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Hi all,

We've been having issues with some of our guests who use booking.com getting messages or notifications via the booking.com messages.   We just received the following from booking.com regarding this and I thought I would share it with you in case you are experiencing similar challenges.

Due to the recent maintenance and upgrade of the booking system, it may happen that you send messages to customers on the extranet, but the customers cannot receive them.

Therefore, when it comes to check-in instructions or other matters that require contact with customers, you can directly communicate with customers on the phone in the short term, or contact us. We will provide you with the customer's email address so that you can contact them directly through email. This avoids a delay in message reception.

Hi Paul - Thanks for the info.  Please do schedule some 1:1 time and we'll get you updated.

In regards to vendors outside of where you'd like to see them, we see that you had La Jolla Surf in your store and we provided an Oceanside surf company. Our vendors work within a 20-mile radius, so if you’re still seeing the La Jolla vendors, we recommend turning them off if you’re concerned your guests will find that too far. We’d love to do whatever we can to help you start selling. And please feel free to use any service that works best for you!

I have submitted my local vendor list several times. The last time was about 6 months ago. I also talked to the owner of the largest fishing fleet in Oceanside and gave you all his contact info twice as well as the local electric Bike rental company. I spent a lot of time making appointments and doing this work for you with no response from your vendor team except that they were very busy and would get to it when they could. Let me know if anything is going to change or we are just going to give up and send the link for undercover tourists to all our guests instead of Host.co. They have all the local theme parks and car rental companies. Are all of your sales pretty much owner-provided services like early check in late checkout and things that the host puts in the unit? What are your $ sales in San Diego and Hawaii on Tourist Activities? 

Hi Paul! I work with The Host Co and we'd love to help increase your sales and get your stores cooking! We have seen about a half million in amenities sales this year and want to make sure that we're steering you to the best success. We do see sales in San Diego and I'd be happy to get your near-by vendors updated. Reach out directly at annie@thehost.co or book some time with me here: https://calendly.com/annie-thehostco/15min?back=1&month=2024-05

It looks like our support team reached out to you most recently on April 23rd with updates and advice, but I'll also alert them at support@thehost.co regarding their response time and alert our vendors@thehost.co team again. 

Thanks so much for posting, and I'd love to reply in this thread when we see your stores take off!

Annie

I have had Host.co linked to all my properties for about a year. 

I have 3 Properties in Waikiki and 3 on the Beach in San Diego. So far we have had Zero Bookings for anything. Surfing Lessons, Luau's, Electric Bike Rentals etc.

These are all big sellers in both locations but a big Zero Bookings on Host.co  Is anyone else seeing the same thing?

We have called them many times with little to no response about problems with the Vendor list and giving them the names and numbers of appropriate LOCAL vendors. So far they have listed none of them.

They are trying to sell Surf lessons on the Beach in La Jolla to our guests in Oceanside. There are 5 surf lesson companies on the beach in front of our property yet they send them on a 20-mile drive down the coast. This will get you a bad review for sure. 

Has anyone had any good experiences with this company? We are not interested in selling Early check-ins or Late check-out we give these to our guests for free if available and we don't want to prepare stuff waiting in the rooms to sell our guests. We want to get a % of the huge amount of tourist activities Booked in our Area Like trips to Lego Land, Disneyland, Fishing Trips, Wine Tours, etc.  Why is this Company a Zero Sales at the Year Mark??

Is there another company doing something similar we can use?

Thanks     Paul

We have 2 properties in two different parts of our state...two different seasons , two different target market groups both using Pricelabs since for the past 3 years.  Starting November 2023, both properties have declined in lock step. All channels are down.  Has anyone else experienced this decline when comparing 2023. Not sure if it's a macro economic issue, an SEO issue, competition or even something else.  We placed them Google Vacation Rentals Oct/Nov 2023, and I've had this lingering feeling that that may be a contributing factor.  Am I crazy?  Thoughts?

Thank you Ken

Thank you Ryan

Hi Jan,

It appears that the containers for the widgets are not stacking properly when loaded in mobile view. You'll need to edit the mobile layout so that they are stacked on top of one another instead of pushed into the same space.

From what I can tell, it looks like you're using Showit as your site editor? If so, there should be an image of a phone in the bottom left of the page when editing your site that will let you readjust elements for mobile. You may also want to look into "Mobile Layout Assistance" which is a feature they offer to automatically readjust the layout.

Did you ever find anything for a template?

Depends on how they're being paid... OwnerRez itself never handles any of your money.  Airbnb collects their own guests' payments, and deposits them into the account you've configured in their control panel.  For direct bookings, we recommend configuring a credit card payment processor in OwnerRez, which will also deposit to your bank account.

Hello,

My ipnone display looks like this for my website.

What have I done wrong and how do I fix?

Thank you

New here.

How do I receive the payments from my guests into my bank account?

Is anyone using a call-center service to field inquiries and maintenance requests for their rental operations? If so, are they integrated with OwnerRez and what has been your experience?

Apparently Ken You can not add your property to Expedia. If they need more properties they pull it from VRBO.

That is true, and is also stated in our support docs:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/instant-book-vs-request-to-book#havrbo

However, the reality is a bit more complicated.  Yes, you have no control over adding your property to Expedia, and not all Vrbo-API-active properties are.  But, they are indeed working on integrating their systems, and over time we have seen an increasing proportion of properties that are on Vrbo also being automatically added to Expedia.

