General Help and Questions

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Inquiries from VRBO and Airbnb are best handled in their own websites/apps, because they do not send us enough contact information for OwnerRez to be able to respond to the inquiry. Once the guest makes a booking, then more information is made available and OwnerRez can take it from there.

You can set up last-minute booking discounts in OwnerRez that can be passed through to the channels.

OK. So understanding "inquiry" is not an option with the ABB API, would be interested to hear from other ABB users about what booking option they've picked with the OR API and if they've had long enough to understand the results.

I'm trying to avoid a double booking between ABB & VRBO. Had one earlier this year and it was not fun to clean up.

I am currently using IB on VRBO. I'm wondering if anyone has picked the OR option for "only guests with verified government-issued ID and who have traveled on AirBnB, are recommended by other hosts, and have no negative reviews...." Seems like that would eliminate most instant bookings. Wondering if that would also make me appear as accepting IB in AirBnB's eyes, which would help my placement in results.

Definitely not. My January & February rates are the lowest, except for things like holiday weekends or Valentines Day. I use the rate calendar to set rates and minimum nights. If most of the month is the same, I'll highlight the entire month and put in the rates. If there's a holiday weekend I'll then go back and change just those 2 or 3 nights. Same for setting minimum number of nights. Just make sure you use the "range" button at the top right if you want to highlight a number of days. Or, if you just want to change all your Saturday night rates, use the "columns" button from the top right. You just have to play with it a bit. Hope that helps.

This confused me when I first started, too. There actually is a difference. If you do some dummy templates you'll notice the choices of who to send an email to under "Blocked Off Time" are different than under "Booking". There are other options also that would affect your ability to send emails to guests. Normally, if what I'm doing involves a message to a guest I always choose "Booking." Seems to work the best for me.

The first choice you have to make is the type of template, there is a list of a dozen choices including Booking, Payment, etc

Seems like all email templates are the same, except that depending on the choice you make you might get some helper text, such as in the subject line for the Payment email template.

Just want to confirm that any choice will work as long as we configure the subject line and content as we want them to be, right?

@Lydia B
Do you use the same rates year round?

I received an inquiry in VRBO but I don't see it in OwnerRez. If you have integration, how do you see initial contacts? I am trying to figure out how I can modify the quote and have the customer book after the integration? Normally, if somebody sends an inquiry from VRBO, will i see that in OwnerRez or only in VRBO? What is the best way to modify an inquiry?

Also, I make pricing less expensive as we get closer to days not booked. What is the best way to set that logic in OwnerRez to feed VRBO? What levels do you choose to discount to?

Thats great info - thanks, I'll go try it right now.

I don't use Seasons to set rates. I use them to designate different times of the year in order to facilitate trigger emails. For example, I have a "Winter Season" set up from November - March. If there's a booking arriving during that time it will trigger an email to tell folks about winter travel. If someone falls into the "Summer Season" they won't get the winter travel email, but they will get the one telling them about the pool we belong to. The only other thing I use them for is to set minimum nights.

Done! Thanks so much.

It used to give me an error. Looks like it worked this time.

Becky - I do neither. I have ski condos and I set rates uniquely per week and sometimes even per day around holidays.

I use spot rates to accomplish this, starting from a spreadsheet and then eventually using the ownerrez Rate Calendar to make adjustments which I then push out to vrbo.

I do not use seasons or monthly settings because for my condos they aren't a good fit.

I edit posts all the time, I edited one two different times this morning. always works as expected for me in chrome.

Just looking for some feedback here from homeowners on how you decide when to change your rates throughout the year.

1. Do you currently have seasons with overlapping months? eg. Sept. 27 - Oct.4
2. Or do you set your rates by months? eg Jan. 1 - 31, June 1 - 30

Can both of you try editing forum posts again please? *I* can do it, and the engineers say there was a forum bug that might have been causing problems which has been fixed.

What happens in OR if there is a double booking? I imagine it's not something that could possibly be overlooked... will emails be sent to owner? Is it visible from an OR screen without having to run a report?

Ok, got it! :)

Yes! Go to the CRM menu and select Guests. This lists all your guests and their information, including emails. In the upper right corner is an Export button, where you can dump the report to Excel or CSV. You may want to Filter it first, e.g. to get rid of guests where you don't have an email or where all you have is a channel proxy. But you can do that easily enough in Excel too.

Kind of. There is a Daily Checklist report that includes much of this information.

