a company wide email Thursday, to Airbnb guests in Florida - so it is definitely valuable to opt in ASAP. Your listings will be visible to these guests when they search by offering a 10% discount. Note that the Airbnb site refers to "7 consecutive dates" but the discount can apply to any number of nights.
Here's how it works:
Am I listed on HomeAway? Am I listed on VRBO? What about VacationRentals.com or Abritel? Am I listed on all of them? Are they the same? HomeAway/VRBO have decided to clarify this and starting next month, HomeAway website users will be redirected to Expedia's Vrbo vacation rental platform.
To be clear, that’s pronounced "verr-bo" which Expedia continues to reiterate. Make sure to spell it “Vrbo” and not VRBO too. 🤓
While users of the HomeAway app will be prompted to download the Vrbo app, any existing rental bookings will remain unchanged, and all HomeAway logins will transfer over to Vrbo. According to Expedia, the consolidation effort "means more resources can be dedicated to marketing, engineering and customer support for Vrbo," which the company has positioned as its flagship vacation rental product.
Airbnb Messages inbox is an awesome feature. Thanks. I look forward to its extensions including at least the property name, and a link to the Ownerrez reservation.
Any plans for a similar inbox for VRBO.
My husband is an API expert. Let me know when you need some help in that area and I will give him a nudge :)
Here at OwnerRez we know how much work goes in vacation rentals. It can take multiple people to manage all the intricacies of the business. We'd love to know how many properties you have, what size staff it takes to run and how you handle cleaning/maintenance. Let us know below.
(make sure to scroll to the bottom and click the Submit button)
If the survey form didn't load, use this link instead:
What repetitive task takes you the most time in OwnerRez each week?
Happy Hump Day! Let's talk updates.
Last week we were short-staffed and had a bunch of things in transition, so there was no Wednesday update. This week, we'll discuss the 17 updates that occurred collectively over the past two weeks, most of which were enhancements and bug fixes.
We now support Ascent Processing as a new credit card payment method. You'll notice that Ascent is prominently displayed in our payment method and recommended as the go-to option for US merchants.
All other credit card payment methods are still supported - no one was dropped - but Ascent has a great product and is able to set up new merchant accounts right now when some other processors are struggling with COVID-era underwriting requirements. If you had issues with your credit card application being delayed or not approved, look into using Ascent. We have had good luck recently with their team.
The "Setup Done" page at the end of onboarding now links to the Bird's Eye View video in our support docs. Give that a look if you haven't already. It's a great video that shows most of the major areas of the site and what they are used for. We've heard a lot of old users remark how much that has helped even though they've been using OwnerRez for several years. As part of an effort to clean up our marketing and onboarding, we are pushing that video out in several places.
Speaking of marketing, the OwnerRez logo is being normalized everywhere. The login and join pages used to show the old logo, but we've fixed that.
We now support long keys for Stripe. Recently, a number of Stripe users have mentioned that the API keys they are getting from Stripe are longer than the previous standard. We now support up to 128 character keys for Stripe. Hopefully this gives us a few months of breathing room before Stripe changes it up again. 😬
Some OwnerRez users only ever publish and deal in weekly rates. While OwnerRez requires (or at least strongly suggests) that you enter a nightly rate, you don't want those nightly rates showing if you only deal in weekly's. So we added an option to the rate table widget to not show nightly rates even if they technically exist.
The channel rate tester has also gotten some work. As users have started using it, we've had to enhance some things for clarity. If you only have one channel integration configured, the channel rate tester will be pre-selected for that one channel. And we link to your Airbnb tax dashboard now if you're running a Airbnb test. Make sure to look at, and thoroughly read, that Airbnb tax dashboard if you haven't before. It is extremely helpful for seeing your tax situation.
The property ordering page has been enhanced for clarity and accuracy as well. Great feedback on that from everyone!
Channel Bridge has had several more updates. The Dutch (.nl) version of Airbnb is now supported in Channel Bridge, and we also updated the import logic for VRBO bookings to skip bookings with no traveler info.
As usual, users continue to test the flexibility of our widgets! We've gotten great feedback on how properties should be pre-selected if a property key parameter is detected, so we added that. Widgets now support the or_propertyKey parameter and will pre-select the property drop-down if detected.
