General Help and Questions

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I suspect others in the future will also find this useful...

ok- I went through Email Templates and Triggers, and Reports. I am trying to understand how to set these up effectively and have quite a few questions, below:

1) How do a lot of the custom templates know when to trigger?
For example, Dates Changed, Check-In/Check Out changed - how is things like this triggered?
Or Payment Request - does that automatically know when/what the payments are and verify it happened?
How does it know to send the Refund email templates?
Do these work with all major OTAs?
https://app.ownerrez.com/emailtemplates

2) is there a sandbox or test system where I can learn/fully test process a booking with fake data, credit cards, dates, reports, etc?
everything I see is empty such as reports, so hard to know what they will look like other than column headings

3) Do all guest.email responses from ABB, BDC, HA/VRBO, FK go to the OR Email system? So far, it is forum activity.
https://app.ownerrez.com/emails

4) pending cancellation and other cancellations - how does OR handle for direct bookings and OTAs?

5) Payments - how does OR know/handle that a sufficient payment was made? per a schedule

6) Review Request - how work with different OTAs and direct bookings?

7) How offer adjacent empty dates to current/near future at some discount - to lengthen their stay?

8) TRIGGER
- Payment > Partially Paid (how much constitutes a partial payment - as little as 1$??)

9) REPORTS
Can I remove all but the listing sites I want in my profile from the reports (not all 47) - only VRBO, ABB, BDC, FK, etc

10) REPORTS
Listing site fees report - is this just their commission? What about my admin, pet, PDP, extra guest, damage or other fees?

11) SUMMARY/DETAILS REPORTS
Taxes. In Pennsylvania, listing sites have to remit taxes. But for direct bookings, I have to. How does the system/report handle this? So I know what is my responsibility?

12) REPORTS
Listing site fees - just their host commission? What about my admin, pet, PDP, extra guest, damage or other fees?

13) EMAIL LIST REPORT
Also, is there a way to harvest the email/phone numbers of adult guests who are NOT the responsible party? perhaps when I send out the lease agreement? would like to gather for future "past guest" list (for future offers, etc).
Are all these emails pulled effectively from the major listing sites (BDC, FL, VRBO, ABB)

All. In description, heading 3 looks bold in edit mode, but is unbolded in view mode (after save)

They are off by default for imported bookings, however looks like you did a batch update a couple weeks ago when updating some secdep settings which turned them back on.

I skipped the reminders again for those 60 Airbnb/HomeAway bookings that had them enabled.

Which property are you having issues with? I'll have a look.

For Airbnb bookings, this should be turned off automatically. We shouldn't have to go in and turn each one off manually. Can this be done? My Airbnb guests are receiving these emails and it really quite annoying. Thanks!

try searching on those terms. That was just one promising hit

I have some heading 3 levels in my Descriptions. They look bold in Edit Mode, but they are often not. You have to select each one and apply bold, and it looks the same. So I wound up with a lot of heading 2s that were plain text and didnt look heading-ish upon save.

Play around a little in different ways with them and you should see.

Dunno. The following may help. I just searched ifttt and thermostat. There were other results. If you cannot, couldn't you also do by day of week to get some benefit, such as if most people check in Friday and out Sunday, make this your default?

https://ifttt.com/honeywell_total_connect_comfort

I am resurrecting this topic in case someone has solved how to control the thermostat from ical? or some other way? I do not usually care to change temp on a turnover day, but if the gap is 2 nights or more, I'd like to have some way of setting temp. to what it should be. I have 3 VRs with 7 thermostats and 2 apps between them (5 are Honeywell 9000) so we are constantly on "thermostat watch". so I would like at least to be able to deal with the Honeywell bunch. If someone has figured it out via IFTTT or something else, please do share.

That would be good. Expedia is actually a family of things like Orbitz and others, that I consider philosophically separate from HomeAway + VRBO. I would like to try to use each separately if possible

If you add a custom channel called "Expedia" it will match that up.

We've got a planned overhaul to split the "channel" and "listing site" concept so it's a two level thing which will solve this issue for good.

When using channel bridge to import bookings from vrbo which orginated from Expedia, I am seeing a message that Expedia isn't recognized, using vrbo instead.

Is there a way to capture the fact that the guest used Expedia (via Vrbo) to book with me?

If it didn't break anything else, maybe I could make a custom channel called VRBO-Expedia ?

@JTVR, also note that while full blown API may become available for a given channel, channel itself may have a limitation (live VRBO and TA) that you MUST have 5+ properties. I think this is artificial limit. But, since I have only 3 so to me it won't matter whether OR has API with given channel or not - the OTHER side won't allow me to integrate. I think Channel Bridge works quite well.

