General Help and Questions

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Ack. I might still put in the feature request, then. :P

Two way to do this...

You can also create a secondary Theme (or 3 or 4 if you want) that has a different Email Address field and then assign that as the theme for all properties. The Theme itself will be used the From address by default for whatever properties are assigned to that theme.

You can also do this via email templates. You can set the From Address to anything you want and, if it's a Verified Email Domain, the system will use it as the actual FROM header on the message. To do this for all geust messages, you would need to change every system message to use an email template and put in your custom From Address.

I'd like to mention that the bookings we received from HomeToGo are coming from very low-quality guests. On top of that, one of these guests recently disputed the card payment he made as fraudulent after he stayed without any problems. I contacted HomeToGo about it (for their support) but heard nothing in the last 10-11 days although I sent them a couple of reminders.

Wait, you can?? This has been a long-standing thing I’ve been meaning to put a feature request in for. Where is that setting??

Yeah, it does seem like it's taking a while, doesn't it? We talk to them regularly and they are moving forward with the integration. It should be done very soon.

The "team" email account is actually the best approach at the moment. They won't necessarily get payment notifications though - you can use a different email address for your main login (that gets the system alerts and messages) vs the one used as a return address for emails sent to your guests (that they'd likely reply to).

Hello! Did this integration happen?

Thanks for your detailed reply, Chris L.

Long story short: I should communicate with guests via E-mail for Direct Bookings.

I guess guests will just have to deal with responses being slower. Sometimes it takes awhile for my business e-mail to route to my Gmail. Maybe that's the problem I need to solve. Or maybe giving myself a longer leash with guests is a welcome change.

Alternatively, what about adding a "chat" feature to the direct booking website with push notifications to mobile? Could also be used to help increase booking inquiries (ex: Olark): https://www.olark.com/

Still wondering: how do you give access to your co-hosts and cleaners so they can communicate with guests as guests as necessary? I could make a "team" email account and help them set it up to route emails to multiple people, but then they'd get EVERYTHING including payment confirmations etc...

Thanks for the follow-up, Chris!

FYI - we hope to have Vrbo messaging integrated in OR in the next couple quarters. It's right around the corner according to our Vrbo contacts. (Ask them that on the webinar tomorrow!) 😆

Yes, my experience is that people who book through non-Airbnb channels do receive and view the emails that OR sends to them.

I don't know what you mean about constantly refreshing the OR CRM tab. When a guest sends a message, it goes to your email, not the OR CRM tab. (The only thing that shows up in the OR CRM tab right now is Airbnb messages, if you have Airbnb connected via API, but you can also receive those via push notification in the Airbnb app, too--I mostly use the Airbnb app for that because of the lack of a mobile app with push notifications on the OR side.) So as long as you have your email set to push alerts to your phone, you're good there.

I do find that people who send emails (direct bookings and Vrbo bookings) tend to be less expectant of an immediate response than Airbnb guests. So if you can respond to emails within an hour or so, that's generally good enough to present yourself as a responsive host.

The last question is sort of moot at this point because at this point, only Airbnb messages get routed through OR's messaging center, so as long as your co-host has access to your Airbnb messages through Airbnb, there's no need for them to view messages in OR.

Hi, I have the ribbon calendar, but it doesn't let me select dates that would populate the form....?
The dates appear bunched up so it's almost impossible to see the actual dates.
If we could scroll right instead of changing the Month above the calendar, that would be optimal.

My biggest hesitation with OwnerRez is communicating with guests.

Airbnb makes it really easy. Most people have the app installed with notifications for everything. SMS and E-Mails further alert you. I have some helpers (co-host and cleaner) who get all the messages (without financials) and can jump in for an emergency or if I'm unavailable or on vacation. It doesn't seem OwnerRez solves this problem so I'll continue communicating with my Airbnb reservations through Airbnb.

When someone books directly through my website, how can I smoothly communicate with them while providing access to others? Do I assume they'll reply to the automated e-mails? Should I push them to communicate through other channels for support?

Guests want QUICK responses to their questions and constantly refreshing OwnerRez and checking the CRM tab at the top seems like a terrible way to respond to guests as quick as possible. What works for you?

How can I give messaging access to co-hosts and cleaners, allowing us to stay on the same page without giving them full account access?

Yes, you would create the new Airbnb listing in OwnerRez -- just don't publish it. You will still be able to see it in your Airbnb profile and preview it over there before publishing.

I thought that all changes like this now had to made on OR, and not on the platforms?

Hi Doug, you can create a new listing in Airbnb and get syncing working but not "activate" it so the public won't see it. That will work for Airbnb, TripAdvisor and Booking.com but not Vrbo. Vrbo does not have a way to hide/show the listing that way. And for Booking.com, the listing has to be created on that side first before mapping the OR side to it. For Air and TA, you can create the listing in OwnerRez and push it over new.

I'm creating a new listing in Ownerrez, and I want activate it so that it will get pushed out to Airbnb and VRBO so that I can preview them, but I don't want them seen by the public yet. Is there a way to do that?

