General Help and Questions

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Many of us use an online guidebook through another company, but is it possible to use our own hosted website as a guidebook?
Can we just add a page that people can't see unless given the specific link for it, thereby basically hosting our own online guidebook that the general public can't see unless given access.

Thank you! Nice site! I don’t see that your site is using the ribbon or the widget to enter a date and show all available properties? I only see the booking widget where you pick a single property. The widgets I’m talking about are the ribbon and the booking/inquiry that gives a list of available properties.

Discount codes on Airbnb , IMO, make 0 sense. So you discount a stay by $50 (for example) only to have Airbnb add on higher "service fee" thus negating your discount. If people want discounts they should book direct without add on service fee- that is a nice discount in itself.

I do not seem to have any of those issues, that may be your website builder/provider. You can look at my site bluemountaincabins.com

are you Ownerrez integrated with vrbo? if not, you do NEED to enter banking info. As someone mentioned above, they have moved from yapstone payments processing (3rd party) to in-house. if you do not provide the info, they CANNOT pay you and they will shut your listing down. When you signed up, you provided your info to yapstone (which is 3rd party processor that they no longer use and are winding down). When they switched payment processing to inhouse, by law they need to ask for your bank info explicitly - they cannot just take it from yapstone. This was a big hoopla last year, about August I think? when the move started.

This was posted on HA forum. Looks like issue on Vrbo side though.
https://community.homeaway.com/thread/60546

Hello,

Re: RogersVRs (personal) account

I am taking advantage of PriceLabs's 30 day free trial so have connected PriceLab to my OR account. My OR account is integrated with VRBO and Homeaway.

I still see my regular "seasonal" rates on the VRBO calendar, but the PriceLab suggested rates are being calculated on quotes. That can lead to confusion & unhappiness from guests, who expect to pay the rate they see on the calendar but might end up with a more expensive quote if the PriceLab rates are higher than my seasonal rates.

Is this happening because the PriceLab rates are "Spot Rates" but VRBO calendar shows seasonal rates? Is there a way to change this?

Re: instructions on this document:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/channel-management-api-integrations-property-field-differences

I'm wondering how to make sure my Airbnb guests can see the "House Manual" (or now called "Guest Resources" in Airbnb) information?

Looking at the "Property Field Differences", is it the "Guest Access" field in OR that populates to the House Manual or Guest Resources manual in Airbnb? This would be where I would have entered the Wifi instructions and house manual if I was going to do it through Airbnb (but of course I can't because I'm using the API so it is greyed out on Airbnb.)

cool. what it hard for you to figure out? how long have you been on OR. are you tech savvy?

Hi - I'm struggling with the availability and booking widgets.
- on the booking widget, is it possible to make the font headings on the results page smaller (they are way too big) and customize the wording - to change "details" to "Book Now"?
- is it possible to delete all the descriptions on the availability results, just show the picture and title?
- the ribbon is so squashed on phones - what can be done to improve? Smaller font? Resize for mobile? The majority of users come through mobile, and the ribbon does not work on mobile.
Thank you for any help!
Carolyn

Hi Guys, there are any way to move previous balance forward through statements?

It is not possible to use the OwnerRez discount codes through Airbnb, they are two separate systems, and Airbnb doesn't provide a means to integrate them.

Lydia - I just checked this morning and OwnerRez already has my Airbnb guest's personal email. Weird, I imagine that they are able to pull it using the API and assign it where it needs to be. That's another thing of joy ;-)

My name is Tim and I am a property manager in New York City. I am not a tech person at all. i manage only 5 units. learning ownerrez software has been a challenge, but i am picking it up. There is still so much i do not know. I had my friend's son who is majoring in computer science at Cornell help me set it up . But he is going back to school in 3 days and he will no longer be available. I will be officially on my own and I am kinda nervous. I am looking for a mentor that can help me figure this out. such as:
responding to a booking request.
altering the booking request so It turns into an inquiry.
refund,

I know i will pick it up. but my learning process is more being shown what to do over the phone as apposed to reading an article.
I hope there is a kind PM that would be willing to assist.. I will give them a free weekend in New York :)

If you make Custom Fields to be completed by the guest as part of the rental agreement process, their entries in those fields will show up in their individual booking under Custom Fields. BUT - I do not think your asking for an email as a Custom Field will transfer to the Guest's record. You may have to cut and paste. Maybe the folks at OR can clear this up for us.

I haven't tried that, but that sounds like a logical thing to do. Make everyone provide it, even though I have it already from vrbo guests, but sometimes folks provide different email addresses anyway so can't hurt.

Are you doing this? How do the email addresses get incorporated back to the guest, do I have to do that manually.

One more question, if I create an AirBNB discount code, is there a place an area during checkout on AirBNB that a guest can enter it?

