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I understand. Thank you for the explanation. How do we pay you? I see there's a section for credit card information, ..or do you deduct it from our bank just like transaction fees?
Hi Ella,
We don't have monthly pricing ready yet. That's won't be ready for a few months. We have to update our billing engine to handle that and we're not entirely sure what is needed for that. At the moment, all pricing will be Pay As You Go based on usage according to the pricing that you see now.
Basically, starting Feb 1, our billing engine which runs each morning will begin calculating invoices WITHOUT considering free bookings. So starting tomorrow morning, anyone with an invoice date that falls tomorrow, will see an invoice that calculates all the bookings for the previous month period. If bookings were created during the previous month period, the charges will be the normal price and it will not show "Free" on the invoice as it did previously.
If your personal billing day is the 19th, then the invoice you receive on Feb 19 will calculate everything from Jan 20 - Feb 19th against the new pricing structure. Everything on the Jan 19th invoice would have shown the old method.
We basically gave everyone *at least* a week to switch merchant accounts before the Jan period started. And since most people don't get invoiced on the first day of the month, most people had several weeks to find a different merchant account and switch if they wanted to. For instance, in your case, you had about a month (Dec 23 - Jan 19) to consider if you wanted to switch merchant accounts before the new pricing went into affect for you.
Hope this helps,
-Michelle
Will the invoice be for all bookings from Jan19-Feb19, but I'll only get charged for bookings that came in after tomorrow (Feb1st) on this first invoice?
Hi Michelle,
Any update on the monthly pricing?
Also this is confusing:
"All customers, whether you use an OwnerRez-created merchant account or not, will begin paying the usage-based pricing that is listed on our website for all invoices created after February 1, 2015.
For instance, if your invoice day is in the first week of February, that invoice will show usage-based pricing for all bookings that were created during the month of January."
From what I understand, any new invoice created starting tomorrow (Feb 1st) will count per use. But, the following sentace stating that "invoice will show usage-based pricing for all bookings that were created during the month of January" - that part is confusing. Please explain. My inoice date is 19th. Which successfull bookings will count?
Hi Ella,
I can't share any definitive information on that at the moment other than to say that monthly pricing is definitely happening. We had decided on that even back before we shared this news about the free bookings ending.
-Michelle
Hello Michelle,
When will Pay Monthly flat rate be available? Or do you know what the rate will be, so you can tell us?
Ella
Yes, you can find and set up processing with other providers, though we are attempting to find some "good rate" providers to recommend. That's why we're talking to people like VRP - so that you have somewhere to quickly and easily go without having to do a lot of research.
You can find your own provider (just Google around!) as long as it uses one of the gateways we integrate with. You can find a list of our supported gateways here:
https://app.ownerrez.com/paymentmethods/add
If you don't want to do the work of going with a new provider (or maybe you want to wait until later) then, yes, you can certainly stick with the Cornerstone account you have now. We will continue supporting the Sage and SecureNet gateways, so those accounts will continue to work same as ever.
-Michelle
O.k., I thought you were searching to replace cornerstone as the merchant provider...so we have to do our own research and contract through them.
How do we have them interface with you then? So for an example if I go back to ecommerce or Costco, etc, do you and they work together so I can use ownerreservations as I have been? or I can just keep using cornerstone that is still currently being used here?
Wendy
Hi Wendy,
The new merchant providers you choose to work with, whether it be Authorize.Net or VRP or someone else, will not be paying us.
We can refer you to other providers, to help lower your monthly credit card fees, but they aren't going to pay us (OwnerRez) anything on the processing side. Not a penny.
We had a deal like that with Cornerstone and it didn't work out (their fault, not ours). There are certainly other providers out there that we could work out residuals deals with (like we had with Cornerstone) but we no longer believe that is a healthy practice. We believe that it is a far better practice to help you find your own merchant account with whoever is the best/cheapest/most reliable provider you can find and let you pay them directly without getting involved. That way, there is no interlocking dependency or need for us (OwnerRez) to need to be compensated for use of our software.
As for the $5/booking charge, it's usually lower than that unless you only do 1-2 bookings per month. Also, we are going to be creating a monthly flat rate that you can choose instead. So there will be Pay Monthly (flat rate based on number of properties you have) or Pay As You Go (the per booking fee that we have now) so each user can choose that they prefer.
Does all of that make sense?
-Michelle
So the $5.00 is here to stay regardless of if you get a new merchant provider that pays you?
Wendy
Hi Claudia,
Happy New Years to you too!
No, our new software price applies to everyone equally. No matter what merchant account you have, referred by us or someone else, the monthly software price will be the same.
We are simply trying to find better referrals (like VRP) so that the costs for users is lower.
-Michelle
Michelle,
If you do go with VRP, as you guys are looking into that, will it go back to being free for using the merchant account?
Happy New Year!
Claudia
I agree. One of the reasons for joining here for me was to avoid additional fees, which are not even that high, for example with PayPal. They are slightly higher than 2.9% plus 30 cents. That right now doesn't seem so high in comparison. I really enjoyed sending invoices and automatic emails, however, Spending $5 per invoice it's probably not what I would do.