We may do TripAdvisor channel bridge as well, do you get a lot of bookings from them? We have held off thus far on the rate push because they only support seasonal rates and the current channel bridge rate push uses the nightly rates that both HomeAway and Airbnb use now.

Thanks, Chris. Very helpful. Do you plan on having channel bridge for TripAdvisor since the API is only for accounts with 5 or more properties?

ok, clarification?

January:
"Currently, we have API Integrated integration for Booking.com, CanadaStays, TripAdvisor and (very soon) VRBO/HomeAway."
"we built an in-house tool called "Channel Bridge" that simulates the user with the goal of copy and pasting data between their channel account and their OwnerRez account. "

Now:
Is the theory that once you have API integrated for TA, VRBO, etc the channel bridge is no longer needed?

I had answered on the support request, but figured I'd copy it here for everyone's edification...

Channel bridge rate push works for VRBO/HomeAway and also Airbnb.

1) Set up Channel Bridge (if you haven't already): https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/channel-bridge-install
2) Open the Chrome browser and log in to VRBO (or Airbnb)
3) Go to Settings > Channel Connections and click on the VRBO channel in the list (if you don't have one already, hit the Connect button, find it under Synced Channels, and add it)
4) Hit the Change Property Settings button and enter your VRBO or HomeAway listing numbers (just the numbers, nothing else)
5) Hit the Push Rates button which will open up a dialog where you can review the rates to be pushed
6) In the dialog, use the Push Rates button to perform the push.

Hi Paul,

Can you give further information on which sites the channel bridge can now push rates to and how to do it? I reviewed the literature and do not even see the rate push being an option, but know like you said the documentation writing is taking a back burner to the pushing of features.

Thanks,
Elizabeth

I tried WP and hated it. I am somewhat of IT person but it was anything but easy (site created by someone and I was just trying to edit and maintain it). I am much more happy with sitelio hybrid type site - it has templates and drag and drop, yet allows customization like inserting scripts, seo etc.

Yep, there are a couple ways to do this. Most people just add a few paragraphs to their standard agreement that refer to "if pets are included" and show the pet count.

You can also set up a separate pet legal agreement template if you want. Then either go to the Legal tab of booking and request an additional signature on that.

If you want to set up a trigger to send that automatically you can do that as well. It'll definitely work for direct bookings, but keep in mind that for listing site bookings, many don't send pet counts, or send a single "has pets" flag which we treat as one pet.

Did you overwrite the description with the one from the other or combine the two?

The character count limit includes the HTML formatting markup, so it will be a bit more than the actual text. You can see that by hitting the <> button in the toolbar to view the HTML. Those are both around 14k characters so individually they'll work fine but if you combine them together you end up at 28k characters which is over the limit.

You've got a lot of content in there, and if you're planning on distributing to channels you'll hit their limits before you hit ours. HA has a 10k character limit and TA a 5k character limit. Both of those limits are text only (we automatically remove the formatting when pushing to channels).

VacationSoup is a combo -- site builder tutorial videos to build your own site in WordPress, and then a cross linked blog sharing system. If you want to build your own site in WordPress and need help with that, it's not a bad way to go. If you want a quickly set up and easily editable site, our hosted website is a lot simpler. Our site can't do every single advanced thing WordPress can, but it does it's one job of being a vacation rental site very well.

Everyone should have a website for their vacation rental in my opinion -- it's great for marketing to repeat guests, and as a place to send leads you already have. Its not going to show up on the first page of Google except for very specific search terms because there's so much competition. But even without search having that personal location for guests is very beneficial.

Yep, it'll be based on whatever template you use, and you'll be able to add your own callout sections.

I cannot imagine a way to make that happen automatically reliably.

It would likely have to be done similarly to your rental agreement, through a trigger and a template.

But I am sure Chris or Paul will illumine shortly

Is there a way to get a signed pet agreement but only to those guests who have pets? Excuse me if the answer is obvious. I'm new here. Hi everyone!!

Cindy Wheeler

I am getting 20,000 character limit error in Description when I am not yet at 20,000 characters!

"Please correct the errors below.
The field Description must be a string with a maximum length of 20000."

HERE (error): https://app.ownerrez.com/properties/182669/description/edit

I COPIED FROM HERE (no error): https://app.ownerrez.com/properties/220953/description/edit

And all I am doing is copying the Description Text from another property, which does NOT have the error.

As always, when I try to edit my post several minutes later, it is rejected with an error.

I was trying to say "I assume this will work smoothly even if we did a lot of surgery on the contents of the default agreement?"

I am all for it.

I have seen in two places that the cancellation verbiage should be at the BOTTOM of the page near signature. This appears to relate to enforceability. It shouldn't be buried within the body of the agreement.