General Help and Questions

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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?

If I were doing this occasionally I would just export the list of bookings that I want to email, then take the spreadsheet and grab only the email addresses. Then I’d combine them all with commas in between, And just paste them into my own email client. Or of course I could send the email from Ownerrez it self.

All you really need is a list of comma separated email addresses. Once youhave that you could paste it into any place where you were sending an email from

I think as long as you’re dealing with 50 or less you shouldn’t have to worry.

The Excel formula would be something like this, assuming that you have all of the email addresses in a single column, one address per row.

= A1 & “, “

If your email addresses are in a column starting at cell A1, type the formula above into the cell B2 and Then copy the formula down word. What you’ll find in the last cell in the B column will be all of the addresses separated by commas

I

I start at the beginning of ski season with a spreadsheet. An also at beginning of summer season. In between I make countless minor adjustments using the new rate calendar.

I agree I can track it outside of ownerrez with spreadsheets, and in fact I try to export a new spreadsheet after each session of changes with rate calendar. But even though I’m extremely experienced with excel it’s still a pain to try to determine how rates changed over time.

A database would Be a much better approach, especially if it could automatically display a small visual of rate changes per date.

So in short, it’s just too hard to do outside or OR, that’s why I’m asking them to add a history feature.

That would work, but I'm lazy! :) Not sure I want to be repeating that process 50 times or more. Would be nice to be able to send to everyone without going through something like that.

Lots of folks in my area (Smoky Mountains of TN) don't allow check-in or out on a holiday. Most of us also require longer stays for a holiday. I don't know your market so hard to say what you should do. Also, keeping housekeeping happy is SO IMPORTANT!

I recently had a conversation with our housekeeper about scheduling cleanings on a holiday (like Christmas or Christmas Eve). My solution is if we take a booking that checks out on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day I'll just block off that night so that we don't get a booking arriving on that day.

Yes, it means I might cheat myself out of one night's rent...but is the chance of this happening greater than the possibility that you might be hurting your opportunities of renting your holiday week by placing a requirement on when the guest can check out?

Hi Rich,

I'm curious...when you enter Spot Rates in OR, do you enter them directly on the Rates Calendar? Or do you use the OR import/export spreadsheet to do it?

If you use the OR spreadsheet then you could just create a new spreadsheet and save it to document those rates.

Or, have a "Master" spreadsheet to archive the rates and each time you change the spot rates just copy that particular OR spreadsheet onto a new page of the Master, with maybe the date as the name of the sheet?