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The two choices I got were using booking.com payments if I wanted to have the guests pay before check-in, or I could collect a payment from guests at the door, and there is no way in the world I want guests to be able to wait until check in to pay!!!

Can ownerreservations, using Lynnbrook, to collect payment from the guest earlier on booking.com?

Amazing how many arbitrary difficulties these sites set up to make it hard. Working on booking.com profiles.

Once I register a property, I cannot (on my own) modify the: property name (as published), taxes, fees.I have to contact them to do this via b.com email. I also cannot have them make the property name more than 25 characters, even though someone did this a few days ago or me!

Also didn't realize you cannot enter text into property profile. They weave it out of your selections. Makes it harder if you have particular instructions not in their complex checkbox pathways

Cant wait to see how vrbo and airbnb strangle me with such simple stuff.

OwnerRez pushes the nightly rate and a per guest fee if you have one.

Any other fees like cleaning fees, and also taxes need to be configured on the booking.com side and will pass through to OwnerRez.

This is talking bout a one-off payment request change -- if you do that, it'll come through to OwnerRez as well.

OwnerRez supports all of the above (charging the card directly, booking.com payments, etc.). It will select the correct option based on the policy sent over from booking.com and whether they include credit card info.

You should be able to do a policy setting for 60 days or nonrefundable on booking.com but sometimes they like to hide that and encourage looser policies -- contact booking.com support if it's not showing for you.

Same thing on the credit cards. Sometimes they force new accounts to use booking.com payments for the first few bookings, then allow switching to the credit card integration after that.

?

They let me choose nonrefundable policy for my properties. At least it looked that way.

The booking.com payment collection said that it would charge guests ahead of time. My other option was collecting from them at the door, which is absolutely not what I want

My theory is that more cookie curter hotel like units (like condotels) may be better suited for b.com and they get booked there. Unique stand alone whole houses are not.

If you are new (i.e do not have account from the past already) they no longer allow non refundable policies for newly signed up listings. just wanted you to know.

As I said, someone else in the building only gets his bookings from booking.com. I think it is Highly regional, as Airbnb and VRBO are oalso highly Regional.

My cancellation policy will be non-refundable. I will also allow them to cancel a few hours after booking is that apparently cuts down the cancellations

I have ownerrez set up to collect 60 days prior stay. Prob is, that B.com advertises that they do not have to pay till day of arrival even though my cancellation policy says 60 days. I made up uuuuuge poster among my property photos saying that payment will be collected 60 days prior to arrival. I think couple of people questioned it. But since I only had 3 bookings that actually stayed (and not canceled among 2 properties, and almost a year) I guess this is an inconvenience to explain to them every time that I have to deal with. I am about ready to pull the plug on b.com as they ironically bring no bookings./

This came through my booking.com email. Dated August 2018, like many emails I get from them. Not sure if they are catching up. I have been there for a week, setting up properties.

It deals with how to charge extra fees during a guest's stay, which would be useful for tours, extra services, charges, etc. Not sure if anyone has actually tried this.

My understanding (Airbnb forum) is that AirBnb makes this difficult. Not sure how HA/VRBO works regarding this.

------------------------
Dear Partner,

We’re happy to announce that you can now charge your guests for additional fees directly in the extranet. From breakfast to city tax, it only takes a few clicks to charge the guest for these additional fees.

How does it work?

Go to the ‘Reservations’ tab of your extranet. Click on the reference number of the reservation. On the ‘Reservation details’ page, click the button ‘Request additional fee’.
Fill out the ‘Additional Fee Request’. Be sure to include a description of the charge (i.e. cleaning fee).
The guest will automatically be sent an email asking them to pay the fee. Once the guest accepts the charge, you’ll receive their payment within 3 days.

Please note that you can only request payment during the guest’s stay.

We hope you enjoy this hassle-free way of charging your guests.

Kind regards,
Your Booking.com Team

For the time being, I think I plan to use Booking.com payments, because it looks if I collected to my own credit card processor , itwould not take the payment until the day they check in?? (my read of the Booking.com site)

Or can OwnerRez functionality collect the payment immediately > Lynnebrook > bank?

New to using booking.com...