Ella
I have never liked the premise of the booking fees. In examining our numbers for 2014, there's so much variability: the system looks more like a penalty system for having slow months.
@Wendy:
OwnerRez supports iCal right now. You can use it at any time. Find it under Property > iCal.
Only some listing sites import iCal. FlipKey and Air both do. HA and VRBO both do not. I do not believe that VacationRentals.com does. To find out for sure login to that website and look around and see if they have a "sync with other calendar" or "import calendar" option. If they do, that would iCal.
Another clarification, so if we enable or use the ical calendar option you will still be able to sync our calendar with vacationrentals.com and vrbo? but with the current system you are unable to, correct?
Thanks,
Wendy
Well already got a response... here it is along with my initial message.
Dear Wendy,
Thank you for contacting HomeAway Customer Support. I hope you are having a wonderful holiday season!
We sincerely appreciate you taking the time to share your experience and ideas with us. Many of the improvements to our products, policies and processes are made in response to customer suggestions such as yours.
Please feel free to continue to share your thoughts in the future via our Feedback tab when visiting our website. The Feedback tab is located on most of our pages on the right side of your screen. Click on the Feedback tab, type in your comments, and click Submit Feedback.
If you need further assistance, please feel free to contact us again through our Help page at the link below. This resource also provides commonly asked questions and answers.
http://help.homeaway.com.
Thank you for using HomeAway, the world leader in vacation rentals, with over 1 million listings across our family of brands.
Best regards,
Nora
HomeAway.com Customer Support
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Your Case Description:
Hello, I'm a homeowner and property manager as well as a customer of HomeAway, I would like you to provide direct integration with software providers like OwnerRez so I can manage my bookings more quickly and efficiently. I have listings on other listing sites as well as my own website so I would prefer that you integrate with neutral software providers like OwnerRez so I can manage my properties in the way that I would like and that is more convenient for me. Please let me know what you will be doing regarding this issue.
Thank you,
Wendy
I wanted to let you know that I just emailed HomeAway, hopefully all here will do the same and hopefully they will "hear" us...
Wendy
Hi Randy,
The larger properties owners will be spared some of the hassle because HA/VRBO tends to you view you as a property manager, and they are much more hands-off with the property manager. Generally speaking, anyone with 5 or more properties on HA/VRBO has all their inquiry emails left alone which means you can continue seeing/responding to guests directly. You will probably not notice much, if any, difference.
-Michelle
Hi Jacques,
Thanks for your words of support. Many listing sites do offer a commission structure but that locks you into dealing 100% with their web software. So answering the guest and getting payment must be done entirely on their website. In the case of Air, they no longer show you the guest email EVEN AFTER the guest has paid you. You have to use a proxy email address. We are working on a way to integrate some of this so that you can click links to answer on the third party website while returning booking data back to OwnerRez.
-Michelle
I'm not sure what I'm getting right now that will be removed. I have 8 properties on homeaway/vrbo and all are on OR. I use iCal for the calendar updates. The change that I have made recently in my inquiry response process is that I use the homeaway system to quote and the OR system so my potential guests are getting 2 quotes from me. The OR system is a lot more friendly for guests since it automatically charges the 2nd payment and automatically reserves the security deposit. Homeaway handles those tasks differently and is not as friendly as the OR system.
Thanks for keeping us in the loop. Sorry for the problems with the processor and homeaway, but I'm not surprised. That seems to be how business runs - stiff everyone as you go bankrupt, but keeping giving bonuses to your CEO, or the flipside of squeezing every last dollar out of an industry by forcing your way into a semi-monopoly through acquisitions, intentional failure to interoperate, etc.
Any suggestions for a best bundle of advertising sites to use instead of homeaway and the other sites they own/run? Looks like a couple of them offer 3% commission instead of upfront charge (flipkey, airbnb), which for my rentals would be a fair tradeoff, as they generate moderate amounts each and have a high percentage of repeat renters.
That sounds fantastic, thank you.
Wendy
Yes absolutely. That's the next step here. We're looking at a number of merch providers who are cheaper than the 2.95%. We'll help you move away from the Cornerstone account you have now, but only if you want. I believe you will want to. There are a number of cheaper vendors out there.
Got it, will you be looking for another merchant account provider that may offer better rates? less than the 2.9%.
Glad to know I don't have to switch, but don't want them adding their fees either since my contract says $0 in fees, so will wait and see how they do.
Wendy
Hi Wendy!
Paul, Sam and Chris are responding to requests about this - we should have been a bit clearer in the blog post and email.
We will STILL CONTINUE TO SUPPORT THE SAME MERCHANT ACCOUNTS as always. In other words, the same Cornerstone/Sage/SecureNet account that you have now will CONTINUE TO WORK FINE in the future.
Your second payment and security deposits and everything will remain as they are now. Nothing technically will change. You do not have to switch merchant accounts.
