General Help and Questions

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Haven't done them yet, are Google reviews the same as Google plus? Where Google plus is going away?

Has OR considered integration with a mobile device counting sensor like Party Squasher? I think Party Squasher already has integrations with Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking.com. If you have considered, what are your thoughts on solutions you might recommend?

Randy

I was able to get my contract set up with the correct fields pulling from the reservation but I cannot figure out how to make digital signatures work and how to send the contract out to my renter directly from the system. Are there any pages that detail those specific items?

Thanks for any help!

I'm considering using OwnerRez for our B&B, and if I choose to do this, I would want to choose the option of including website building. I cannot seem to find any information about this, except for the price increase for the add-on.
Do you have any examples of websites built through OR?
Thanks

Since the VRBO bookings are dwindling, I found that Facebook bookings are growing. My new and upscale property performs badly on VRBO (https://www.vrbo.com/1233689) , more than half of my bookings are direct or Facebook. I think most of them come from posts in FB groups and Marketplace. But I do hashtag my property name like this #BlueMountainLodge or #RidgeViewLodge in my group posts and marketplace where they do not allow links. So apparently guests find my FB page and follow to website. Social media presence also gives legitimacy and a place to leave reviews/recommendations.
yes I request Google reviews in my post departure review request email but about half were unsolicited. https://goo.gl/maps/RXWjt3hx57x
I do not know which direct bookings come from Google. I have a custom field on checkout form that says "How did you find us?" but people may answer "Google" or "Internet search" and I don't know if it was Google listing or simple search. If there is a way to tell, I would like to know how.

I believe Google has demised G+, so I may need to remove that reference.

@BlueMtn - I notice you have photos to 'Follow on Facebook' and 'Follow on G+', for Facebook in particular have you found it's helpful? With almost 4,000 likes I'm pretty sure of your answer, just curious about how big a factor you have found social media in general.

Similarly, for organic search through Google, have you focused on getting google reviews? When I search "blue mountain lodge" you're the 4th listing for me, but that requires folks to know/remember your specific name. Curious if you get many inquiries/bookings from folks searching google (and not one of the big sites) and searching for generic vacation rentals or cabins or such.

@BlueMtnCabins - I've looked at your website before, it's terrific on a desktop and a phone too.

I've never considered doing anything outside of wordpress, mostly because there are so many wordpress based sites I didn't see any reason to use anything else.

The thing I concluded after my experience using studiopress, which is a theme/framework overlaid on top of wordpress, is that I really don't want to even think about the website on a day to day basis. I don't want to worry about keeping various elements patched or secure from an attacker, although in all honesty the worst someone could do is mess up the site, and I'd always have some backup available. And for SEO kinds of things, I've been there/done that at various times and finally decided to just not care very much about it. Google seems to keep changing things, and ultimately seems to reward genuinely good sites and especially good reviews. Which is a good point, all the reviews I'm getting from VRBO won't be much help with the google 'juice' so I'll have to encourage people to review us there too.

By the way, I did a quick review of sitelio and couldn't find many great reviews, and several bad ones. Not saying that it's not a great solution, maybe someone just has an axe to grind.

No matter which solution I end up with, I'm sure I will use your site as a map towards getting all the kind of content organized. I can tell you spent a lot of time, I'm sure your guests are very appreciative of all the information they can find.

Thanks for the tips!

I think from layperson perspective, WP sites are overrrated. I had one done on WP dropped it 2K and 2 years later. Much harder to update and maintain for a non specialist. I have a site that I did <myself> on sitelio starting with their template ( it has evolved since I have started it in 2016) and ownerrez widgets. Plus: you can specify meta tags, alt tags, search keywords and embed analytics and schema.org code etc what is needed for SEO ( many other templated sites do not allow that). Minus: some canned objects (photo galleries, bullet lists etc) are not as flexible as I'd like them to be. Another plus- cost of hosting - about $100 a year but you can get a cheaper promo. take a look and let me know what you think: bluemountaincabins.com

Hi. I am hooked to Pricelabs and the rates are imported as "spot" rates to Ownerrez. The option to "push" rates is inoperative when I try to push them to Homeaway, though:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/lgsxwvzuv8xuva2/Screenshot%202019-02-11%2000.36.02.png?dl=0

I did a quick search and didn't see anything in the forums about Zillow. Would it be possible to incorporate a zillow link to each guest address so that we could more easily take a glance at the house our guests live in? I know that I can copy/paste, but having it appear in a report or better yet in the booking email would be terrific. Just checking out where my guests live might give me some idea about the kinds of questions to ask. I suppose this could be misused too, but I'd rather have more information than less about my guests.

