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Any update on this feature? I don't want guests to see what increase % I might have for a season

I manually enter a booking. I'm taking care of it offline. THen I get these random emails from RemoteLock (My lock integration provider) and it says that this booking has ".....yet to be confirmed". Does anybody know what this is about? Is there an official way in OwnerRez to "Confirm" a booking? Currently I create a booking...and that's it.

Toni, are you a property manager using the PM features?

Those are different selection modes for the calendar.

With Toggle, you pick one day at a time and clicking adds or removes to your selection.

Range is click and drag to select. You can also Ctrl+Click new ranges to add to your selection.

Columns is click and drag to select like Range but it goes by columns (i.e. day of week) vs a date range like Range does.

I am using the Rate Calendar to set some spot rates and I notice on the right hand corner of the calendar these options:

Toggle
Range
Columns

If I click on any of them, nothing happens.

I'm curious what the purpose of these options are?

I've read the "Spot Rates" article below, but it does not mention these options.

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/spot-rates

Does anyone know?

For the bookings accepted through Vrbo, my rental contract requires the guest to make their second payment through my OwenrRez/Strip account rather than on the Vrbo platform. When requesting the guest submit a credit card the only option I can find is the one to submit a "new" card. The header reads "This page will help you update your billing information so that future payments and security deposits use a new credit card instead of the one on file. Use the fields below to enter a new credit card and select what types of transactions it should be used for." Is it possible to change this heading or am I missing an option to request CC info without requesting payment? The guest does not have a CC on file as they made the initial payment through Vrbo.

Thanks,
Beth

That setting is on the settings for each owner -- the Channel Fees section. By default the channel fees are set to be prededucted from owner earnings and also for commission not to be calculated on them.

You can do this because there's some magic for nightly surcharges that goes on in the background depending on the channel:

- For VRBO it will be sent as a separate fee because they do support nightly fees
- For booking.com, you configure fees on the booking.com (we send nightly rate and are not able to send fees other than guest fee)... then whatever charges booking.com sends back based on that we will use
- For Airbnb, any nightly surcharges will be added to the nightly rate pushed

So if you create the nightly surcharge, it should work -- of course, make sure to test on each site and review that you get the expected result.

Yes, Airbnb doesn't have a long description like others -- they use the short description and then several other fields.

Accommodations Detail is the one that syncs with The Space on Airbnb. Here's an article that breaks it all down: https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/channel-management-api-integrations-property-field-differences

Hi
I have recently created a vacation rental website www.rentalhomescabo.com on ownerreservations and integrated it with Airbnb and VRBO. However I am noticing on Airbnb that my description area, sentences are being cut off. Where is the field that syncs with about your space field in Airbnb? Is that the long description or short description?
Thanks

Where is your website. Looking for two units for snowbirds next winter. Centurydrive@hotmail.com

Check the community.homeaway.com and community.withairbnb.com forums. Lots of posts there about noise, parties, rules/restrictions, and solutions like NoiseAware and others.

My impression is that NoiseAware is fairly pricy but is kind of the gold standard in the "noise awareness" industry. There's another option, Roomonitor, that Airbnb is currently partnering with for a huge discount (https://www.airbnb.com/d/partyprevention).

Fortunately, the target demographic here in Branson doesn't really lend itself to parties (and implementing a 2-night minimum tends to screen out even the very few whose goal that is), so I haven't found value in noise monitoring solutions and haven't implemented them myself. I have a much bigger problem with *my* guests complaining about noise from neighbors (feet tromping around all day and night upstairs, the couple next door getting in arguments, etc., and one 1-star review I got for construction noise after a hailstorm shot holes in our building's siding. If I could install a noise detector that would alert the HOA or cops to noise from neighbors, now that I might find value in! :P

and remember to tell your team to turn the phone to landscape. On mine it switches to showing a full month so much easier to read.

Yes, the widget is designed to automatically resize smaller on phones. However, looks like your site layout is actually doing the opposite and zooming farther in on mobile, making the text bigger but keeping it from laying out correctly.

It also has quite a bit of whitespace on the sides -- looks like about 20% of the horizontal space is taken up by whitespace.

Remove that extra whitespace and the zooming and that should solve the issue. Looks like you're on WiX so you'll need to tweak the separate mobile layout. Check out steps 8-9 here: https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/wix-widgets

Here's an example of what the widget should look like on mobile (this is on an iPhone 5, so quite a small screen):

Here is what the multi-prop widget looks like on my phone:
https://imgur.com/Uh72LWJ

Is there a way to make it more usable?

We recently had an incredibly poorly timed incident. One property I help an owner manage had folks call the police at 0300 and disturb the neighborhood. This happens to be an HOA community (the only one I help manage in an HOA). Details don't really matter, I understand why neighbors are upset and drunk loud guests would upset me too.

That said - how are you working to manage noise in properties that have neighbors?
I prefer to engineer this issue out with location - meaning I would like to only help manage properties that don't have close neighbors, but that is not an option on this property.

I found a company called NoiseAware. Has anyone used this before? It's a noise monitor.

What expectations do you give guests regarding noise? Do you have policy in place for violations?

Sherri, i am having the same issue (and do the same as you) can you help me understand where the setting is so that our commission is not including the airbnb host fee as our agreement with the owner is that we take a commission on the reservation amount only not including taxes, channel/host fee, or cleaning fee.

For clarity, if a guest stays for 1 night for $100 and the cleaning fee was $40, and host fee was $4.20 (3% of $140) and the total payout was $137 , we would take 18% of that. I need to know how to set up the owners and owner statements to only calculate the 18% commission off that amount only.