The issue here is about how you are billed by OwnerRez. In the past, we did not charge our normal software fees to users that had the OwnerRez/Cornerstone-created merchant account. We recouped fees through the merchant account so the monthly software fees for those users were $0. If you go to Account > Billing in OwnerRez and look at your monthly invoices, you'll see what I mean. That is what will be changing. In Feb, all users will be billed the same for using OwnerRez no matter what merchant account you use. You can continue using the same OwnerRez/Cornerstone-created merchant account you use now, but your OwnerRez invoices will no longer be free.
Hope this helps,
-Michelle
So are we supposed to look for an outside merchant account to add to OwnerRez or are you going to be offering another merchant account option?
Wendy
Thanks for the updates on what is going on over at OwnerRez. I'm disappointed you've had to make these changes and a little confused about the credit card situation so will have to get into that separately. Will be emailing HomeAway also...
Thank you for your site and look forward to other improvements. I hope your business doesn't suffer because of these changes.
Wendy
Recently, we've been forced to make a corporate decision as it relates to pricing.
Users will no longer have free service in exchange for an OwnerRez-created merchant account.
We will be contacting each OwnerRez merchant customer directly about this news with more details on why we are making this change and the history behind it. The details are not something we want to share on our public website as it involves some bad acting on the part of our merchant account partner.
This was a very hard decision to make and something that we debated for more than six months. In the end, we were forced into making this change because of our merchant account partner's actions.
If you are not an OwnerRez merchant customer but would like to know the details, please contact us directly and we'll let you know.
What Will I Be Charged?
All customers, whether you use an OwnerRez-created merchant account or not, will begin paying the usage-based pricing that is listed on our website for all invoices created after February 1, 2015.
For instance, if your invoice day is in the first week of February, that invoice will show usage-based pricing for all bookings that were created during the month of January.
We know some customers will be frustrated with this change. More than half of you have been merchant customers and have never paid monthly fees. Please give us time to explain the details to you, by email, and we hope that you'll understand why this change is necessary. We are working on developing monthly fees that are not usage based for those customers that prefer that type. In the meantime, thank you for using OwnerRez and we look forward to a great new year of features in 2015.
One of the first goals we had, from the very beginning, was creating a simple way vacation rental owners could keep their HomeAway/VRBO calendars up to date and collect inquiry data across multiple listing sites in one central place.
This is part of our fundamental goal to be the best neutral vacation rental software on the market. We want to work with all listing sites, but we don't want to be part of - or influenced by - any one of them in particular. And we want you to be able to manage your guest data in a neutral central way.
Over the past several years, integration with HomeAway has gotten increasingly difficult to maintain as HomeAway continues to increase the security of their websites and hide the guest information you pay to see.
We have maintained an open dialogue with the HomeAway development team and continued to ask for APIs and other industry-standard ways of sharing guest data - again, data you pay for - but those needs have not been met.
The latest increase in HomeAway security is a 2-step authentication requirement which requires the user to get a phone or text message before logging into the HomeAway website. While we have developed programmable ways of integrating with this, it is fraught with uncertainty and our testing has shown less than desirable results.
Even more heinous, the HomeAway login screen is now using a fingerprinting technique to 'remember' the user's computer, but the technique is extremely buggy. During our integration testing, we found that we could access multiple user accounts even after restarting the browser and clearing login data!
This testing has shown us that their latest round of security updates is not well developed and is prone to errors and attacks.
Given this current state, and the belief that HomeAway will continue to hide guest data and make access difficult, we have made the official corporate decision that we will no longer integrate with the HomeAway/VRBO family of websites with respect to using the user's credentials to update their account.
In other words, we will no longer "crawl" your HomeAway listing to do updates. This applies to calendar, inquiry data and any other data associated with HomeAway listings. If it requires our system to use your HomeAway login, we don't do it.
We will, however, continue to integrate with HomeAway in public ways that do not require your login. For instance:
There will be a lot of disappointment over this, I'm sure, but we sincerely feel that there is little choice here for us to make.
I'd like to note that virtually every other vacation rental software provider - all of our competitors - have had to do the same thing. Over the past few weeks or months, they've been slowly turning off HomeAway integration except for the larger accounts that have at least 5 listings and support the PM API.
This decision to turn off HomeAway integration is not the fault (or desire) of neutral software providers like OwnerRez. It is the fault of HomeAway for making purposeful decisions to block you from your customer data and force you to use their reservation tools.
And would you do us a favor? Tell HomeAway how you feel about this. Contact them directly and explain that, as a customer of HomeAway, you'd like them to provide direct integration with software providers like OwnerRez so that you can manage your bookings more quickly and efficiently. If they mention using their own reservation software, remind them that you have listings on FlipKey, Airbnb, your own website and elsewhere, so you'd prefer that they integrate with neutral software providers like OwnerRez.
The good news is that we will have vastly more time to spend on features that you've been asking for.
One of the big drawbacks to supporting listing site integration, where it required crawling, is that is sucked a lot of energy from our development efforts. Every time HomeAway made a slight change, our crawlers had to be adjusted, tested and re-released. We have had to delay numerous new features - auto responders, rules, booking widgets, better notes, etc. - over the past two years because of setbacks with crawling. No more! We look forward to putting these efforts back on the front burner and getting them out there!