1. At the moment, you can't: Airbnb's API does not support request-to-book, only instant booking. If request-to-book is a hard requirement, you cannot use the Airbnb API.

2. It is impossible to *absolutely prevent* double-bookings, as it is not possible to update all calendars literally instantly. There will always be a window of time in which the calendars are not fully updated no matter what method you are using, and it would be possible for a double-booking to slide in.

However, the API connections are much faster than the iCal calendar syncs, and so they make that window of time much smaller. If you are using the APIs with both VRBO and Airbnb, it is still not *technically* impossible to get a double-booking, but as a practical matter, it would be so wildly unlikely that it can be generally ignored.

All things considered, we recommend usage of the APIs wherever possible, as they minimize the likelihood of a double-booking.

Hi all - is there someway I can download the names and mailing addresses of previous guests (or export them into an excel doc) - for Christmas Card posting purposes?
TIA

UPDATE: THIS IS ME EDITING MY POST!!!!! YIPPEEEE! Thanks for fixing that.

FYI to OR folks:

I realized I left out the "l" in frequently, so tried to edit. This is not the first time I've tried to edit a Forum post. I have NEVER been able to do so. Always get the message "An error occured while trying to edit the reply -"

Any suggestions?

Hi, Becky! You may also want to post in the Facebook group "Unofficial OwnerRez Support Group". You might get other owners to answer on FB who don't visit this Forum as frequently. To answer your question: I know a number of folks use a gmail address and also get a Google voice phone number so they don't have to post their private number.

Is there a dashboard/overview type page for OR? I'd like it ideally to show arrivals, stayovers, departures, the inbox, tasks, and guest items waiting on (payment, signature, etc)

TIA

I am a homeowner with one rental property only, and I’m in the process of getting everything set up and “streamlined”. I have purchased my domain name and would like to add an email connected to it that is separate from my personal email. Can anyone chime in with pros and cons for doing this? Anyone doing it now that has any tips? TIA

1) With the new AirBnB API integration I have a "Channel Rules" question. Currently I do not allow an ABB guest to instant book. On the new OR page to "Edit Airbnb Channel" the 2nd field has to do with "Instant Booking." There is no choice for "inquiries only." What do I do if I do not want any instant bookings?

2) Also, one of the reasons I turned off instant bookings on ABB is because of the delay in passing bookings from one OTA to OR to another OTA. I had an incident where I received instant bookings from both ABB and VRBO and it caused a problem because they came in within minutes of each other. I know that's highly unusual, but I want to avoid the possibility. Does the API with ABB change that? Eliminate that as a potential problem?

In case anyone else is interested, here's my new workflow for setting and maintaining a season's worth of rates/min nights. The Rate Calendar is a critical piece to the workflow.

a) I do one large session where I establish Nov-Apr rates, and put them in a clearly marked spreadsheet that I'll save forever outside of OR

b) import the spreadsheet as spot rates, and then 'push' the rates to VRBO or elsewhere

c) (this is new) Whenever I feel the need to revisit rates, I'll now pull up whatever information I feel is helpful, such as comparing with my competition by doing live searches, along with looking at previous year rates for similar days, and I'll have my original spreadsheet open. Next I open the Rate Calendar and change two ranges for any week that I care about - Sun-Thur and then Fri/Sat. This goes quickly, and lets me tweak each 7 day period with a minimum of effort. Any unique dates like valentines day weekend or of course Christmas can get unique rates per day just by either picking a 1-day range or using the toggle feature.

d) After my updates are all made, I need to 'push' the spot rates to VRBO.

e) I now will 'export' the spot rates to another spreadsheet, so that over time I'll have a record of my original rate settings for the season, and then each time I did any other changes. I like that because it gives me the ability in the future to put all the rates for a given property into a spreadsheet and do some simple formulas to highlight dates where changes happened.

This might be more complicated that necessary, but I really like to have the records of rates I've set along with changes... maybe with time I'll get smarter about predicting how to set rates and realize which dates historically need to be discounted.

Chris - I tested on my end and can't reproduce the problem any more. And as a bonus, the toggle button now seems to be working. Until today I couldn't figure out what it did, but now there is a clear boundary put around each date as they get selected.

Personally I don't like the 'toggle' label, it doesn't suggest to me what it's doing. Maybe it could be renamed to 'Multiple' ? Just a thought.

And thanks again, I spent a lot of time considering how to manage dates, and I eventually concluded it's just too confusing to keep up with spreadsheet versions as I make changes every few weeks.