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Airbnb is now advising waiting 24 hours after check-out to clean the property and a minimum of 72 hours between guests. My cleaning companies are asking for the same thing. Airbnb is actually requiring it for hosts who opt in to their COVID-19 First Responder promotion (https://www.airbnb.com/openhomes/covid19relief). (Supposedly Airbnb automatically blocks calendars for opted-in hosts -- https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Hosting/How-hosts-can-provide-housing-for-COVID-19-responders/m-p/1268186#M303155 -- but I suspect my OwnerRez integration is interfering with that.)

Given the seriousness of the COVID-19 crisis, can this be bumped up in priority? I know it's a long-term project, but TBH, stuff like this is way more important now than, say, a new rates editor.

Yes, we can manually add blocks after each booking, but that gets extremely tedious to monitor and change, especially with how quickly bookings come in and get canceled these days.

Select the 'Other' option and then put in the calendar export link from OwnerRez.

Here's a step by step guide for TripAdvisor, both importing and exporting calendars:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/channel-management-calendar-import-export-tripadvisor

1) OK. We saw must have 15 properties to use OR to sync (don't)

On Flipkey, they allow syncing with other calendars

2) So on a property calendar, they have:

Rent on other sites?
Sync calendars with Airbnb, HomeAway, Google and more > Import button >

> "Events from your chosen calendar will be sent to your Tripadvisor calendar automatically."

> VRBO/AirBnB/Google/Other buttons (to paste a link to other calendar

3) So since you handle vrbo, bdc, abb - how would I sync that FK calendar with one on OwnerRez? Should I use an OR link or one from the OTA?

There isn't any way to require *no* upfront payment for a booking. However, you can alter the percentage of the payment required under the Rules of the quote, and make it very small - say, 1%. That should be close enough for most purposes.

Thanks Ken - yes that works. No need for any filtering, just exporting from the Bookings 'list' view instead of ribbon is enough.

THanks, saved me a bunch of mouse clicking !

Given the state of our nation right now we are changing cancellation policies for almost every booking depending on the date it is booked for. I am wanting to require no upfront payment on a couple quotes until we have a better idea on when this is going to end. What is the best way to do this?

Thank you,
Emma B

That sounds like the Availability/Search Widget:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/widgets#availability-property-search

If you use the main Bookings display, List view, filter by Cancelled, and export to Excel, that includes a column with the date it was cancelled. Does that work for you?

How to add availability search bar for all of my units to the main page of my website

This is rarely a problem, but I'd like to get a report showing bookings that were cancelled after March 10th.

Unfortunately the excel report on detailed bookings has no column with the cancel date.

It actually doesn't even have a column for status, instead the Guest name is appended with [CANCELED] (typo)

The latter is not super hard to work around, but it's impossible to distinguish between a booking for March 2020 that was cancelled in November vs recently.

Otherwise I'll just go through manually, I see that the actual cancel date is kept in the activity statement listed under the booking overview tab.

But would be nice to have this in the long term.

There's no way to force gaps for the time being. We are working on adding that - it is often requested. If you allow shorter gap minimums, you could remove that for the time being, but that isn't really the same thing. The only other way is to create blocks yourself on either side of a booking after they come in by manually creating them on the calendar.

You can't push anything INTO the Evolve calendar. You can only use its URL to PULL the Evolve calendar data OUT of it.

I want to make sure we have a minimum of 48-72 hours between the departure of one guest and the arrival of the next. Not sure where to set this up for future bookings. Will I also have to change my Gap Nights settings? FYI - the purpose of this is to provide guests with a bit of extra assurance during the Covid-19 outbreak that they are not coming into a property right after someone else and that the passage of a few days will help to minimize exposure. Thanks!

There isn't any way for us to display which guests have purchased travel insurance through some other source or OTA - we have no way of knowing that.

However, you can easily see which guests have purchased travel insurance through OwnerRez (or not). Use the List view on the main Bookings screen, then Filter by Has Travel Insurance status.

