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My rules on my listings for both ABB and VRBO include "Must sign Gulf Lesson Rental Agreement within 72 hours of booking or reservation will be canceled." The triggered OR email link takes them right to the agreement and they have to provide email, physical address and phone number when signing that agreement. I've had zero push back and have had only a couple of people I had to prompt to get it signed. Most do it right away.

Ahhhh - good idea! I will try that. THANK YOU!

Not really an OwnerRez question

Just seeing if you seasoned people have any thoughts or input. I am mostly done prepping 6-7 VRs. Getting ready to do pictures now.

I am struggling with (as new VR owner) pricing. These are the factors going through my mind:

1) Our high season is essentially May into November. I have lost May, June, July

2) Everyone says to lower prices until you get at least 3 positive reviews on each property.

3) ABB Smart Pricing suggests Base, High and other prices. But a lot of owners say Smart Pricing is unrealistic and leaves a lot of money on the table and encourages bargain seekers.

4) I am intending to use PriceLabs, but they key their pricing on YOUR suggested Base Price for a property, when you may have no idea what a good Base Price is.

5) am very motivated to get heads in beds, especially SUNDAY-THURSDAY

QED: I am leaning towards using AirBnB Smart Pricing (except for weekends), and use PriceLabs to have a higher price on VRBO, and an even higher price on Booking.com, to try and let different audiences book.

Thoughts?

Thanks for the details. I will discuss with dev. I'll have to see what the rationale was here.

Speaking of rental agreements, is there a way to get back the ORIGINAL ownerrez default rental agreement?

I just emailed the spreadsheet for you to inspect. You'll see that I compare two other rate sets, plus my own (adjusted) from previous year, and then I adjust each day's rate according to whatever seems right.

Think of me as a human dynamic pricing engine who wants the flexibility to set specific dates (using an imported spreadsheet). I give OR a list of rows, I just want it to consume them and overwrite previous rates I've imported.

I would use Seasonal Rates and break up the time periods into weeks or two week or 10 day periods where the rates will go up and down. Then create a "season" for each of those small periods based on where you will set base rates.

I don't know how your base rate will go up or down or if there are any patterns. For any given week, will the week DAY nights be different than the weekend END nights? Give me a real string of rates and I'll know what to recommend for.

Sounds like you want seasonal with base rates and then set spot rates as you watch the calendar. Spot rates override seasonal rates for whatever night there is a spot rate on.

https://app.ownerrez.com/reports/bookingstats?ExportFormat=&DownloadTrackId=&StartDate=2018-09-01&EndDate=2019-08-31&AsOfDate=&GroupBy=1&PivotBy=4&IncludeBlockedOffTime=false&PivotSummaryField=10&DateField=Arrival#report

I also sent a screenshot by email.

That's what it was. I wasn't able to edit the security deposit amount in the booking, but there was a button to 'reset to property' which did the trick.

In my situation the sec dep is held by VRBO, so it's not really meaningful in the OR side of things, but it's in my agreement. An alert guest noticed ;-)

What is the security deposit amount on the booking > Rules tab? Changing rules at the property level does not change them on pre-existing quotes or bookings. You have to change them there too. There is a "Apply To" button on the property rules page that will bulk update any pre-existing quotes or bookings.

I had tried that but it still gave me the same result. Stale data ($200 sec dep instead of $100).

I have update my properties security deposit settings, so was expecting the refreshed legal document to pull in the new values, but that doesn't seem to be happening.

Thanks Paul ...

My period of interest is the upcoming ski season - mid November 2019 until mid April 2020

I want the ability to set each day in that period to it's own rate, and hopefully req'd min nights.
I expect I will revisit rates about every 4-6 weeks, update my spreadsheet and then import to OR and push to VRBO.

I don't use a dynamic pricing service, but in effect that's what I would be doing. My situation might be unique, I have 3 units out of about 200 very similar units in a resort. Many of those units are managed professionally by two major companies. So to compete I need to monitor their pricing and adjust mine to remain consistent. At the resort it's common to price higher than market for months ahead of a date, and then reduce rates based on vacancies.

Am I completely out of luck here? Or can I use Seasonal Rates in a way that they maybe weren't intended?

Right.

Not naive. Seems right to me. PriceLabs should factor in last minute rate drops on their side already. They may have settings now that help you raise/lower that too, or at least put your finger on the scale a bit.

That will work, Joe. You can create as many triggers as you want. You need to create the email template (for what the trigger will send) prior to creating the trigger.

We only currently support door locks that have their own API system built-in. Most of the Schlage locks use a "gateway" like Vera to operate. Some work directly but it's a moving target. We also tend to support (first) the lock types that most users have asked about. eRL, ResortLock, PointCentral and Kaba are now supported.

Hi Lydia,

Not possible to do that based on the current fields and what our Airbnb/Channel Bridge process would create. You could use a custom field (at the booking level) to manually define this on every booking. So you would open the booking, crunch the numbers and write "$485" (for instance) in that field for the booking. Then when sending the email for what you need to collect, the email template could reference the custom field code so that it shows the manually entered amount correctly.

Go to the booking > Legal tab > Request button and you there you can send them a booking-specific link for what they need to sign.

Can you share the link of the report you're on? That won't show any data publicly. But it will let me see what you're seeing after I go into your account.

Yep, I just answered you on the other forum post about this.