There's a portal access area in the PM module that you can use to grant cleaning staff user access to view the calendar only, and give them the guest info that way: https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/portal-access

Hi,
I have 4 cabins colocated on a lake. I have a local do the turnovers, and have been having him just look at the ribbon calendar to figure out when to clean. If a booking comes in last second, then I call him to make sure. Seems to work fine.

But, we're offering linens now, and it would be helpful if he could see how many people are staying, which is not available in the public availability calendar.

How do most people manage their cleaning schedule?

Thanks,
-JJ

Multiple bed and breakfast owners are very sold on tripconnect as a cheap source of direct bookings

Ah, I think I read about it someplace. Unless these "pay per clicks" are very cheap, I would not trust TA with this. I used to have VHR subscription (VHR was owned by TA but for a while continued to run as simple old fashioned subscription where they sent you an inquiry and you handled further communication and booking). So when sub was nearing the end, many owners observed that there would be a slew of "inquiries" that lead to nowhere. I was already using Ownerrez , so it responds and it has email tracker. The quotes that were sent in response to these "inquiries" were NEVER opened by "recipient". I strongly suspect that these "inquiries" were generated by VHR/TA employees in order to entice owner to re-up. Having said that, I am very skeptical about anything TA would promise you.

Cpc/commission (tripconnect) and sponsored placements are totally different from FlipKey and TA's other VR sites. They direct visitors directly to your website, as opposed to being handled my FlipKey or their other vacation rental sites

In other words, the web traffic are your direct customers and not handled by TAs vacation rental sites.

Night and day

Not sure I understand. TA and Flipkey are the same, just like VRBO /Homeaway.
How does traffic goes to your hosted website from TA? Only few guests, I found , would find your property in TA (or other OTA) and then google it to find your direct site.

My real intent is to use TA as a cpc/commission/sponsored placement model. Not FlipKey, etc

Essentially, it is like Google AdWords but within TA. So traffic goes to your (hosted) website, not through FlipKey or the TA vac rental portfolio. Therefore you control the payment, customers, etc. This is direct booking.
Ownerrez cannot currently do this, so I'm going to be using a PMS just for that function.I already discussed it with the owners here and I'm going to share my findings in case they wish to join the trip advisor group that can do this. I learned about this at a bed-and-breakfast forum, and they highly acclaim this method.

Vacation rentals cannot do this, so I'm presenting my rental units as Suites within a hotel.

This is not my question/thread. I consider the OP doubts about the product were likely the result of not doing proper research, understanding, due diligence. It, OR, and other similar functions are not pushbutton.

Substitute OR for PL and that is my point.

JTVR, you seems almost hostile to someone who is trying to answer your question by sharing their experience with Price Labs by just trying to "shoot the messenger". Seems like you already know all the answers, so why ask then?

Guess what. TA no longer allows 100% upfront payment. I had that and they unilaterally overrode it 10 20/80% split. There was a big discussion in Say No group. They explained it by saying that way you get more bookings (not). They should try reducing their insane commissions.

So, TA is set to only take bookings 90 days out. Payment in full required in 60 days out. If some rare booking comes in....

Just make a help topic pointing to this thread, or tweeze out the critical parts from top to bottom under new help topic with a useful name. But this stuff is practically gold.

Maybe put it at the beginning of the connecting to a channel menu item

So domains and DNS can host different services. A web site is one service and email is a completely different service. For the hosted websites in OwnerRez, we only provide the website part (this is the A/CNAME records you configure on DNS).

You need a separate email provider to handle email (this is the MX type records you configure on DNS). Often your registrar will have an email service they provide and you just have to configure the DNS properly for that. It sounds like you've got email on your other domains with them, so ask if there's a way to use their email service but still have the website point to OwnerRez servers.

If not, you can use GSuite like Paul mentioned, which gives you GMail but at your own domain: https://gsuite.google.com/. There's tons of emails services, another couple I know of are https://www.fastmail.com/ and https://www.pobox.com/.

Basically what you'll do is to find an email provider, sign up with them, and they'll give you the correct MX records to configure on your domain's DNS to make that Sales @ JimThorpeVacationRentals.com email address work.

OK - my other domains (besides this one - using your hosted website service) are on a standard host.

