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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!
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
Chris L said:
> Woefully inadequateThis 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. :)
Chris L said:
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.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.