Exactly Airbnb is 15% and they handle the payment processing so where is the incentive to promote/use HTG?

5-8% I may consider ( as I am also paying 3% cc fee). 14% is a flat no. What is going to happen is that owners (me for example) will raise their rates by as much to cover the commission, and nothing will ever book through their site. So if they opted for reasonable commission say 5% they would get something. With 14%, they will get a 14% of 0. Which is still 0 last I checked.

Thanks for sharing the notice with everyone. Yes, we saw that too and reached out to them about. We don't know what the "payments isn't ready yet" part means? We here at OwnerRez were not aware that some other payment solution was going to be worked on or offered to users. Not sure what that means, nor why the commission is now increasing up to 14%. My assumption is that it was always supposed to be 10-15% (which is the normal range when you're the merchant of record) and so the 2.5% seemed strange. At any rate, I agree that there is some confusion here that needs to be worked out.

Hi Ozan,

Can you try clicking the Disable button on your Airbnb channel and the re-enabling it? You might have to resign into Airbnb.

Hello,

Hello i Accidentally disbaled the api for airbnb and now i cant get the sync activated. For the last kong hours it says sync not active and activate button is not active also. Any suggestions to fix this.
Thanks
Ozan

It sounds like they were going down the route of handling the payments for us?
If that's true that was never made clear and would make them the same as any other OTA.
Personally I don't have any trust in the company. The 2.5% deal was never made available to European hosts and now we get an announcement like this! The delays at the start also didn't inspire confidence.
At 14% the maths are never going to work to make any money for me.

Just got this. Sound like they are changing their conditions on the fly? "Unfortunately, we’ve faced some unforeseeable delays with the new payment solution and won’t be able to switch you to 2.5% as you’ll still run on a partial integration with your own payment solution. " So THEY faced problems and therefore THEY want to charge us 14% instead of 2.5%??? That is quite a jump. Does anyone know what do they mean??? Thanks

"Dear valued partner,

As you already know, HomeToGo’s 0% promotion is coming to an end on March 31st.

We hope that we’ve been able to contribute to the success of your business in these last months by bringing you commission-free bookings.

What changes

Originally, we were planning on offering you a reduced commission as part of a full integration on our new payment solution. Unfortunately, we’ve faced some unforeseeable delays with the new payment solution and won’t be able to switch you to 2.5% as you’ll still run on a partial integration with your own payment solution.

In the meantime, all new generated bookings will be charged at our regular 14% commission for all OwnerRez clients running under partial integration as of April 1st, 2021.

What’s in it for you

We understand that this can be confusing to you and we want to assure you that our intention was to have everything ready by now. The trust of our partners is key to us and the success of our business. We will do everything in our power to retain your confidence in HomeToGo. As a measure of good faith, we will offer the following for your properties:

Immediate visibility boost for your properties on our 40+ websites

Possibility to choose your invoicing trigger - on booking or on check-in date, just answer this email to let us know

Full support if you wish to markup our commission - just reply to this email as well if you need help or information

Top priority when our payment platform is ready and possibility to choose between a host-only fee only and a combined host + guest fee

We are confident that the new visibility boost for your properties will result in many more bookings and show you that we value your business. We also strongly believe that continuing our partnership will be mutually beneficial in the long run and we hope that you’ll decide to keep on working with us.

Thank you for your time and understanding. We hope you’re staying healthy and we are available for any questions you may have.

Best,

Your HomeToGo Team

Yep, somewhere around there. You can follow our releases in the changelog: https://www.ownerrez.com/support/latestupdates -- and we also write blog posts the week subsequent that drill into the details.

Great thanks Joel.

Just out of interest, how often do you apply patches? 2 or 3 times a month?

Resurrecting the topic. I do have a set up where it sends and email/test top us to remind us to change thermostat setting before/after arrival/departure. but that is rather involved. Anyone had figured out IFTTT or any other way with Honeywells?

Thanks for the report, Rob!

Looks like we got too strict on the TLD validation. We'll loosen that up in the next patch.

Hi Tiffany,

So just to be clear, this is on the 'profile' page, then click on 'verify your domain'. Which takes you to 'Verified Email Domains' then clicking '+ Verify Domain' button.

Then is the box supplied i've entered the domain and tried all formats i.e.
kehwindsor.co.uk
www.kehwindsor.co.uk
https://www.kehwindsor.co.uk/
http://www.kehwindsor.co.uk/

Clicked on the 'Save & View Instructions' button. And each time is gives the error...

Please correct the errors below.
- The domain name you've entered doesn't look quite right. Please review and correct.

Many thanks in advance for your help on this one.

Do you have your own website, either live or you're working on setting it up? If so, you can connect the details button to your website.

To do that, go to the General Info tab of each property. Click change and then set the property URL to point to the page on your website that has information about the property.

If you don't have your own website, we have a hosted website tool that will build you a site based on the information you enter in OwnerRez: https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/hosted-websites -- and then you can link that to your domain.

Hi Joelle, thanks for the feedback We have discussed our RA signing process several times internally and have some major changes planned. Just no ETA yet or scheduled time when it will be done yet.