Yes, you are exactly right. Our spreadsheet import is for seasonal rates. The built-in VRBO import creates spot rates. This is because VRBO's entire new rate system runs on spot (or nightly) rates, not periods.

Both seasonal and spot rates have their place. The difference is in the variance - how often do you change them?

Do they go up and down constantly based on market/demand factors? Do you have an algorithim or service (eg. PriceLabs) that is constantly adjusting them for you? If so, use spot rates.

Most users have seasonal periods (high, low, holidays, etc) that they define the nightly rate and weekly rate for. Then they come back and layer spot rates on top of that for different days during the year or create specific date seasons for certain hot periods.

There is a column for min nights. It's the one called Season Min Nights. See pic below.

If you're going to change the rate every day, you should use Spot Rates. They are designed for that and you can set min. nights on those too. I guess you're looking for an Excel import which we don't have, so that might be the sticking point here?

Here's an example of what many users have in their House Rules on Airbnb:

"We supply our own renter agreement and waiver that you must sign after booking on Airbnb. We're happy to provide a copy prior to booking. You must provide a real email address and phone after booking, so that we can contact you directly without messaging through Airbnb for important/emergency matters."

So that satisfies the Airbnb rules of notification. Once a guest books, you send them the signing link from OwnerRez (automatically by trigger) which collects their contact info and gets a signed renter agreement all in one go.

We don't have the identify side yet, but you can certainly ask the guest for a card on file which is encrypted and stored in a way that you can't get human-readable access to. We are fully PCI compliant for storing and managing cards. As long as your House Rules on the channel tell the guest that you are going to do - ask for a card on file and place a hold before arrival - it should be fine. Many others do that.

Those are channel settings that govern how our system will interact with HomeAway based on the couple differences that HomeAway requires.

For payments, there is only automatic because that's the only way to it works for HomeAway. They push us the booking live, along with the guest's card info, and we process it internally using your own merchant account (eg. Stripe, Lynnbrook).

Ignore the rest of those settings for now. Just save and add the channel. Then you'll see an Instructions tab with what to do on the HomeAway side. What to fill out and who to contact. That's the important part to get this started. They will work with you on what all needs to be cleaned up or finished.

Take a look at Tools > Listing Quality Analyzer which will run through your properties and tell you what needs to be fleshed out more. This helps a lot when getting ready for API integration. Otherwise, your HomeAway integration specialist will keep emailing you things that need to be fixed first.

ISSUE:
*** I need to collect 3% from each AirBnB guest to pay my local county lodging tax. The 3% is assessed against the total of: the total rent, plus the cleaning fee plus the admin fee (all of which ABB collects, and each of which are listed separately in my ABB listing).
*** I live in Tennessee, where ABB automatically collects/pays our state and local sales taxes (9.75%). Those taxes are calculated based on the three charges mentioned above.
*** I am trying to see if there is a way to create a Custom Email Template that will pull the three amounts against which my local lodging tax needs to be assessed. I am not active on ABB yet so I don't know what fields OR pulls. I also don't know the specific definitions of many of the "field inserts" OR offers.
*** When writing a custom email it would be great if I could use a field insert like {BTGUESTFEE}. But that specific field won't work if it includes the 9.75% sales tax ABB is assessing. (Because I obviously don't want to charge 3% against ABB taxes.)
*** So, need to know if pulling those three fees is possible and which field insert it would be.

THEN, IF ABLE TO DO THE ABOVE:
*** Is there a way to calculate a 3% against those three fees using something like {BFPPOA}? (I know that's not what that was intended for, but trying to think outside the box here.)

Hahahaaa! Hope I explained that properly. Trying to work smarter, not harder, so setting up something like this thru a trigger email would be amazing. Thanks for any/all ideas!

I found an error in a security deposit amount (I had $200 in OR, should have been $100) but can't see a way to generate a new agreement for the guest to sign.

In my first year I have months with zero bookings. The Booking Statistics report showing cumulatives (ie: annual) nights per booking clearly includes months with zero bookings.

The report shows my annual at about 1 booking/night for the year, when every month with bookings is 2 or 3 nights.

Can y'all fix this? Would be best to calculate the annual across the full year, same as I imagine is being done for each month. Using an averages of averages isn't the right approach here.

The report I'm

from what I've read, it seems that Spot Rates are used to update Seasonal Rates. In the sense that the base rate is set using Seasonal Rates and then a Spot Rate will affect just the given date.

But when importing from a spreadsheet vs VRBO it seems rates are handled differently

a) importing from VRBO (via OR page) rates end up as spot rates
b) importing from a spreadsheet rates end up as seasonal

Can y'all give some insight into the best approach here? My goal is to maintain a permanent spreadsheet with dates per night.

From reviewing the import rates template (rate-import.xlsx) I think I could set individual dates like this:

Season Name = On Season
Start Date = 11/1/2019
End Date = 11/2/2019
Type = Night
Amount = $299

But I don't see a way to simultaneously set the minimum nights, unless it's in the 'Rate Nights' column perhaps?

I like having daily granular rates in a spreadsheet so I can have a permanent record of the initial (and reduced as dates get closer) rates.

To date I've been manually setting in VRBO, but I'd prefer to have a master spreadsheet which I import to OR and then push to VRBO.

Email gets to them. I set up trigger when booking arrives, to send them "please sign rental agreement" email. In the process of e-signing RA, OR collects their actual email, phone, address etc