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Hi everyone! As usual we've been designing and working on code a lot more than we've been sharing information or writing blog posts. We tend to do that!
But I wanted to take a second to breathe and mention something pretty cool that we just put out there.
The next time you look at your ribbon calendar, you'll notice that a little green button appears as you hover over the empty cells.
Give that a little click, and bam - up pops a quick quote box with a bunch of stuff prefilled for you including the rates and any rules or warnings that might prevent the guest from booking.
You can edit the quick quote and instantly see the rate and rules change.
Just hit the ESC key on your keyboard to make the quick quote box disappear or X out of it.
There's also a new Quick Quote button at the top if you want to open it from there.
We're experimenting with making the ribbon and month views more dynamic. You'll notice that the property names on the right side of the ribbon view are clickable now as well. Our goal is to add a lot more functionality to these views to that you can quickly view what you want without having to click around so much.
What do you think?
We don't have a button for that yet, but it is coming in the next hotfix (sometime this week).
How do you force a calendar sync?
I have the same problem I think. I added a booking in OwnerRez for check-in on Sep 15 with check-out on Sep 18. It wouldn't sync in HomeEscape so I had to add it manually. I think it wouldn't sync because I already had someone checking in on Sep 18th.
https://www.homeescape.com/secured/calendar/48044566
We've gotten one inquiry from there over the past 6 months. They certainly do need to work on their exposure but, like Chris said, at least they're not part of the Evil Empire and they have the good ole listing site we all used to enjoy. I can understand why they haven't really gotten more inquiries yet. Making it to the first page on Google searches is really hard when you have the entrenched big guys that have enjoyed a decade or more of page rank and millions of inbound links. It's gotta be hard to fight that as a new listing site.
Any idea how they will monetize their product? According to their blurbs, they don't charge anyone anything.
I liked it when I could pay a couple hundred bucks and be listed alongside other rentals who paid a flat fee.
Yeah, they're not sending a whole lot of traffic right now, but since its free I figured the hour or two setting up the listings is worth it for me. I'm figuring that now they've got the site working end to end they'll do a marketing push soon that will increase traffic.
Now if we can only get inquiries via HomeEscape! i am reluctant to even go through set up, as I have had 2 listings on HE for several months now - not a single booking.
We've been excitedly watching the new crop of vacation rental listing sites that have been developing recently. HomeEscape is one of the standouts -- gorgeous design, well marketed. I've added my personal vacation rentals on HomeEscape and have already received inquiries from them.
OwnerRez just added full support for integration with HomeEscape. We receive inquiries through our email parsing engine. We also support two way calendar sync through our iCal calendar import and export.
Once you get your listings set up on HomeEscape, use the following guides to get integrated with OwnerRez:
Yep, good catch. I had assumed you were worried that the entire feed was failing.
I found a logic issue that was keeping that block from being created. Check now and it should be in place.
Everything else look good?
I understand the terminology. I believe there is a defect. Look at the log on 7/31 for this entry item:
ab79a247-6164-44c6-8a8e-63f1876ea48f (8/29/2016 to 9/3/2016) failed: Skipped because something exists.
Now when you look at my calendar for this property, you will see nothing exists for the dates of 8/29--9/3. I have someone that checks in on the evening of 9/3, but this shouldn't prevent a check on the morning of 9/3.
Please recheck.
Thanks.
Susan
I had a look at the sync in your account and it does look like it is working. It says "failed, skipped" for some of the bookings because there are already manually added bookings, but the overall sync did complete.
I realize that's a bit confusing, so I'll work on improving the messaging around that.
http://admin.vrbo.com/icalendar/fb97cbd5e5d645479bd5f987572492dd.ics
Sure. What's the iCal URL you are using?
Hi Chris,
I just did this for my property at 202 Dunes. I just booked August 29--Sept 3, and when I attempted to import got an error message. There is not another booking there, can you please check this out and let me know whats going on?
Thanks!
Susan
We've always supported exporting calendars to listing sites via iCal. We've received a lot of recent requests to be able to do the opposite -- import bookings/blocked off time from other listing sites via iCal. Today, we released an update that adds two way sync support!
To set this up, you'll need to set up calendar import and export in each property. Export is already covered in our Hook up iCal availability calendars to update listing sites article.
For calendar import, go to the property Calendar Import section and add a calendar import using the iCal feed from your listing site, like VRBO, HomeAway, AirBNB, etc:
When you create the import for the first time, it'll do an initial pull of items from the calendar, then automatically update every few hours. You can view the last status in the log under the calendar import.
Currently, only AirBNB provides enough information in their iCal feeds for us to create bookings. If you want bookings with guest info and charges from other sites, you'll need to add that information by hand. For other feeds, go into the blocked off time and use the new "Convert to Booking" button to convert the block off to a booking.
If you have any ideas or find iCal feeds that we don't support, let us know and we'll look into it.
Yes, this is an option on the standard Book Now/Inquiry widget.
