General Help and Questions

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How do you manage smoking at your property.

I would like to indicated folks can smoke outside, but not inside. AirBNB shows smoking as either allowed or not. Thoughts? I do not remember how VRBO indicated this.

Thanks for the additional info. In Canada we do e-transfers, which are instant and confirmed or they can’t be sent. I assumed e-checks were the same but sounds quite different.

A bit more about the reasoning here... The hold-up on e-checks is primarily because they're not a true online payment method like credit card. With a credit card, you charge it and know that it's been charged immediately.

When you do an e-check, it takes a few days to settle into your account, or it can end up not clearing into your account up to a week later.

e-checks can also have a reversal or chargeback up to 60 days.

If your bank can process e-checks for you, you can go into OwnerRez and add a Custom Instructions type payment method and include e-check information there, and then once the check does clear you go into OwnerRez and record that transaction.

None of the reports per-se have the listing site reservation number on them but there is a data export that has it.

Go to the Bookings tab and go to List view, then use the Export button in the top-right to export to Excel. That will include the reservation number (and a ton of other stuff about the booking).

At this time, OwnerRez does not support e-checks, so even if a provider did, we aren't compatible with that. We've thought about it but haven't yet seen a good interface and provider for doing so. No doubt we'll run across one eventually and start supporting that method.

I looked through the forum history but I could not find a discussion on this......

Do any of the merchant account providers accept e-checks as a form of payment?

If you wanted to manually enter the reservation number, or cut and paste it from every booking record, you could make a Custom Field and put it there. But when you run the Date Range report it may not be the only info that shows up in the "Other Fields" column. Not sure that gets you what you want. Hopefully one of the brilliant OR folks will have a much better idea! :)

Thanks, I'll give that a try.

What I'm trying to capture is the Reservation ID numbers for VRBO/Homeaway/Airbnb bookings. I wondered if I entered that number into a Custom Field if I could run a report to see all of them at once.

Actually it's pretty easy once you know how, just not obvious.

Go to the Support area - you can use the button in the menu stripe at the top of the forums. That offers a large Search bar, that you can use for searching.

Yes, you're searching the Support docs - but as it happens, it's also searching the forums too, and any matching forum post will be returned in the result. :-)

Just wondering how I can search a past topic in the forums?

Not sure if this is what you want, but try "Reports", then "Stay Reports" then "Date Range". I use that to see the Custom Field I have for their individual door codes. (I also check the box to include notes associated with bookings.)

Is there a report that captures Custom Fields?

Thanks so much Lydia! We love to hear how OwnerRez helps you in your business and I personally get great satisfaction out of every new feature we add that saves you time or helps you connect better with guests.

Merry Christmas to all of our users and may your New Years 2020 be very prosperous!

Yep, that makes sense. We have plans to revamp that entire section and make it much more customizable.

On behalf of so many folks, let me take a minute to thank all the wonderful people at OwnerRez for everything they've done this year. Yours is an amazing addition to our rental world and your friendly support is so appreciated. We can't wait to see what you have in store for 2020!

THANKS FOR EVERYTHING!

Chris: I was wanting to give them some specific instructions on how to send me the one other item they need to complete their reservation. I have customized the messages in the quote/booking process so was hoping I could do the same with this. I'll find a work-around. Thanks!

There's not a good way to exclude direct bookings with an Everything But type trigger. For that to work you'd create a custom listing source and set that on all of your widgets and inquiries and bookings (if you have it on a widget, it'll flow through to inquiry and booking automatically, but if you created a manual booking you'd need to set it manually).

Instead of that, I'd recommend rephrasing it as an only trigger and pick all the listing sites you want, then uncheck Airbnb.

We've got plans for a channel source overhaul that will split out channel and listing site, and then let you target direct bookings separately in criteria, but no ETA on that yet.

Right now there's not a way to customize the message at the top of the lease signature form -- only the step 3 of the quote process.

What do you need to customize in this message?