So I chatted with my domain registrar and they said:

"Do you have a hosting to use for the domain's email service yet please? You could confirm with them about this issue as all the files are configured there. If they do provide MX records for you, then you can set it up for your domain."

"Looks like the domain is using our custom DNS. You could set up DNS records for your domain at the same page to connect your email hosting to your domain name."

My Domain settings include:

DNS Settings: Dynadot DNS
Email Settings: Email Settings do not apply to custom DNS

In other words, not really sure how to do this, and still not sure how to use this email (Sales @ JimThorpeVacationRentals.com)

You didn't miss it -- I was just thinking that myself as I was writing that out!

I might have missed it, but the above should be a help topic... Perfect!

The pre-booking process is different on all of those sites, but you can funnel in the post-booking process to one standard process. Here's the lowdown:

VRBO will give you the real guest email address and phone right off.

Booking.com, TripAdvisor, and Airbnb will give you the phone number and a passthrough/platform email address that will send email through to the guest. TripAdvisor will strip links in the email until full payment is made, the others will always pass them through, so my recommendation is to set TA to full payment required up front. Booking.com does some wonky things with hyperlinks, so the best thing is to include the raw URL for links.

Airbnb includes the passthrough email and phone number on the iCal. The rest require API integration to get that information in automatically, so I'm assuming you'll have API integration. If not you can use channel bridge for VRBO, and booking.com and TA would need emails entered manually.

Once you've got the passthrough/platform email address (or real guest email address in the case of HomeAway), the next step is to send them an email with the renter agreement signing link. The renter agreement signature process collects their real guest email address as well as the e-signature on your rental agreement template. Best way to do this is to create an email template and trigger on the booking created event, with a criteria for those channels (HomeAway, VRBO, booking.com, Airbnb, TA). Include the {BULEASE} merge field which is the renter agreement signing link. Here's an example (the example talks about Airbnb only, but the same technique works for the API integrated channels as well): https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/airbnb-request-for-contact-info-real-email-address-and-signed-renter-agreement

After the renter agreement is signed and you've got the real guest email address on file, the rest of the process will run just like a direct booking, sending out your scheduled/triggered emails to the guest etc.

If you want to do the security deposit hold in OwnerRez for HomeAway and Booking.com, check the "use OwnerRez security deposit settings" option in the channel settings and note that you will be doing that in your house rules on the channel. For Airbnb and TA, they have their own methods of holding deposits, so you'd continue to use those.

I find your assessment borderline naive. When you start using a complex piece of software, it is your responsibility to research, understand and configure it to your needs. PriceLabs is like OwnerReservations. There was a lot of thought that went into setting OR up.

PriceLabs or any other dynamic pricer may or may not be present in your market. Did you determine that?
How did you determine your base price?
Did you deeply dig into the PriceLabs help and instructionals and use their support to optimize and configure it to your situation?
Do you truly understand prices for your market? Across all seasons and days?
Do you understand all the variables that go into pricing? events in your area or nearby?
Do you really think Airbnb pricing is reliable? It is roundly hated on many other forums, often cheapening listings just to generate commissions.
Do you understand how to use the min night optimization there also?
How do you know "bookings have dropped?" Do you understand yield management? Supply and Demand?
untrustable?? How in the world do you know?
the rates are different? of course they are!!! This is called dynamic pricing!!! This is not a science, sometimes max revenue is achieved at a lower price with higher occupancy or a higher price with a lower occupancy on a razor's edge - and the decision might be applied to similar properties the same day.

The user is going to be totally responsible for using it properly. Right now, heading in the wrong direction... Most people properly using correct dynamic pricing, that works in their market, will see a 5-30+% yield increase. And sometimes they will tweak the pricing if they know of the occasional huge event or anything that creates a surge in their area,

ok, my question above was "hijacked" a bit, so bringing them down again:

The burning question is:
...Realizing that each of these 4 sites have their own processes and methods and ways. Including how they communicate with clients
...Realizing that how or if they provide guest phone number and email can differ...
How does the various email templates (lease agreement/signature, collecting payment, security deposit, etc.) work with Booking.com, TA, VRBO, Airbnb?? Does it not work well or have issues with any of these 4 I might not know about?