Create a new Book Now/Inquiry widget. When you go to change the settings on the widget, look for the "Show Property Selector" checkbox under the Fields section (up near the top). If you enable that option on the widget, it'll turn on the property dropdown like I show in my example.
Chris, in your example here I see you have Quote/book widget for multi-property with the drop down. I do not see an option to create a multi-property quote/book widget among my widget options (only multi property calendar) . Does this feature still exist? Thank you
Oh, great point! I sort of glossed over that part in the post didn't I. You can create widgets in your OwnerRez account under Settings > Widgets.
Here's an article with more about widgets: https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/widgets
Great news! Cant wait for the hosted website. Let me know if you want a beta tester!
Where would I find the widget HTML from OwnerRez?
Thanks!
Excellent write up! Just note that tabs are not visible in Mobile, but thunderpenny provided a mobile link which you can post for your mobile Facebook page visitors.
Want to add your OwnerRez widgets to your Facebook page? We've had several requests for this, but we don't have our own Facebook app yet. Now you can, courtesy of the Thunderpenny Static Html app. One of our sharp-eyed users turned me on to this method -- Victoria over at Smoky Mountains Vacation Cabins.
This technique doesn't require an OwnerRez Facebook app, but instead lets you embed your vacation rental calendar and book now widgets from OwnerRez into Facebook directly.
Here's what to do. First, go to https://www.facebook.com/StaticHtmlThunderpenny/. That's where the Static Html app is hosted. To install it, hit the Use App button. Select the app for your property or company.
Once you've got the tab set up on your Facebook Page, copy/paste the widget HTML from OwnerRez. If you have existing widgets, you can use them, or create a new one just for Facebook under Settings > Widgets in your OwnerRez account. If you want to learn more about OwnerRez widgets, check out our widget how-to article.
If you know HTML, you can add some descriptive text surrounding the widget. Something like:
Preview the widget. If it looks good, publish it and you'll be ready to go:
A couple of recommendations:
This is AWESOME! Nice job.
We released an update earlier today that was mostly about Property Management stuff, but we slipped in a couple things for emailing that will make your life a lot easier. We have a lot of changes coming for guest communication - responding to inquiries, dealing with guest responses, capturing a timeline/thread of everything - but we wanted to fix a problem that has been frustrating users for awhile.
You can now quickly switch to a different email template when sending an email. No matter what kind of email you're sending, you can tell the email editor to load in a different template.
How do I see it?
Go to any place in the system where you would send a guest email. Sending a quote, responding to an inquiry, sending the renter agreement to be signed, etc...
You'll now see a little "Switch to Template" selector at the top of the email form. If you open the selector, you'll see all system and custom templates that are available for the current record you're on. Upon selecting a different template, the email form will reload with that template loaded.
There are a variety of times when you need to email the guest but a specific event or automation point can't take care of it automatically. This ability to switch to, and prefill, a different template means you can take care of other ad hoc issues quickly right from the booking record.
No need to copy/paste information back and forth between OwnerRez and your email program for boilerplate issues anymore!
New "Send Email" buttons on the booking
As part of this, the other problem was that there was no simple "send email" form where you could just pull up the guest's booking and fire off something. Sending email in the system is always tied to a specific event.
We took care of that problem too. You'll now see buttons on the booking's overview page, yellow header bar and on the booking > email tab for "Email the Guest" which will open an email window where you can send ad hoc messages.
Our big conversation overhaul will also take care of these problems, but we wanted to slide in an update for this right now as we continue to work on the big picture items.
Good morning, everyone! You can now purchase damage protection for your bookings! A few days ago, we put out a first release and we've been working closely with several early users who have been testing it for us.
Turning on Damage Protection
To get started, go to Settings > Damage Protection. It should be self explanatory from there how to turn it on.
Please read the introduction information when turning on Damage Protection. It's important that you understand how it is applied. For instance, the guest does not optionally choose to buy Damage Protection. Damage Protection is something that is automatically applied to all of your bookings, once turned on.
Wondering how much it costs? Take a look a the turn-on page for Damage Protection for costs.
Applying Damage Protection to already-created bookings
Turning damage protection globally will not affect existing bookings. You'll need to go into your existing (ie. already-created) bookings and turn it on for the ones you want to have it. To do that open any booking and you'll see a new Damage Protection tab. You can pick the coverage level and apply.
Filing Claims
On any booking, you'll see the claim form under the Damage Protection tab. It's a PDF you fill out and email or fax in. We are already working on making that form electronic so that you can fill out a claim online.
Enjoy!
Waiting for updates :) all this sounds exciting!
@Ella: you're right. Ideally these would be triggers and you could set as many of them as you wanted (and when you wanted). I'm going to create a dev ticket for this, though no promises on ETA. ~Sam
It would be great if we could set up on our end WHEN the remainders are sent. For example, I don't want security deposit reminders sent 10, 5 and 1 day before it's due, to me that's too often. I would like them srnt 5 and 1 day before due date only.
Ella
You guys rock!
