General Help and Questions

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Hey all! I'm at my wits' end - I've got a Yale Assure using August Connect that is compatible with RemoteLock. For awhile I was just operating it via the August app since RL was being buggy with the booking times, but now that I'm using OwnerRez (a new thing) I want to get it all operating through OR and RL.

OR says integration to RemoteLock is connected and properties are mapped correctly.
RL shows the lock is online and my account is connected to OR
I have run the batch update for my future bookings on the subject property

But NO guest info shows up in the RL interface! I have a guest checking in at 4pm and even though all the correct info is in OR, and I've batch updated the bookings, that guest's info is not showing up in RL. There seems to be no way to verify that their code is in the system, and I can't just test if the code works on the lock because it's time-sensitive and wouldn't work right now in any case.

Any guidance will be appreciated - anyone else had this issue? Am I just not being patient enough for RL to update? (I have zero issues with my other properties, but those all have RemoteLock 5i hardware)

I had a guest contact me for the same reason. I created this response to explain why that happened and share it here in case others might want to use it:

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Thanks for your message, I am sorry for any confusion.

When we put a hold on a guest's credit/debit card for the security deposit we have no idea how their particular bank will handle the hold. Every bank has a different process.

So what typically happens is the hold is placed one day before the guest arrives and could be valid for a couple to several days. When it is ready to expire (per the bank's process) if the "release date" (7 days after the guest departs) has not been reached a new hold is requested. This could happen several times, depending on the duration of the booking and the number of days the bank hold is valid.

If nothing else has occurred (like a charge against the hold for damage, for example) then the hold is automatically released on the specified date. 

We set the hold to be released 7 days after the guest departs because it could take the housekeeper several days before she can get to the property to clean it. We need to make sure we leave enough time for her to determine if there are any damages so that we can file the damage claim before the hold expires.

I have triggered the hold to be released today. Your particular bank's process will determine when the funds will be released in your account.

I hope this helps!

Unfortunately, this is normal, because we don't know or control when security deposit holds will be expired by the issuing bank. They notify us that they are *going* to expire it, but we don't know if they do that immediately, in a few hours, or the next day.

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/security-deposit-holds#multiple-holds

I have a following situation. Guest staying 6 nights. The original secdep that was reserved 2 days prior to arrival was supposed to expire and new one reserved (refreshed). well enter sent me a screen shot where it shows TWO "pending" auths for the amount of sec dep. This happened more tan once, renter not happy, is there a way not to "refresh" the sec dep is old one is still pending?

I too am in need of this trigger! I usually send manually, but I was in the hospital for an
emergency stay and due to the circumstances, the message didn't get sent last week. Ugh!
Has anything been done to address this yet?

Any update on this? according to my calculation Airbnb shows 17% tax whereas combined tax (TN Sales, County Sales, County Lodging) should be 12.75%. I only have 3% county lodging tax defined on API.

I have a yurt that has been being developed slowly, hopefully it will be ready to rent by this summer season. Follow my site to see when it shows up. I will let you know. Miel

Yes to all of the above.

Does this apply to responses that happen from an inquiry? It goes to their email, even though they haven't booked yet?

So when it comes back to us, it comes to the email we have on file, correct? Also, on my emails, there is a footer with my own url website on it. I assume Airbnb strips that out.

Airbnb strips out anything in your message they don't like, and then sends what's left to your guest's own email address. If the guest replies, the same thing happens in reverse, and what's left of their response makes its way back to you.

I hate to sound stupid, and I've searched for this answer but can't find it. When an automated email goes out to an Airbnb guest, where does it actually go? It's not in their message thread, for that I think we need to use the Airbnb tab under "templates". So what email does it go to? Does it go to that guest.airbnb.com email address? How does a guest actually get it?

I would also love this feature for the exact same reason! Garbage day!

