General Help and Questions

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For a while now, we've been talking about a Housekeeping module for OwnerRez.

Well... we're still talking about it. But we do have one initial feature that may be useful to many of you: a way to schedule a property to be cleaned on a specific day after a booking. Read about that here:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/housekeeping-scheduling

I dumped BDC last year. They are more trouble than they are worth in bookings. 3 bookings that actually paid in 1.5 years between 2-3 properties are not worth the aggravation and effort, to me.

I like it, thanks for the suggestion !

I manually send it via the Airbnb app (or website) when I see the booking come in. It's saved as a template, so it's just a couple of taps/clicks.

Chris L - how is your post-airbnb booking messaging sent? By email? Or somehow through their app?

Blue Mtns - if keycodes are sent by sms they'll be available even without cell coverage. So even in your case with spotty cell coverage, almost certainly your guests will have cell service sometime in the 1.5 days before a visit. Now maybe they'll forget, but I think it would be pretty hard for a guest to be upset if they were emailed and texted several times.

In any case, sounds like sms is being worked by OR so maybe we'll see it sometime in the coming months ;-)

You just need to define multiple discounts. One for bookings of 7-10 days. Then a bigger discount for 11-20 days. Etc., etc. That way the longer they stay the greater the % off. As for the person booking 20 days paying more than if they'd booked for 29, maybe keep the rates the same for everyone and only apply the huge discount to days equal to or greater than 29. A lot of that will depend on how the rest of your market does things.

I have LOS discounts (6-28 days) 10% off regular rate and LOS discounts (28 day or more) 55% off regular rate. To stay for a week or a week and a half for example....its currently cheaper for a guest to pay....than lets say....the same guest was to put in a month (29 days). BUT when a guest selects for example...like 20 days....now they are actually paying more more!...for just 20 days...then if they selected 29 days. So what I am saying is how do you put a CAP on it? At some point, those days...that fall between 18-28 total days...it ends up being more affordable if the guest had simply booked for 28 or more days. But that doesn't make sense right? How do I control this? They should not be paying more. Should it be capped? or is there a trick that I am missing?

> Woefully inadequate

This I will agree with. :)

At the very least, though, everyone else you're competing with on BDC also has crappy descriptions about being X miles from Y. Just make sure you stand out with a good money shot as your lead photo. :)

You can already reply via vrbo. But that can end up in spam also.

In my case I do not care for digital brochures etc. We are in the mountains and reception can be poor I want to ensure that they check their email and actually PRINT directions on paper and bring with them b4 driving to the destination as they may lose satellite and phone signal.

I guess I need to emphasize EMAILINg part more - just today had airbnb person whop was asking about door code (was emailed 3 days ago). I guess ppl do not check their emails...

so why not make cleaning fee a $120?

well maybe it works for condos. I have 3 mountain homes, all different. So whatever descriptions BDC concocts form the list of amenities , like " holiday home is X miles from Y and A milez from Z and has air conditioning" is just not very appealing in my market where people try to outdo each other with descriptions of desirable amenities and nature views. Also, as I understand, a customer on BDC cannot simply browse a property calendar to see open dates. The property only shown is exact dates they enter are available. Which is also not conducive as we are a family destination and people like to browse before booking , even not knowing exact dates. We do not allow 1 night stays either.

I still cannot fathom how BDC is supposedly #1 in short term rentals. Maybe in other countries. Not in my market. Woefully inadequate.
my properties bluemountaincabins.com/cabins

Sorry in advance if this is already address elsewhere - I can't find it. Is there a way to mark up surcharges. I want to set up a property cleaning fee to $120 with $100 going to cleaner and $20 going to PM. I believe there is a way to do this and I read it either on support or forums...if not I must have imagined it.

Of course I will help in any way I can. I am still trying to put the whole thing together, but am hopeful it will be much better.
the OwnerRez customer service has been wonderful.

I'm still testing it out on 2 of my 8 properties, but it's been a weird channel for me.

I use Payments By Booking (I guess I could try to call them and convince them to let me run payments myself, but eh). One nice thing: they don't seem to pass along any kind of credit card transaction fee, so that's an extra ~3% I earn.

