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FWIW, this isn't going to change until Airbnb decides to change it.
I emailed Brian Chesky with the point that "when you make us collect pet fees via the Resolution Center, you pay CC transaction fees and lose the Guest Service Fee on that money. If you allowed them to be included in the listing price, you'd recover the 3% CC fee from the host plus the ~10-15% service fee from the guest and make a few extra bucks in the process." No reply, of course, and I know he has bigger fish to fry, but given the cash shortage Airbnb is experiencing, every dollar they can earn helps them. It's a bonus if it makes my life a little easier, even though I'd technically take a small hit on the pet revenue.
It's also under the "Guest Instructions" section in your Property settings ("Check-In Type" has several options). That syncs to Airbnb if you are API integrated and I believe that is what tells Airbnb whether to show the self-check-in flag.
I see that I can't customize them, even if I make a new template for example "extra payments" as I would like to be able to create the email to be scheduled AND add the personalized PP link for payment/invoice. I can't "save" the email once I've opened it to insert the PP link, the only option is to "send" or cancel.
I guess I will continue to use the PP option for scheduling payments and do a work around. I can't be the only one who would like the option of having 3 payments? As there are expensive properties that rent monthly by the shore, and surely others would like to be able to offer that option?
I think the best way to look into this would be for you to email the Helpdesk with the ORB number of the booking. We'll try and figure out what happened.
I cancelled the second payment of a reservation for $1,638.00 in the VRBO booking so the guest could avoid the processing fees and send me a check.
I updated the reservation with the channel bridge import tool and now it's showing as a "Discount - CANCELLED_INSTALLMENT -1,638.00 in the charges section.
This isn't right. Is there a reason why this defaulted this way?
Should I just delete that so called discount line item and add it back the actual rental rates
Anyone else had this issue?
If you have halfway decent place , No pets. Aside from peed rugs, you will find scratched door frames and window sills, hair on the bed coverings, and chewed furniture. The amount you charge per pet will not alleviate stress of having to remediate damage between turns. I am a pet owner myself but I will not allow pets in my rentals.
You'd probably want to mention that in one of the fields under Guest Instructions, and potentially also use that in a Field Code in an automatic pre-arrival email sent to your guests.
The "only" option does not exclude bookings with other. By "only", it means that only bookings that contain that tag (regardless of any other tags they might have) will be included. So I think you should be good to go.
Ok right, that's why we put 10k characters on the OwnerRez side of the support doc. It looks like Airbnb may not have a limit at all on that field, but our OwnerRez limit is currently 10k.
Where do I indicate "Self Check in" for a property?
Looks like the logic for the Tags feature in the Triggers is either "Only" or "Everything But."
Can one more logic gate be added: "Contains"? I want to set up a trigger to send a Welcome Packet to people once I've verified their ID, which I'll mark by adding an "ID Verified" tag to their booking. But I also have other tags set up, so "Only" doesn't work, because a booking might have 2 or 3 other tags. So I need the trigger to send to all bookings that "Contains" the "ID Verified" tag, regardless of the presence or absence of other tags. That doesn't seem possible right now. Thanks!
Unfortunately, Airbnb still does not support any way for a guest to indicate that they will be bringing pets, neither do they support a pet fee surcharge that can be set.
The only way to do this is as recommended above -- state the fee on your house rules and submit a resolution request after booking.
A year and a half later, it appears we still need to submit to the Airbnb resolution center answer for pet fees.
How do I do as your Listing Analyzer says- what are the matching keywords you are referring to and where do I use them at?
Fee "Pet fee" is not recognized as an Airbnb fee. Airbnb only supports their own built in fees.
>>> Either use one of the matching keywords<< or set the listing site criteria to exclude Airbnb.
Hi Paul,
The error message I received was from OwnerRez:
Please correct the errors below.
The field House Manual must be a string with a maximum length of 10000.
That's controlled by the name set on your profile in Airbnb, so you'd need to make an update on that side. Its not something that can be controlled by OwnerRez through the API.
Hello, I would like to change the "Hosted by" to my company name when viewing on AirBNB. How can I do this?
That would make sense, wouldn't it?
Unfortunately, no, that's not how it works. :-( The min nights for a given stay is set by whatever the min nights setting is on the *first* night - that is, the arrival day.
This is how the channels do it. For years OwnerRez did it the way you described, but it turned out to be just too confusing to work differently from everyone else.
Am I correct that with minimum stays if I set a date with a higher minimum stay, that specific date cannot be booked unless it at least is shouldered by the appropriate number of days set as a minimum and that the greater number supersedes lower minimum stays?
