General Help and Questions

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One thing I have noticed is that if you set rates out farther than your booking window, Airbnb will automatically reset the booking window. Could that be the case?

To do this, edit the surcharge settings and set the expense to PM gets 150. Then under commission, set it to calculate on entire amount.

That'll include a $150 expense to the owner and then also deduct commission on the entire amount. The expense will remain 150 and the 22.75 would be added into the overall commission on the booking.

"it is against ABB terms to collect amounts outside of ABB"

A lot of people (on the forums I follow) say they collect various things outside of ABB. Some claim they never do the crippled ABB security deposit thing, but request for damaged items directly from What if you upsell when ABB doesn't do that kind of thing?

Curious where you saw this?

BDC (at least used to) do a lot of having you collect from the guest at the door.?

So I am thinking of duplicating couple of my listings as PPB on VRBO. Is there a way to export them to vrbo?

Do you receive bookings or inquiries?

I have a booking window set at 3 months in advance but I still receive bookings 5 - 6 months in advance. Talked to an Air rep and she is clueless. I read the Air community forum and there seems to be mass confusion regarding settings, price tips and advance discounts.

Besides manually blocking my condos on Air does anyone else have a fix or another work around.

ALL these booking site have become a giant PITA.

Can I get commission to generate on both the rent and the cleaning fee?

If a cleaning fee Collected is $175, I am looking to apply commission to that entire figure.

$22.75 in this case is the commission I have aligned to. $150 is what the Cleaning charge is. There is a nominal difference between the two the owner keeps.

The owners expense is then my commission and what we have paid to house keepers. Or $172.75.

3) ignore anything ABB suggests price wise. According to them a 3 bd house that sleeps 10 should be rented for same price as local motel 6 room. Not very "smart".

4) you have to study your competition (size, location, etc). I am sure you know who they are. Go on VRBO (because that displays daily rates on calendar) , find your competition and see their rates. Then knock off about 5%-10% due to newness and lack of reviews. You will gradually raise it later.

Lydia, I am in TN also. I collect 3% tax via Airbnb resolution center. By the way that way they do not apply CC fee or service fee to it but it is a manual process. it is against ABB terms to collect amounts outside of ABB, so some guest may complain.

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?