I was optimistic, because in my market, there are many hundreds of condos on Airbnb and HomeAway but only (AFAICT) 60-ish condos on Booking, so being a big fish in a small pond held appeal.

I had four or five Booking.com stays in our fall season that went well, which got my hopes up, because they came pretty quickly after I turned on the channel. However, now that we're in our deader-than-a-doornail post-holiday season and rates are in the toilet, Booking.com seems to be attracting some not-so-desireable customers. They do absolutely no screening of people, unlike AB/HA, and so anyone can just go to Booking.com and book. So I've gotten two Booking.com guests in a row that have caused a giant mess for my housekeeper (she actually billed me an extra 2 hours of work on the second) and also stolen things from the property (towels, cups, etc.) and left some minor stains and damage (nothing major, but still annoying).

Earning 3% extra on a $50/night rate for a 2br condo doesn't make up for that. I did keep the security deposit on the second guest (praying for no chargeback); for the first guest, I didn't realize I didn't have my system set up to enforce not emailing the door code prior to receiving the security deposit, so I didn't even get a security deposit I could keep. Total damage/loss cost between the two guests was about $350 (although I really could lower that to about $200, since my housekeeper worked really hard and got the stain on the quilt 90% off, so it doesn't really need replacing, and the melted carpet is in an invisible place, lol). I did earn more than that in rent, so at least I didn't lose money, and both were last-minute bookings that might have otherwise gone empty, so I think I'm still actually (slightly) money ahead, but it's been more stress than I would rather deal with.

I've added a big surcharge to my Booking.com channel, at least for the winter season, just to sort of scare away the bottom-feeders, and I've tightened up my email triggers to not send guests the check-in info until they've signed my RA and added a security deposit. I've also finally decided once and for all (maybe...) to disallow same-day bookings, because they are often more trouble than they're worth; HomeAway doesn't support them, anyway, and I think my settings still allow Airbnb guests to *request* (but not instant book) same-day check-ins.

I'm still continuing the experiment, but we'll see how it goes. It's always a balancing act trying to grow revenue without making things worse. Experience has taught me not to get greedy and allow one-night stays (even during 1-night gaps) or let rates drop below the $50 mark (Pricelabs was suggesting $33/night this time of year!), and maybe experience is now teaching me not to go after same-day bookings and maybe not even to use certain channels. We'll see. :)

From what I've heard, OR is working on getting channel messaging (i.e. replying through Vrbo, Airbnb, etc.) implemented, so once that goes live, we'll be able to send some stuff there, although rich content like PDF welcome packets and things might still have to go via email, and URLs might get censored (TBD).

I signed up for Touch Stay (they were a vendor at the Scottsdale Vrbo conference). It was about $300 for a year for my 7 properties. It allows you to set up a very nice-looking and easy-to-use digital guidebook and then send a URL to guests they can use to access it. They have an option to do booking-specific URLs (so info can be customized per guest and some info, like access info or directions, can be hidden before or after their stay); however, the system to manage this would be pretty cumbersome to use to manually input every stay in. I had a call with the CEO the other day and asked him about integration with my PMS; he said they've actually talked to the OR guys and have found them very friendly and open, but they have to prioritize the big guns like Escapia and V12 first before they can get to smaller players (but they are interested). I guess it's a race to see whether they launch their integration with OR before OR can get their guest portal built. ;)

That said, I've had decently good luck by emphasizing in my post-booking Airbnb message multiple times and very clearly that my system will be *EMAILING* them *VERY IMPORTANT* documents to their EMAIL, not their Airbnb inbox, and that these will be delivered to whichever email account they used when signing up for Airbnb. I have a pretty good open rate and haven't had many issues with people not finding their codes. I also send the welcome packet and door code immediately after booking (I integrate with RemoteLock, so the door code doesn't start working until their check-in time anyway) and again 7 days before stay and once more 1 day before stay.

I do kinda wish the emails didn't go out at 3am...something more sane like noon Eastern time would be more logical, or even better, allowing me to specify the time as part of the trigger...

Posting this because I haven't thought to do this before.

I just created a trigger using booking criteria of 7 or more night stay, and using it to send an email to my cleaner with a request to plan for stocking extra consumables (toilet paper, paper towels, dishwasher pucks, etc.)