I'm not sure how that would help. The problem is how Evolve combines bookings in their calendars, so you can't sensibly *import* them into OwnerRez.

If you can export a Google calendar into Evolve, you can export your OwnerRez calendar into Evolve the same way and save a step.

Also, since Evolve generally piggybacks off of HomeAway's calendar, if you have a HomeAway listing to export your OwnerRez calendar into, that may properly push your OwnerRez bookings into Evolve also.

Thanks to you both! That fixed it!!

Ken, thank you. Here's a question... in your experience, do you think I could have my OR calendar push to a GOOGLE calendar, and then I could have that Google calendar push to Evolve? Does that sound like it would solve the issue or create some sort of crazy loop?

Thanks!

Is there a way to quickly filter thru reservations to see if a guest has purchased travel insurance through the OTA they used to book? And same for guests who buy thru OR? I know I saw something about a guest who'd purchased it, but have no idea who it was. Thanks!

OwnerRez is fully able to push iCal calendar feeds to any other system that is able to accept them.

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/channel-management-calendar-import-export

The problem is Evolve specifically, as discussed here:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/connecting-to-evolve

When I send a quote and rental agreement via OR to a guest and they make payment, a booking is automatically created in my OR calendar. I love this! Except that in order to avoid double-booking, I have to manually block those dates off in my Evolve master calendar.

BUT when I do that, when OR imports my Evolve bookings my OR calendar thinks there's been a double booking and it throws me an "calendar sync error" email.

I'd LOVE to use OR as my master calendar but I can't, because as I understand it, the OR calendar doesn't push data to Evolve or other calendars; it only PULLS data in. So in light of the fact that I must use Evolve as my master calendar, does anyone have a good workaround to avoid the calendar sync error messages?

THANK YOU!

Thanks, Lydia! Yes, that's exactly right - check the property rules. Specifically check that your 2 and 3 night minimums are in the right spot. They should be on the left side. So it should read "between [2] and [ ]" (with the right side empty) if you want a 2 night minimum and no maximum.

Lynnbrook does not return fee data in the transaction, nor do most other processors and gateways. In fact, the only one we know of (anywhere) is Stripe and they only do it because they're an aggregator. Other aggregators like PayPal do the same. We are working with Lynnbrook to return fee data, and they have said they are working on it.

Sorry... @JoeS I didn't see this until now. Evolve is a company that I use to fill my rental calendar, much like a VRBO / Homeaway. The people are very nice, they are owner-focused, and I've had no issues with them.

Randy, there are no cancellations for travel insurance. That's the whole point of travel insurance - to cover cancellations and trip interruptions. If the booking is made in mistake and cancelled right away, the carrier will typically refund the TI if it is cancelled very quickly (ie. right after purchased). But the traveler can't decided to cancel later and then also get TI refunded - that would defeat the purpose.

Will be interested to see ORs answer on this. Would seem that insurance is non-refundable if they're the ones who canceled. (I'm assuming this is a Covid-19 cancellation, but maybe not.)

This is a link provided by OR in another post: https://insurestays.com/faqs-covid-19/

I would like to set up a trigger email to go to guests who have canceled their booking. I can't seem to find anything in the trigger set-up which allows me to direct something towards guests a certain length of time after they've canceled. I know I can send something as soon as they cancel, but I want to reach out later to remind them we're still here if they'd like to try again. Looks like we just need one more option in the "Action", "Time" drop-down - "Booking is canceled."

Or maybe we do something with the Booking Status, or Booking Fields (Canceled on Date)? PLEASE! :)

How does a customer for a cancelled booking obtain a refund of the trip protection coverage if it was not used. Booking # ORB2528229

Take a look at Properties, Rules, Length Restrictions.

I have a minimum 2 nights and 3 nights on holidays. I just put the quote widget on my website and put in a test inquiry for 4 nights. The software told me that I had requested too many nights. That the property had a maximum of two night rentals. How do I fix this?