Hosted websites not showing correct property order. We noticed that our recent property ordering feature was not displaying correct on external websites (such as the properties menu). Not sure how that made it through testing, but it's fixed now!
Accommodation amenity not spelled right. Now fixed. OwnerRez is a giant system with many emails, templates, website, pages and so on. If you run across a misspelled word, please let us know. We like to be accurate but we don't see it all.
Phone number type hiding behind number. When editing guest phone numbers, the mobile/home/work selector was wonky looking. That has now been fixed.
Duplicate inquiries being created. We discovered an issue where some guests with slow internet connections were smacking the "Send Inquiry" or "Book" button on the Book Now widget over and over again because they thought it wasn't working - it was, just slow because of their internet connection. When that happened, 10 or 12 inquiries might be created under the covers. We now show a working indicator and disable the button.
FloridaRentals reporting monthly rates instead of weekly. This has been fixed. No need for you to correct your rates; the API should now push the right indicator.
System alerts not showing right culture (currency/date) format. Depending on where system alerts were sent from, some alerts were reverting back to US-based culture settings and not the user-defined culture settings. This has been fixed.
HI Jennifer, that isn't related to OwnerRez. I've seen that happen to Airbnb messages as well - not sure why/how/what causes that.
I can’t forgive out how to customize the messages for inquiries. I thought I have done it 3 times but it always reverts back. I am
Obviously doing something wrong but don’t know what.
I receive too many phone calls and emails asking questions about the property even though the answers are all posted on my listing.
Happy Friday Everyone!
Florida still can’t make up its mind… Palm Beach County pauses vacation rentals reopening due to growing coronavirus cases. With a safety plan in place and the state’s approval, Palm Beach County had set the stage to let vacation rental owners welcome tourists and staycationers into their dwellings once again. But concerns about a coronavirus resurgence stopped that from going into effect Monday. “It was our hope to begin the opening on June 15th; however, data over the past few days has shown some increases in hospitalization, some increases in percentage of new COVID-19 cases over the past weeks and a bump in influenza-like illnesses in our emergency rooms,” read a statement on the county’s website. Sigh.
On Tuesday, short-term vacation rentals are allowed to resume most operations on Maui, the Big Island and Kaua'i. Owners are not allowed to rent to anyone who is undergoing quarantine. Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell has yet to submit a request to Governor David Ige to allow legal short-term vacation rentals to operate on O'ahu.
If you’re a traveler, watch out for rental fraud! Investigations are ongoing in at least three cases of rental fraud that have occurred in the last month in Holmes Beach, Florida. Visitors arrived only to find out that they really didn’t have a booking at the property they thought they’d reserved. Now Holmes Beach police officers are warning rental owners to be on the lookout for any fraudulent advertisements for their properties, and are warning visitors to be careful how they book their next vacation.
There’s an interesting case going on in the Outer Banks. A large PM is under scrutiny after reneging on an alleged promise to refund money. Dozens of guests reported the PM and now North Caroline state is investigating.
What’s particularly interesting is that the NC Real Estate Commission evidently mandates certain refund policies. Notice this line:
"If you have a contract that cannot be performed, it's not a contract, and you're due your money back," Stein [NC Attorney General] said. "We are in the process of digging into this and investigating it, and if what we find out leads us to conclude that these people are in the legal wrong and they need to pay these people back we will do whatever necessary to get these customers their money back."
What if the signed contract stated that no refunds are given for cancellations or ‘acts of god’, and the guest knew and signed to that? Does that matter? Shouldn’t the contract hold up?
COVID-19 has caused a huge downturn in rental revenue but 1 bad guest can create expenses that are totally unexpected.
We're thinking about a number of different upcoming needs at the moment, and it's quite possible that customer support might lead into those in time. So we'd be glad to consider a wide range of experience and backgrounds. With a small, fast-growing company, you never know where you may find a good fit!
OwnerRez is an incredibly powerful tool that does a lot of high level tasks automatically. But there are still some thing that take time. We'd like to hear what repetitive task you think takes the most time to do in OwnerRez.
What do you find yourself doing over and over again?
(make sure to scroll to the bottom and click the Submit button)
If the survey form didn't load, use this link instead:
What repetitive task takes you the most time in OwnerRez each week?
Great idea to recruit from your users! Any idea of a salary/hourly range? This isn't something I can take on, but I know a few people who may be good but make it a policy not to share job opportunities that don't publish a salary/hourly range.