This saves me having to notice/remember to tell the cleaner manually.

The only difficulty is that this kind of message would ideally be sent on the day before departure of the booking previous to a long booking. , because that's when the cleaners will be at the property. If there were a gap of multiple days ahead of a week long booking the reminder could be too late. Triggers don't currently allow something like "1 day before departure of the booking previous to this one" but in this case it would be helpful.

Trying to make sure my direct website rates have a larger discount than my other channels. So I set up different rates...a series of monthly rates for my channels. Then I set up monthly rates for "My Listings - Phone In". But the only selection I see as an option is to classify the rates as applicable to "Phone In". There is no category to apply these larger discounts for "Direct Inernet/Web Booking". Is that possibly the same thing?
So if a guest comes to my website...uses the OwnerRez widget...will it show the largest monthly discount? The "Phone In" discounted monthly rate? Because one monthly rate rule was associate with the "My Listings - Phone In"? I would attach picture but I can not.

Don't worry. They will likely cancel anyway or give you a bogus credit card. in 1.5 years with 2 (last few months 3) properties I had maybe 3 or 4 total reservations that actually paid and stayed, and one charge-back. Not worth the hassle. Pulled the plug last year.

Hi Chris,
I just set up booking.com for 1 of my 7 properties so far. I've received 4 booking from them in the last 2 weeks with no credit card information. When I call and speak to booking.com, they tell me that I have to collect the payment from the guests upon arrival until they validate my property which may take a while because it's already been over a month since I set up the account. They won't pass guest credit card info to owners until they do some sort of verification.

So, here's what I was thinking. When a booking comes in, I would set up a trigger email in OR for booking.com guests that would send them a link to pay for their booking following my OR rules which would be 50% at the time of booking then the remaining balance collected 15 days prior to arrival, then have them sign the rental agreement and then collect the security/ damage deposit the day prior to their arrival and send them the eRentalock email along with the confirmation that the security deposit was charged.

1. Is there a field in OR that I can use that will take the guest through the whole process after the booking has been received by OR?
The same process that they would have to go through to book a property (but after the booking has come in)
For example: Select Trip Protection, Pay for the Booking, eSign the Rental Ageement, Schedule the security deposit.

Nope. Oops. :-0

We've made a note of that to get it looked into.

Unfortunately no it has not - but I don't think it was ever due out in 2012. It was hoped for last year, but the Airbnb API integration got priority. We're hoping to have it this year.

Actually, we have a special tool that can import the listing data from any Airbnb or VRBO listing, without having to log in to the channel:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/listing-content-import

For my chukar property, chukar – ORP246282, I set up a season "fall and on" and used the Length Restrictions with a 6 night minimum required if Friday or Saturday is included in the stay. Thus, for example, if a guest tried to book Thursday October 1st to Saturday October 3rd, the system should say a 6 night stay is required.
It does it correctly in your system here:
http://heavenlylodges.hosted.ownerrez.com/heavenly-lakeview-lodge-orp5b3c20ax#availability
But I set up an API integration to a new AirBnB listing and it didn't work correctly. It applies the 6 night minimum stay to the arrival day of Friday or Saturday, instead of if a Friday or Saturday is included in the stay.
https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/42223715?

How can I fix this so it works correctly in AirBnB?

https://www.vrmintel.com/otas-take-on-google-vacation-rentals-asking-eu-to-investigate-anti-competitive-platform/

SMS yes, so many emails end up in spam. I have been texting manually after email is sent, but hey, I do have a day job!

I renamed my website, so now I have 2 items listed under Custom Sources for the same thing. So when reports are run etc it shows extra entry . Any way to remove no longer used custom sources (other than asking support to do so?)

https://www.ownerrez.com/forums/requests/refundable-damage-deposit--how-it-is-displayed-in-quotes

I have same dilemma, Been discussed https://www.ownerrez.com/forums/general-help/secdep-via-cc-hold--insurance-vs-traditional-damage-deposit

The direct text option that was due out in 2012 has it been released yet and if so how do I use it

Airbnb guest just told me my listing shows a disabled parking spot and he asked if it had regular parking. I don't see many controls in Ownerrez that address parking, so how do I add to a better description in the amenities section?