Most likely, you have one of the "Combine" options selected in your Preferences.

https://app.ownerrez.com/account/preferences

If that isn't it, please write into the Helpdesk with the quote number and we'll take a look.

when I create a quote and send it to a potential guest the system does not show the discount to the guest. I often have to discount even more b/c they do not know I have already discounted their quote.

Is there a Rooms column in the file? We recently removed that -- if it it's in your file from an older version of the template, that could be causing the issue. If it's there, delete just that Rooms column and save the file and try again.

If that doesn't work, send the file to help@ownerreservations.com and we'll have a look.

The same is happening to me! I've filled in the template and inputted all the data I have. Very frustrating!

Thanks for the quick response and fix!

This happened because of the consolidation we did to bring Vrbo and HomeAway to one channel instead of two. There was an edge case where the matching logic on channel bridge wasn't merging them correctly.

We just released an update that'll fix that, and updated those bookings to use the correct Vrbo listing site (rather than the legacy one).

Why would some of my bookings come into the OR system with a Listing Site of VRBO (legacy) and others come in with a Listing Site of (VRBO)? What's the difference in these two?

I have noticed that I have a trigger set for "Everything But VRBO" and the VRBO (legacy) bookings apparently do not follow the same rules as the VRBO bookings...

Thanks for your insights.

EDIT: The OR guys are ON IT!! Dev team looking into it.

Thanks for the feedback! We always do try to give a heads up well in advance when we make a change that could affect your rates or rules. In this case, unfortunately, we didn't factor in that case where there was an exclusion for Vrbo and not HomeAway, so we didn't get the issue into our notification queue.

I apologize again for the mixup here.

Copy thanks Chris, that makes sense. As a suggestion for the future, maybe give us all a heads up next time a change like that is coming so we can prevents such issues... I spent the better half of my morning trying to figure this out and fixing the problem it created, not to mention temporarily deactivating my VRBO listings in the interim.

Yes, this weekend we rolled out an update that merges all of the Vrbo/HomeAway family of channels into one Vrbo channel. We'll have more details about that in the changelog tomorrow.

I looked into your settings and I see what happened here -- before the update, you had criteria on the taxes for "everything but Vrbo". Since Vrbo and HomeAway were separate, that wouldn't exclude for HomeAway bookings previously. After the update, that criteria started applying to all bookings through the Vrbo API channel, since they're all now treated as Vrbo.

Looks like you've already fixed this in your settings by removing those "everything but Vrbo" criteria. I double checked the taxes feeding to Vrbo and they are included in the feed currently.

Just got a booking last night via VRBO API and low and behold there was no tax charged... I know my setting had been correct because just 2 days ago we got another VRBO booking and the tax was included... I hadn't touched any setting since then.

Now I'm also noticing none of the verbiage I see anywhere on OR has "Homeaway" like it used to, it's all now just "VRBO", including in the places where we select "apply to booking sites" ... I suspect this recent change had something to do with the tax debacle I'm experiencing also.

Did OR just make some changes and not make it abundantly obvious and clear to owners... or did they announce the change and I just missed it?

Same error msgs here.

These are intermittent network hiccups and can be ignored, unless you specifically see something wrong in your Vrbo listing.

I started to receive said report looks like daily. The latest has this:
ERROR Failed to retrieve Listing XML File at https://fast.ownerrez.com/haapi/haxml/ora7ccdcf175x/listing/{listing ID}
for both listings.
Is there anything I need to do?

Sure - the OwnerRez Widgets are driven by the data in your OwnerRez account, so if PriceLabs is connected and pushing rates into your account, that's what you'll get in your Widgets.

I am interested in getting a Wix website for a more updated look on my website. I have had the OwnerRez hosted website for the last year and a half. I am trying to make sure everything will work and flow smoothly. If I use the Wix website and add the calendar, availability, Book Now widgets etc are we able to still use Pricelabs and have OwnerRez push the rates to the website? Is there anything I am not thinking of that I would need to add to have everything flow nicely? All this is new to me. I have someone helping me build the website.

No, gaps are not created/enforced on blocks.

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/property-availability-rules#changeover