SOS! New and trial by fire

Hi, I’m Stephanie. We purchased a property for our own use, but the previous owner had approx 20 STR that we are honoring for the summer. When we realized each guest would need to rebook, in my infinite wisdom, I thought “I should get something that will help me manage all these bookings and platforms, even though I know absolutely nothing about property management”. So now I’m learning ownerrez, VRBO, airbnb and grumpy guests who are panicked their rental is being cancelled less than a week before their booking 😭. 

I think I have things set up correctly, but one guest said their cc was sitting in VRBO because I didn’t take cc (I did set up stripe as my cc processor). I’m not sure where to start, but I’m really struggling to understand the VRBO interface in OR (like, the pending reservations-I accepted them because I knew they had paid, but it shows no payment).  Keep in mind, I’ve never owned a STR before (and I have probably overcomplicated this, but I don’t know what I don’t know). Thank you in advance! Happy Mothers Day! 

Now, I can run some CC, but they are declining (assuming because the card hasn’t been refunded by VRBO yet).  Can I confirm and run the card in a few days?

Hi Stephanie:

Welcome to OwnerRez! There is a lot to absorb, at first.

In my experience, there are a couple of common reasons for credit card payments to fail:

A) The bak is a bit overzealous in applying a fraud flag. The guest usually needs to reach out to their bank to okay the payment, which might have been an unusual transaction for them
B) insufficient funds. You are correct that, even if the other host refunded the amount, it can take a few banking days for that to be applied on the card.

One other caveat, if a guest uses a debit card, that can be very messy, Refunds and security deposit holds can take 5-25 days to be returned to the account, depending on the bank. 😮

When there is concern/confusion about the credit card payments of a specific booking, there are two places to check. You can always seek confirmation, directly, from your processor as they have all the info; most processors are available 24/7. There are a few things they do not sync to us, like chargebacks, or voids/refunds you might have processed on the processor site instead of OwnerRez.  

Or you can go to the booking>Transactions page and scroll to the bottom, click the green CC processor link:  

Which shows you the transaction history at the bottom. Hovering over the decline badge may show you why the card was declined.