Yes, you could do an adjuster on the channel or a listing site specific surcharge and those would be added to the rates.

Right now Airbnb is the only channel where channel bridge will factor back out the taxes you configure though.

I though VRBO was allowing you to set a % for extra taxes? Or at least, back earlier this year when they started remitting taxes they said that was "coming soon". Crazy they still don't.

If you can get to 5 properties, of course, that all goes away because with VRBO API they use the tax settings from OwnerRez and pass it all through to you instead of remitting on their own.

Lydia - when I've done this I just created a custom email template using the 'booking' type and I overwrote everything in the email space with the text that I wanted. And I also adjusted the subject line. Maybe you are using one of the premade templates? I've never needed any of the premade ones, just customize a booking template to match whatever you want.

I am putting together a template which will be used to request additional info from a guest and get them to sign the rental agreement. The default message at the top of the page says:

"Please verify your information before signing the renter agreement."

I would like to change that message. Where can I do that?

Thanks!

Since Oct 1st on VRBO I've been issuing a followup payment for an additional 8.5% taxes (town & village), since VRBO only collect state and county taxes.

I was advised by VRBO to do this instead of increasing my rates proportionally, but it's an inconvenience for me and a kind of bait/switch for guests.

When I recently enabled the Airbnb API I decided to include the extra 8.5% in my rates, and I imagine that will work well also.

I'm thinking I could configure OR to push rates (I only use spot rates) that add the 8.5% taxes, same as I'm already doing with Airbnb.

Does anyone have a recommendation one way versus the other?

I see how to exclude the big booking sites from a trigger, but how do I prevent a trigger from firing when someone books direct with me, such as converting a quote to a booking?

Thanks, Rich, this is handy information! :-)

@Rich

HAHAHA :-D

Merry Christmas!

Hi everyone,

Reviews can either be "global" or affiliated with a booking specifically. It's the same review record under the covers, just tied to a booking or not. If not tied to a booking, then it's global by default.

Now... Our desire is to link every review to a specific booking because that's helpful to certain business processes, but the only automated way to do that is with Airbnb reviews. Both VRBO and TA reviews do not have the proper reservation #'s on them to allow our system to know WHAT dang booking they are for. Their reviews have other reservations #'s, but not ones that are used elsewhere so the automatic matching isn't possible (or at least easy). Airbnb reviews DO have the same reservation #'s on them so our system matches those up automatically.

Now our plan is to do a "fuzzy match" to find the probable bookings because we know the property, general dates of stay and a display name on the review. We believe that those attributes should allow us to make a best guess on the right booking and do auto-matching.

We also plan to add a "match this review" button reviews so that you can explicitly pick and assign the right booking on your own. Just haven't gotten to it.

So that's why VRBO reviews aren't associated to a specific booking and the background on what's going on there.

Yes, this has been requested before. We're hoping to overhaul our guest record handling over the course of the coming year, to help more readily identify repeat guests, allow them to be associated with multiple bookings, and allow more than one guest to be associated with a booking, among other things.

Channel bridge was one of the first parts of the channel management area and is still the only way to do channel management for VRBO if you have less than 5 properties which is their requirement for API integration. We now have a lot more API integrations like Airbnb and booking.com and CanadaStays which do not have a property minimum requirement (and HomeAway/TA which do have a property minimum requirement), and the channel management feature includes all of those as well.

I had a look at your account and I see where the confusion lies -- you were using the channel bridge since the first betas. When we announced the channel feature last October, we gave everybody using channels at that time a promo price for a year (until Dec 2019): https://www.ownerrez.com/blog/introducing-ownerrez-channels -- that promo just expired this month.

I was under impression that C/B was available whether you use the channel management proper or not (I do not - found really no need for it in my set up). I guess I was wrong.

Yes, channel bridge is part of the channels premium feature. It looks like you've had that enabled for a while but recently disabled it.

Re-enable the channels feature and you'll be able to channel bridge again.