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Hi Claudia,
There are three separate things here.
The notes can be found on the booking. Open any booking and look for the Notes tab. Any notes entered will also display on the booking overview page.
The early/late indicators can also be set on the booking. Open any booking and look for the Dates tab.
The Double Blind settings can be found in your linked accounts. Go to Settings > Linked Accounts and click to edit the settings for VRBO, HomeAway or FlipKey. You'll see the new settings at the bottom under the property match-up area.
Where do I get this screen?
Claudia
Notes
Need to jot down a reminder about the guest or booking? Want to flag the booking as having a problem? You can now do that directly on the booking. And anything you write down in the booking notes can be found in search.
Early check-in and late check-out
You can now set a specific check-in and check-out time on the booking, alerting your staff when a guest is arriving early or leaving late. The booking ribbon and calendar views also show indicators so that you're reminded in the future. You can also create email templates for the early/late check-in/out time so that your guest gets a confirmation of the change. Your third party people (staff, housekeepers) will also receive a notification just as they do when the dates change.
The "Double Blind" Email Problem
The major listing sites (FlipKey, VRBO) have been making it more and more difficult for you to see your guest's contact info when they send inquiries. We've tried addressing this by incrementally updating our inquiry parsing engine, but it's come time to think outside the box.
In the "Sync Settings" for a linked account, you'll now notice some double blind email settings at the bottom. This will allow you to direct your inquiry responses (the emails that say "yes, we're available") back to the guest through the listing site's internal messaging system instead of to the guest's real email address. This may be necessary for several reasons:
We'll be making lots of changes to our inquiry response process over the next few months as we work to close the gap between the listing sites' policies and your need for central management.
Michelle - Thanks for the quick response!
Yes we would specifically like to include the "notes" field from the booking section in an iCal feed. We would use this to communicate with our staff regarding guest specific items such as extra bed setup etc.
It would be really cool if we could eventually pick the items (fields) to include in the iCal feed just like we can in the email template section. Meaning pick and choose from {Guest Name} - {guest Phone} - {Guest Email} etc. etc. etc.
Hi Chip, we don't have custom field support inside of the iCal description but that's a great idea actually. You're looking to have a way to use custom fields to customize what your employees see in the description field only? Or elsewhere too?
We would like use the iCal feed for our cleaning - maintenance crews but can't figure out how to include the notes field from booking or any other custom field. We need to notify crews of extra bed setups - repeat customer that requests certain amenities etc. etc. Help?
No, this is currently only for the scheduled emails. We're working on a bigger email overhaul that will add a bunch of other things and make the property selection apply to all template types, but that's a bit further out.
I see this for scheduled templates. Do you have it for quotes?
Thanks, Claudia
I think an overall repeat % like you mention above. By pure repeat I'm computing not based on single stay multiple units booked but rather multiple stays.
I have another idea if interested email me directly damon@marinasedge.com
Damon
Those are some great ideas! I'll look into adding them in our next release.
One question: what exactly do you mean by "pure repeat booking rate"? Is that something you would see next to each guest in the repeat booking report? Or are you looking for a percentage that is total number of repeat bookings vs. total number of bookings overall? Like, "out of your 5324 bookings, 759 were repeat bookings, giving a 14% repeat booking rate"?
Chris,
This is outstanding! I just looked at the repeat guest report and have a couple of potential improvements.
--Would it be possible to separate the repeat guests from the guests that do multiple bookings by evaluating if they had stays in different time frames?
--If the total $$value of these customers was displayed it would allow us to offer them perks, etc.
--Finally, having a pure repeat booking rate is really the single best indicator of the overall experience of our guests. If you could display this... Awesome.
Thanks again, this is great!
We just released a new version that adds better tracking for what listing sites have sent you inquiries and bookings, as well as the ability to easily see when you're dealing with a repeat guest.
Listing site conversion tracking and report
An important component of effectively managing your advertising is being able to see which sources drive the most inquiries, and from those inquiries which convert most into bookings.
We've added a new Listing Site Conversion report which you can see under the Reports section. This allows you to analyze the data in your OwnerRez account and easily see where your inquiries and bookings come from.