Apparently Ken You can not add your property to Expedia. If they need more properties they pull it from VRBO. That is the only way your property shows up on their site. Why has no one from Owner Rez told me that in the last 3 days of me trying to work on this? 

Ken for Expedia do I create a listing on Expedia?

No, don't do that.

Or do I push info from Owner Rez.

No, not that either - it connects through via Vrbo.

I did see from our VRBO API the Expedia was below it but when I click on it it just goes to Expedia home page.

That's odd, I'll ask the engineers to take a look.

Do I create our home from that page?

No, that should not be necessary, and likely wouldn't work anyway.

Ken for Expedia do I create a listing on Expedia? Or do I push info from Owner Rez. I did see from our VRBO API the Expedia was below it but when I click on it it just goes to Expedia home page. Do I create our home from that page?

The answer is - it depends.

 - Expedia is actually the same company as HomeAway and Vrbo.  We have a close relationship with Vrbo, and, if you have connected to Vrbo using OwnerRez, your properties will also appear on HomeAway without any additional work by you.  They may or may not appear on Expedia, but, they are working on integrating their systems so over time they will all work together.  Again, it is not necessary nor recommended to set up your own Expedia account.

 - HomeToGo is a separate company, but, you can push your OwnerRez properties up to HTG as a new listing fairly easily:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/channel-management-api-integrations-hometogo-setup-connecting#preparing-ownerrez

 - With Booking.com, we do have an API connection with them, but it's not as full-features as our others, so at present it is unfortunately not possible to push your properties up from OwnerRez.  You have to manually create them in Booking.com, and then connect them to your OwnerRez account as discussed here:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/channel-management-api-integrations-booking-com-setup-connecting

We are actively in work to make this process smoother and more efficient, which will hopefully be available in the near future.

Since you own your listings on each channel, OwnerRez itself does not set them up for you. If you are using our paid ProConnect setup service, our staff will assist and advise in the necessary setup and configuration.  If you are not using ProConnect, you can still write in to the Helpdesk, explain what you want to do, and we can assist you with instructions or, if necessary, schedule a screenshare call.

To add our property to other sites besides AirBNB or VRBO like HomeAway  Homes to Go  Expedia, Booking.com Do we have to go to each platform and create our listing completly or does any info from OwnerRez transfer over easily so that we don't have to go thru all of he steps? Does owner rez have a service that we can pay for to do this or does anyone know of a company that we can hire to do this on about 10 sites?

I found your ticket, and, it has indeed been replied to.  If you have not received / seen that response, the most likely explanation is that it ended up in your spam folder - please check there.  Otherwise, perhaps there is an issue with your email account or server, but I'm not seeing any bounces for your email, so that's less likely.

I have emailed 5 times and have not received any response.

Dear Scott,

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience and frustration you've experienced with HomeToGo, and we appreciate the opportunity to address your concerns.

First and foremost, we want to express our regret that you haven't seen the results you expected over the past two-plus years on our platform. We take your feedback seriously, and we understand the importance of resolving the issues you've brought to our attention.

Regarding the pricing discrepancies and the lack of response to your emails, we want to assure you that this is not the level of service we aim to provide. We did have several pricing issues in the past however those are now fixed.

Furthermore, we want to apologize for the inconvenience you experienced with the billing topic. We would like to investigate your issues and help you out. For this we would need more information which you can provide to us via our Partner Relations E-Mail partnerrelations@hometogo.com.

We value your partnership with HomeToGo, and we are committed to making the necessary changes to ensure a more positive collaboration moving forward.

If you have any further details or specific examples you would like to share, please do not hesitate to reach out to our support team at. We hope that we can do the necessary steps to resolve your issues.

Thank you for your understanding. We look forward to restoring your confidence in HomeToGo and continuing our partnership.

Best regards,

HomeToGo Partner Relations Team
partnerrelations@hometogo.com

So helpful thank you!!

I am not a Google Sites expert but I was able to drag the embedded Html on top of a picture. I used one of the default templates to create a site. 

Do not 'just' insert a picture and try to add the widget on top, instead set the image of a section. This allows you to drag content on top of the image.

How do I overlap my booking widget and a picture of my property?

I am using google sites to build my website. I am leaving three examples of how i'd like it to look.

https://www.azure-properties.com/

https://www.lindsborgvacationrentals.com/

https://www.haustay.com/

How do I overlap my booking widget and a picture of my property? I am using google sites to build my website. I am leaving three examples of how i'd like it to look.

https://www.azure-properties.com/

https://www.lindsborgvacationrentals.com/

https://www.haustay.com/

Thanks Ken. I always appreciate the quality OR customer support. 

There are absolutely situations where Worldline/Bambora is the best possible choice, and maybe that's you - so, if you like them best, keep them!  That's why we support them, and all the rest - each one may not be right for you, but it's right for somebody.   :-)  

Hi Ken,

Very helpful. Thank you.

I suspected that the Stripe agent didn't completely understand what I was asking. So it's good to hear that my payment structure can work with them. However, I'm leaning away from Stripe because of the lack of service and ability to negotiate rates... 

But Lynnbrook is adamant about not releasing funds until check in...I will keep trying but I just received another email back stating this. 

Why should I switch from Worldline/Bambora if it's working and still seems to have the lowest rates for me? 

Thanks,

Kara