Ah, okay. That makes sense. Yes after finding out that this was already resolved, we updated the support doc as well. We haven't confirmed the API limit on characters, so we put ??? for now. It is mostly likely 10k characters since most of those fields tend to be in that area.
When you say you got an error message at 10k, was that on the Airbnb side or OR side? The limit is definitely 10k on the OR side.
Yes, integrating tags with triggers is a planned feature.
Any way to incorporate the new Tag feature into message triggers?
What I'd like to do is only send my welcome letter with door lock code to guests who have both signed the RA and sent me their ID. The easiest way I can think to keep track of this is by adding an "ID Received" tag to bookings once I receive a copy of their ID. If the tag isn't present, then the message trigger shouldn't fire until the tag is added.
(Of course, I'd love OR to automate this entirely by integrating with an ID verification service--I've posted on that topic before. ;) )
TBH a question like this is probably better suited for a place like community.withairbnb.com or community.vrbo.com or one of the many Facebook groups dedicated to VR hosting rather than this forum, which is mostly for questions about how to use OR software.
Personally, I accept pets everywhere I can and firmly believe it's a huge net-positive for me. My background:
-been in the business since 2017
-9 units owned and/or managed
-all units are 2 or 3 bedroom condos
-HOA rules allow renters to have pets at 5 of those units
-all units have carpeted bedrooms; one has carpeted living rooms
-my average stay is about 3 days, and most of my units see roughly 230 nights of occupancy a year
-I've hosted ~1200 guests since the last time I checked.
I have never really done a scientific study of numbers, but all of the units that accept pets are my top-performing units. I've never had any serious problems (in the many dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of guests who have brought pets, I've only ever had one issue with urine, and I've never had any guests complain about pet smells).
I do have a fairly extensive pet addendum that I have them sign as part of the rental agreement. I ask for details about the pet (name/sex/breed/weight) and specify that they must be up-to-date on vaccinations and treated with flea/tick repellent prior to arrival. I also require them to be crated whenever they are left alone in the property. I don't actively enforce that, but putting it in seems to screen away some of the more irresponsible pet owners. I also periodically do a survey of what other owners charge for pet fees, and most in my market charge somewhere around $25 per pet per stay, so that's what I keep my pet fee set at. (I tried increasing it once upon a time to $25 per day, but I found that lowered my occupancy, so I reversed course after a month or so.)
Hi Paul,
Yes, I knew there was a "House Manual" field in the Guest Instructions area in OwnerRez and assumed that it might be related to Airbnb's house manual. However, since it was not included on the Property Field Differences document it was not clear if we could depend on the Airbnb guests being able to see any information entered into this field in their Airbnb booking.
I see that now you have entered "House Manual" in the Airbnb column with ??? for the number of characters. I think I can confidently tell you the limit is 10,000 characters because I was stopped with an error message because my House Manual exceeded 10,000 characters and I had to whittle it down to fit.
Thanks for confirming that our Airbnb guests CAN see the House Manual info when they look at their bookings through their Airbnb apps.
Looks like you're in luck!
After this topic originated, we found out a few months later that Airbnb added a previously undocumented field. Set it on the Guest Instructions tab, see pic below.
You can manually schedule reminder emails on specific dates under the Email tab. Or, if you have no payments scheduled and payment reminders turned on, they'll be sent on OwnerRez' schedule, which can't currently be customized.
I have a returning customer that pays by check, she books an entire month and I want to be able to "Schedule" the "request for payment," as I understand I can't use the "schedule payment" unless they are using/have a card on file. Since it is for an entire month in peak season, I like to offer my guests the option of making 3 payments instead of 2. Can I schedule the requests, or do I just have to set up a reminder for them? I can do that in PayPal but it seems like I should be able to do it right here.
As of right now we do not allow pets. I tried letting pets come and have pee stains on the rugs, so I stopped allowing them
I have replaced the floors in 3 of my home to waterproof vinyl planking, so I am now considering allowing them again.
Please help me decide Pets or No Pets- Tell me some of your findings with pets.
How much extra do you charge per pet? Do you have them sign an agreement? If so tell me about it.
Thanks
I'm asking about this internally, but as far as I know there is still no documented way to set those fields via API. Sorry to hear that your manual work go wiped out.
The fix has been released (last week), along with a ton of other stuff: https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/update-2020-10-13
I'll play with doing the reverse, maybe a surcharge if you stay less than a month, to equal what a week would be...I'll keep working on it somehow. I am not on any of the channels for this property at the moment, because I have two regional sites that allow me to direct book and I've snoozed Abnb and TripAdvisor. I thankfully (knock on wood) do very well with these two sites.