Repeat guest tracking and report
Its good be able to know if your guests have stayed with you multiple times, so you can give them extra care or target them specifically in a remarketing effort. We now detect repeat guests by email address in inquiry, quote, and booking overview pages and display a badge that allows you to click and see their previous bookings. You can also go to the Repeat Guest report in the Reports section to get a list of all repeat guests in your OwnerRez account with their stay dates and number of times they have stayed.
We've been hard at work for a long time on several large updates. It's taken a lot longer than we thought, so we've started to break out smaller updates that we can release independently.
Over the past couple of months, we've released the following updates:
Yeah, mine is new. Thanks for all your help!
Looks like they grandfathered in old plans: http://help.flipkey.com/hc/en-us/articles/200903347-Subscription-Pricing, but it sounds like yours is new?
Looks like FlipKey has disabled the ability to bypass their booking system.
http://help.flipkey.com/hc/en-us/articles/200903127-Pay-Per-Booking-Plan-#id.fjj8u2l0v5a
Damon
That makes a lot of sense. I actually set up my account and they defaulted to allowing FlipKey payments, and I can't figure out how to turn it off.
I'll contact them!
Thanks
I see those emails coming in. I think I know what's going on now.
Were you recently converted to the FlipKey payments system? Once that happens, FlipKey will block all contact info for the guest until after the guest pays you through FlipKey. They do this to make sure that the guest pays through FlipKey payments and they get their fee, rather than allowing you to process the booking through your own merchant account.
FlipKey also sends emails in a different format that doesn't include contact info, so we can't pull that info out to populate an inquiry.
I'd recommend contacting FlipKey and requesting that they turn off FlipKey payments for your account if you want to get contact info and process the payment yourself.
We do have some work on the roadmap to add integration for systems like FlipKey and AirBNB that will track inquiries and calendar blocks even if OwnerRez isn't processing the payment, but that's a few months out yet.
Ive sent 3 different inquiries today, all still come through as unrecognized emails.
I've looked through your account and several other test accounts we use and haven't been able to reproduce the problem with the FlipKey emails.
Have you seen any other unrecognized inquiries come in or was it just this one? It's possible that there was a momentary corruption issue on FlipKey's end that's now fixed.
Can you send a couple more test inquiries through to I can see if the problem still exists?
Any luck on this?
I just re-sent what I believe is the original
That looks like it's a reminder about a previous inquiry, not an actual inquiry. The email's in a different format from the standard inquiry. It says, "You haven't responded to this inquiry" etc. etc.
Did the original inquiry come through correctly?
Great. I just forwarded it to you.
Damon
They might have, yes. FlipKey has been in a state of flux on their inquiry style and 'book now' program over the past 6 to 8 months. Can you forward the original email you received to our dev@ group? They might have made your new listing part of the 'book now' program which means you can't see or answer guests directly until they book, and you have to log in to respond.
-Michelle
I just set up a flipkey account and it came through as unrecognized email. Did they change something again?
I'm trying to use the custom fields to place a link for the credit card URL for the booking in emails booked on external sites so I can send the guest an email to pay the cleaning fee and capture their card for the security deposit. I'm not seeing how to do that unless I copy the URL for each booking to the custom field??? Somehow I don't think this is how it's supposed to work... can you help?
Is there code available for the ribbon calendar? This would be useful for a traveler if they are looking for availability rather than having to go thru all 8 of my properties individual calendars...
Hi Glenn,
This is because of something new that FlipKey has been doing which we're encouraging users to complain about.
Without providing you any options, they're going to a new "Book Now" option which keeps the guest info hidden and forces all payments through the FlipKey website. We've been contacted by a lot of frustrated users about this.
What we recommend doing is calling FlipKey directly and asking them to stop this practice. Tell them that you prefer getting listings the old way - by email - so that you can process them how you prefer.
There may be an option they can flip on/off for you that puts it back to the old way for you.
-Michelle
Hi I recently signed up for a flipkey account. Looks like you do not have to pay a yearly fee, rather you pay a small percentage of each rental. Does this sound right? I am getting inquiries and they are coming in as unrecognized. Also, more seriously, I cannot see the email address of the person doing the inquiry. Do you know of any settings on Flipkey that would enable this? Am I doing something wrong on it?
Glenn