Rich, have you tried making a custom field requesting the guest's direct email? Make it a required field that they have to complete as part of the booking/agreement signing process.

I just started using Airbnb and haven't worried about having the guest's actual email, but you're right I should be getting it.

I didn't change anything with regard to my email templates and triggers for the rental agreement. I think it worked same as with VRBO, nothing needed to change. Now for taxes I had to do things differently because with airbnb I configure all of the taxes myself and with vrbo they collect some taxes (state/county) themselves.

Can you tell me more about how you get the guest's actual email? I figured I'd need to send yet another email template so that I could use the trigger to only send it to airbnb guests, not others.

I don't think that a custom field can be configured to be blank if being pulled on a vrbo guest but otherwise have a request to send email, but in any case I figured that I'd just keep using the airbnb proxy email until someone tells me a good way to get the guest email ;-)

Hi Rich,

I agree! Every day I am learning more how to customize OR to make handling our 6 STRs (10 configurations, each with its own VRBO/Airbnb listing = 20 listings) more streamlined.

I'd like to ask about your reminder to guests to sign the rental agreement. Do you handle that reminder the same for Airbnb bookings as for others?

I'm asking because I use a version OR's "Booking Clean-Up Form" for Airbnb bookings, which makes them provide their personal email address. I use a different message to ask guests who booked elsewhere to sign the rental agreement.

Which message do you use for Airbnb bookings if you have any?

AMEN!

I have to say this - I'm in the middle of the busy ski season with three units, on Airbnb and VRBO, and everything is running smoothly, in large part because of OR. Everyday there are 5-10 email templates going out, and the reminders I've created using triggers are working to get people to sign the rental agreement. I'm confident that my cleaner knows what to do, and that I'm getting fully paid (and signed rental agreement) before I provide anyone with key codes. It's so nice to have automation doing its thing to make my life easier ! Thanks to the OR team for making this great product !

Does anyone know of a company that provides invoice factoring financing for vacation rentals?

Thank you. I've entered URLs into these custom sources and have run the Listing Site Performance report again, but nothing has changed. I still see the [direct] (14 bookings) on the report. I'd like to know which bookings these are so that I can correct the source.

https://snipboard.io/WKr0BU.jpg

Just wanted to mention - if you have at least 5 properties, you can use the HA/VRBO API connection and do your own payment processing.

I took a look at your account, and I think the problem here is that your Custom Sources are misconfigured. You have a bunch of names entered, but no domain names for OwnerRez to detect and identify, so it's getting confused.

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/custom-sources

Yes, that's one of the criteria you can set for the discount code - what sites it is valid on. Make sure you've set up a custom source for your website:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/custom-sources

And yes, the discount codes still don't stack. Do you have an example where it looks like they did? That would be a bug, so please report it via the helpdesk.

@BlueMtnCabins, you said: "There is a tick box in rates where it says pro rate or split. You have to set it up appropriately."

Where is that exactly?

I went to "Seasonal Rates" to a weekly rate and under "Pro-Rate Behavior" I see these options:

Use this rate for bookings with the exact same number of nights
Use this rate for bookings with any number of nights (other nights are pro-rated at the same amount)
Use this rate for bookings with the same or fewer number of nights
Use this rate for bookings with the same or more number of nights

If I click the last option, this option appears:

Only use matching seasons to determine available nights for proration

Is this what you are referring to?

From the very beginning we've used Avalara MyLodgeTax (formerly known as Hotspot tax) to handle the licenses & taxes for our properties.

https://www.avalara.com/

It costs $20/month per property plus an initial $50 set up fee. In addition of course you must pay for each business license that is required but you would have to do that anyway.

You just report to Avalara the number of nights rented and taxable revenue at the end of each reporting period and they make sure all of the appropriate tax authorities are paid the proper amount of tax.

When just getting started with our short term rental business we were kind of overwhelmed with everything and we felt that taxes and proper licensing was absolutely one area we wanted to be sure was done right so we were happy to have Avalara handle this important aspect for us.

I don't know if this is helpful, but when you are looking at the Payment Options page (Property > Rules & Policies > Payment Options) make sure you don't see a little red dot next to any of these:

Direct debit authorization
Tax form

Recently several of my clients received the same message and they had to complete the Direct debit authorization (in all cases) and some had to complete the Tax form (if they hadn't already done so).

I think everyone has to complete the Direct debit authorization form because when VRBO rolled out their new payment system recently they did not include that authorization in the initial roll out. Everyone has to complete that form to give VRBO permission to debit their bank accounts if needed, for refund or chargeback purposes.

If you don't see a red dot next to those items I would assume your account is ok, but you could always call Customer Support and ask them to take a look at it. Their number is ‭(877) 202-4291‬.