Thanks!
I don't know if this is a bug or even related to OwnerRez but I have received two messages in my Airbnb inbox (on airbnb) and I cannot make the unread notification (dot) go away no matter how many times I open the messages. It seems to have happened since OwnerRez began showing the Airbnb inbox. Is this connected or just coincidence?
Would love to be a part of OwnerRez!!! Just listed our PCB rental with you guys and are excited for the opportunities it will bring...I manage a VA clinic and also am over QA at the clinic. Will send my info:)
Lisa Lansdell
Paul W said:
Funny - after a couple more CSR's, we're looking to add a QA as well. We produce updates faster than we can test them, so our releases get backed up on QA for a week or two. A part-CSR/part-QA would be excellent.
Funny - after a couple more CSR's, we're looking to add a QA as well. We produce updates faster than we can test them, so our releases get backed up on QA for a week or two. A part-CSR/part-QA would be excellent.
Did you mean me? LOL. mentioning that I should be on payroll? Dream retirement job for me! I can also possibly do QA testing. I just need to retire as I cannot now take on a 3rd job (between my main IT job, running 3 VRs and a construction project to boot). I will hope that opportunity will still be there later :-)
I think enough people are fed up with VRBO and their ilk. I'd love to see Houfy added (and FabStaz is affiliated with them)
Good news everyone, It’s Friday!
Airbnb joins vacation-rental sites who have begun to see a surge in demand. Antsy city dwellers seeking to escape their Covid-19 refuges are road-tripping to nearby vacation rentals in surprisingly strong numbers. This shows the first signs of life for an industry that essentially ground to a halt in March.
“People, after having been stuck in their homes for a few months, do want to get out of their houses; that’s really, really clear," Airbnb Inc. Chief Executive Officer Brian Chesky said in an interview. “But they don’t necessarily want to get on an airplane and are not yet comfortable leaving their countries."
Yes, Captain Obvious. But the key is that a lot of those people know Airbnb will give their money back (against the wishes of the host) if it's an "extenuating circumstance" so hey why not use Airbnb? 😒
Beyond Pricing’s Pandemic Pulse page has some really interesting stats coming out. West Coast and Ski markets in the US have now returned to similar booking pace levels that they were seeing before the pandemic. The East Coast and US Interior vacation rental markets continue to see historically high levels of booking pace. Australia, New Zealand, France, Portugal, and Italy are seeing steady growth in weekly booking pace that will soon get these markets back to a normal level, while other countries like Japan and Spain have yet to see travel demand return.
After contemplation and discussion spanning nearly a decade, property owners who operate short-term vacation rentals in Crow Wing County, Minnesota will now be subject to new regulations and licensure requirements beginning in 2021. The ordinance states short-term rentals will not be allowed to operate in the county without an annual license and defines these rentals as "any home, cabin, condominium or similar building that is advertised as, or held out to be, a place where sleeping quarters are furnished to the public on a nightly, weekly, or for less than a 30-day time period and is not a bed and breakfast, resort, hotel or motel."
Hey, at least they got a decade to discuss it! Most counties jumped on the regulate-short-term-rental bandwagon the moment they could. Who doesn’t like extra taxes?!
Hawaii Vacation Rental Owners Are Threatening To Sue Over Shutdown. A Honolulu land-use lawyer has sent letters to four island mayors saying local rules related to COVID-19 violate constitutional rights of property owners. “The result of preventing these rentals statewide equates to damages of approximately $100 million per month, and the collective impact on property values is easily $1 billion,” Kugle wrote. Hawaii remains under an order requiring all people flying into Hawaii to stay in quarantine for 14 days upon arriving. One issue has been how to make sure people follow the orders. While supporters of short-term rentals say their properties are safer because they’re generally less densely occupied than hotels, hotel industry executives argue that they have established policies and procedures to keep guests safe while they’re bound to their rooms. What do you think? We’re pretty sure we know, but tell us anyway!
API Integrated Channels communicate with the partner site on a preferred back-channel. This allows for the ability to push rates, availability updates, receive bookings, and much more! That being said what changes should be made to our current API integrated channels?
What new channels would you like us to support?
What existing channels need to be changed or currently drive you nuts in some way?
(make sure to scroll to the bottom and click the Submit button)
