I submitted a support ticket for this item, but is there a way to set up a subdomain for any direct interaction a guest might have with OwnerRez? For example, when completing the rental agreement, instead of sending an email with the short OwnerRez link, can it be configured to use a subdomain? (e.g., booking.redcanoelodging.com)
Using multiple domains for guest interactions can be confusing and may undermine trust, especially when a guest has made a direct booking.
Hi Dan,
Great question, and I completely understand why you’d want guest-facing links to stay on your own domain for consistency and trust.
At this time, OwnerRez doesn’t support hosting guest actions (like rental agreement signing or payment collection pages) on a customer-owned subdomain such as booking.redcanoelodging.com.
The main reason is security and compliance. Those pages can involve sensitive data (especially payments), and they must be served from OwnerRez’s secure, PCI-compliant infrastructure. Allowing them to load under a custom subdomain would introduce additional security and compliance complexity that we can’t support safely.
That said, there are still a few good ways to keep the guest experience feeling more “on brand.” For example, using your own domain for your Hosted Website or direct booking site keeps the shopping and booking flow on your brand domain up until the point the booking is made. Using a branded email sending domain also helps a lot, since guests see the message coming from your domain, which often builds more trust than the URL alone. And finally, a small tweak to the wording in your email templates can go a long way, clearly explaining that the link is taking them to a secure OwnerRez page for signing and/or payment.
I understand that outside of vacation rentals, some guests may be trained to be cautious of what looks like a third-party link. However, this is very common in the vacation rental industry. It’s not unusual for guests to be redirected to a secure vendor-hosted page to complete steps like signing a rental agreement or submitting payment. In fact, many competing systems don’t allow custom domains for guest-facing booking pages at all. With OwnerRez, your experience can stay fully branded through the shopping and booking flow, and then only switches to the secure OwnerRez page when it needs to. And those pages are still branded with your logo and information, so it typically reinforces your brand rather than diminishing it.
Most guests won’t find this unfamiliar, and a little bit of communication in your email templates can go a long way toward setting expectations, easing concerns, and maintaining a strong brand experience.
Hope that helps explain why the booking experience flows the way it does, and please let us know if you’d like suggestions on guest-friendly wording you can add to your templates. You can always reach our Helpdesk team at help@ownerrez.com
