General Help and Questions

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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.

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.

Hi - it would be great to be able to enter two different names on a CRM record...for those who are partners or have different last names but should be on the same record. Thanks!

?

Bumping this in hopes Chris or Ken can tell us what's going on. THANKS!

I'm having a problem too....

triggers I can't delete
- allergies
- yapping dog
- car payment

email templates I can't delete
- Are you drowning in debt?
- Have Arthritis Pain, then this message is for you !!!
- We have your wanted meds at low prices only

Is it a problem that I'm sending 10,000 of these an hour from Owner Rez?

;-)

You shouldn't be getting stuck in a Catch-22 like this. Can you write in a support request to help@ownerreservations.com and tell us the specific name of the template and triggers that is doing this to you?

I am trying to delete a few email templates. They say they can't be deleted because they are associated with triggers. I tried to delete the triggers, but it says that they can't be deleted because they are associated with email templates.

If you have low volume, we've found that Stripe is more willing to establish a merchant account for you than other providers. You might give them a call.

As far as using your PM for payments, the simplest solution would be if your PM would agree to use OwnerRez, or to allow you to use his payment processor in your OwnerRez account to receive payment. That would work normally.

Otherwise, what did you have in mind for payment - that your guests would be sent over to some other website where your PM is able to accept payments? You could give instructions for that in "Add A Custom Payment Method", but I think a lot of guests would find that kind of sketchy and be reluctant. You'd also have no automatic way of knowing who made what payments when, and of course OwnerRez wouldn't be able to schedule or collect any payments on its own. We don't recommend this approach.

I found the setting. Please ignore / delete this post. Thanks!

Hi there!

New to OR this month. In our environment we don't do commission on hosting fees (but oddly, we do on taxes collected).

For the hosting fees, is there an option to set them specifically to "Deduct Commission at [ ]%?"

I see that I can do it manually on each transaction associated to each booking, but I'd rather have it deducted by default as not to pay commission on the amount.

More Detail:
We are API integrated to AirBNB, VRBO, Booking.com. When we receive bookings at least from AirBNB integrated, a "AirBNB Host Fee" is created automatically and commission is generated based on "Gross" instead of "Net" charges. If there is a different approach I'm all ears...

Thanks!

The CRM > Guests report includes snail mail addresses, and can be exported to Excel.

You can find a similar report containing a list of guest email addresses under Reports > Mailing List, which also can be exported to Excel.

Both these are driven directly by the main database that stores guest information as it is available, and will include whatever has been recorded.

For anyone who is setting up a Stripe account and runs into this error, this support document will be useful:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/stripe-process-payments-unsafely-setting

I am still undecided about setting up my own merchant account due to my low volume of direct bookings. I currently have my PM handle all my payments, and then of course the other big websites as well. Is it possible to add a link to my PM under the category "Add A Custom Payment Method" so that renters can still instant book but so that all my payments for direct bookings run through my PM?

Yes i would be interested in this as well, but for email. Could guest email addresses automatically populate, upon confirmation of booking, to a collective list?

Hi Guys... it's a second VRBO guest trying to pay with card and I receive this error message:
"Error processing card: The bank did not approve this request. Details: Sending credit card numbers directly to the Stripe API is generally unsafe. To continue processing use Stripe.js, the Stripe mobile bindings, or Stripe Elements. For more information, see https://dashboard.stripe.com/account/integration/settings."

What was my mistake? :)

How do I generate a mailing address list (snail mail, not email) to export to Excel, so that I can print labels and send a gift to my guests from the past year? I don't see any reports that include guest mailing addresses. Thanks in advance for your help!

Yep, the system in OwnerRez isn't built for sending out newsletters. Our email provider only allows sending transactional email related to a specific booking, not a seasonal blast. When you're doing a newsletter, different rules apply -- CAN-SPAM act, unsubscribe links.

Instead, look in the Reports section for the Mailing List report -- that'll give you a dump of email addresses, just export to Excel. Then if there's just a few do the BCC method Rich mentioned. For more, use a tool like MailChimp or Constant Contact. That'll let you import the mailing list and create a really nice looking newsletter template. MailChimp is free for up to 2000 email addresses, so it's a great way to do a professional newsletter out to your guests.

We don't have any charge for analytics in OwnerRez, that's just something you enter in on this side.

Did you work with a someone else, a different company or person, to set up your analytics? We don't offer that service here, we just have that box in the settings where you can enter the analytics ID and we start sending the data to Google Analytics.

"Importing" is a status that used to mean something but doesn't really anymore. Try going to Change Property Mappings, set the property to disabled, save, then come back and set it back to Everything. Typically that'll fix it.

You won't be edit the items in the listing that are pushed from OwnerRez on the Airbnb side -- they disable all of the buttons when API connected.

This might be self-inflicted. I've "snoozed" my listing until June 11th from Airbnb's dashboard, and after that I fully configured the OwnerRez API and (hopefully) all settings including taxes over on the OR side. I associated an OR property with my Airbnb property and allowed them to synch.

That all worked, I see photos and lots of other details that appear to be correct.

However, when I look at Listings in the Airbnb dashboard this property is continually showing "Importing" and it doesn't seem that I can edit anything else in the listing.

In OR for this property the Sync Status == Everything and the Listing Status == Inactive.

I'm a little paranoid about turning the listing on until I've exhaustively looked at fees, surcharges, rates, etc and confirmed that they are all correct. But perhaps my snoozing is interfering with the completion of importing?