Hello

We have been running our listings exclusively on VRBO that past 7 years and have recently decided to make some major changes to increase exposure and direct bookings hopefully; which have lead us to signing up for OR and getting our listings set up on Airbnb & Booking.com.

My question revolves around how you as owners are setting up fees in OR to be pushed to Airbnb beings their set up for fees is different than that of VRBO & Booking in the sense that you can not set up a per night fee.

For two of our listings we have a nightly parking & nightly resort fee that you can charge in someway through VRBO and Booking but not through Airbnb. I'm hoping to be able to set rates in OR and push to all platforms (VRBO, Airbnb, Booking) but can't wrap my head around how to best incorporate the parking and resort fees being the escalators can not be used since the percentage would need to change as the seasonal rate changes?

The only thing I can think of is to eliminate all fees on VRBO & Booking as lump them into the nightly rental price; but I am not reallly fond of that idea because it raises the rate and the parking is really an optional fee that I would like guests to know about if they choose to shuttle to the unit?

So open to thoughts and suggestions as to how you all are doing it as maybe I am over complicating and thinking this. Thanks in advance I do appreciate it!

The new Channel Bridge version 10.19 has been released to solve the issue.

Make sure you've got the latest: https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/channel-bridge-updating-to-latest-version and you should be able to push rates to VRBO/HomeAway again.

Unfortunately, this is a limitation of Airbnb (and HomeAway as well). They evaluate min nights based on arrival day only. I'm not sure why.

OwnerRez for direct bookings evaluates min nights based on every day of the booking. For HomeAway we actually enforce this via API because they allow us to pass back a "stay not allowed on that day" message to the guest. But Airbnb only has a "this is unavailable now" message that would be very confusing to the guest, so we let their rules stand.

I'm not aware of any workaround if you want the day restrictions -- that just seems to be an artifact of how they display them. I agree -- it's extremely confusing... to the point that while we were developing the API integration we thought we had a bug doing extra blocks. Then we realized that we were sending the right data, it's just a strange display they do on the calendar picker.

If you're giving some money to the owner and keeping some as the PM you can control that split and it'll correctly factor in to the owner and PM statements. Is that what you're looking for? Like a cleaning fee where the owner is paying the cleaners so you want to send them $100 of the cleaning fee and keep $20 for yourself?

Or are you expensing the entire $120 cleaning fee to the owner, but want to track that you sent $100 of that to cleaners and kept $20 for yourself? This isn't something you can do yet. OwnerRez doesn't currently track payouts to vendors like cleaners, so there's no way to get down to that level on an expense split.

Yep, that's a great trigger concept!

We don't currently have a way to target other bookings in a trigger, but it's something to think about for sure.

My suggestion would be to go the other way -- mark the listing site criteria for direct discounts "everything but" Airbnb, HomeAway, VRBO. That way it's simple and clear. And then set the channel based discounts specifically for the listing sites where you want them to apply.

Similarly, for nightly rates, put in your standard direct rate. Then in the settings for each channel you can set a percentage adjuster to increase it.

I just want to hear from those who are in a situation similar to mine:
~ Mostly family destination (but occasional spring breakers);
~ Drive-to destination;
~ Semi secluded or secluded cabins/houses sleeping 10+ (i.e sorry I am not interested in condo buildings, apartments, or homes in densely populated area, or very small ones);
~ NOT a luxury / high end pricing and clientele (middle of the road).

WHAT DO YOU USE:
a) Traditional refundable damage deposit ( collected before stay and refunded after stay same way it was paid).
b) Sec Dep (credit card hold).
c) Ownerrez-linked damage insurance:
~ pass on to renter?
~ pay yourself?
d) self-insurance (i.e collect non refundable fee for each booking to use it as a damage repair reserve)

e) have you recently changed form one method to another? Any change in renter behaviors observed after you changed? (i.e if you went from refundable deposit to nonrefundable damage waiver fee, for example).

TIA

We've noticed some issues with channel bridge rate push over the past couple of days. Turns out VRBO changed the interface a bit, which caused channel bridge to stumble.

We've submitted a fixed version of channel bridge to Google, but they have recently made the review process for extensions take perhaps a couple of days. As soon as the update clears their review process, this problem will be fixed -- we'll keep you posted here.

This doesn't affect HomeAway API or channel bridge downloads. Just the HomeAway/VRBO channel bridge rate push.

My email client has an annoying habit of gathering emails together by subject line, which ends up confusing me when I have threads from unrelated bookings shown together.

Occurred to me that it's more personal (and possibly more effective) to include custom fields like {CFIRST} and {BARR} into most of my email templates. Hopefully it will increase the likelihood of guests opening the emails I send !

The way AirBnB displays availability is not what it should be. Definite PITA for many of us. I'm not sure what your goal is (maximizing nights booked, not splitting a weekend, etc.) but would it help if you said all bookings had to be a minimum of 6 nights but then did Gap Nights with a minimum of 2 or 3?

I totally agree with you! AirBnB's display is not good. Interested to see if anyone has a work-around because it's not helpful.

I'm a noob and testing my calendar integration with Airbnb API.
I'd like to disallow check-ins on Saturdays, as it 'splits' the weekend. I see how to set Arrival Restrictions, but in Airbnb it makes it look like every Saturday is booked/unavailable (even though in actuality you can book over the 'unavailable' Saturdays).

1) is there a way around this? ie a way to show Saturday as available but NOT allow Saturday as the check-in day?
2) anyone have the 'no-check-in-Saturday' rule, and if you've operated it for a while, any impact on people booking your weekends?

thanks!