In the same vein, is it possible to incorporate into OR the ability to do some kind of background check? Such as publicdata.com? With long term leases I'm always doing research before renting, but with these vacation rentals I do pretty much nothing. Seems like having a custom/automatically generated report on bookings would be a helpful thing to have. I'd imagine there would be a subscription involved or a per search cost but maybe with enough people doing it the cost could be manageable.

Paul - thanks... lot's to think about.

I've done wordpress/studiopress themes myself before and concluded that for security reasons alone I'd need to use a hosted solution where someone else manages to keep ahead of the scammers.

The template I showed was from Wix, and of course they are a very limited kind of website in terms of customisation, but they handle all of the security risks and I figure that the website won't change very often assuming that the widgets work well.

In full disclosure, having the website elsewhere than OR gives me redundancy. If y'all ever go dark/disappear I'd at least have all the content from my website, so it's kind of a backup solution.

Thanks though, I'll be playing around with this in the coming weeks and probably have more questions.

Similar situation. I have one listing (relatively new listing) that when I imported the payment and other booking info from VRBO last night, it shows up on Owner Rez as it should but when I click out of it and go back to the bookings page to double check it all the info has disappeared except for name and dates. A previous booking from several days ago (for the same condo) is doing the same thing. I sent a help email :)

Exactly. People think you get a template and the hard part is over and it is so pretty and so customizable. But even the good paid templates end their tech support after 6 months.

Then when things go wrong or you don't understand a problem, that is when you learn the value of tech support from the web host and from the website. And it ain't cheap.

Ross hit some good points overall. It comes down to how much you want a custom look and feel versus the time spent in wiring up widgets or managing your page content (property photos, description, etc) which has to be duplicated in your template.

When you change the property listing content in OwnerRez (photos, description, amenities, etc) the website end changes instantly because it's built on the same infrastructure. All of our security, routing, load balancing, etc infrastructure handles the website end so you never need to worry about that stuff. And your page are always up to date because it pulls directly your OR account.

With your own third party website (Wix, GoDaddy, Wordpress) you have to manage those content pages on your own. We have widgets for calendars, book-now, inquiries, etc that you can drop in so the dynamic parts of the site will work fine based on your OR settings, but you have to manage what goes around it.

The advantages to using your own third party website is that you can completely customize the look and feel or buy third party templates. Our website engine runs off a central template and you have to work within that template and style what is there. It's a great template with a lot of functionality, but it's not a completely custom green-field experience if that's what you're looking for. Keep in mind that most of the third party templates you're buying (like the one you linked above) is also not completely custom for you either. There are hundreds or thousands of other users who have bought that same template.

NOTE: They had been applied to OR in a prior channel import and now they are not??

Recently I did an Airbnb channel import and for some reason the payments are no longer showing as have been made in OR. I did an overwrite import and a merge import and neither made a difference. Any thoughts.

I bought a Wordpress Vacation rental template that had several thousand sales.Then as I started digging into the various plugins and widgets, I started seeing serious limitations and a lack of knowledge on my part. The template you show has a copyright date of 2023. You think these people are professional?

I certainly wouldn't use a freebie template or one with a few sales. However there are a ton of web issues that a new person may not grasp. SEO, availability, loading time, updates, liability, reviews, professionalism, web presence, host problems....

I figured if there are technical issues, having a website through the people managing some/all of my agreement, paperwork, communications, pricings, calendars, payment methods, credit cards, etc. and handling tens to hundreds of thousands of bookings was better than saving a few bucks on a DIY basis.

They provide a basic template and they host it. There is tech support behind both. It talks to the OwnerRez functionality.

Lost bookings. Bad reviews. Guest confusion. Things I didn't think about. Hacking into my site. What constitutes a huge advantage to you?

I decided to start with their hosted website, instead. There is a saying that the person who serves as his own lawyer has a fool for a client!

Hi Folks,

I'm looking to set up a website for two/three ski condos in Colorado. Would love to hear about anyone who have done this recently and which site you picked, why and your happiness with it.

At the moment I'm considering using Wix and maybe this template: https://www.wix.com/website-template/view/html/1565?siteId=010744df-a688-4c70-88b5-f2b5f1bb0caf&metaSiteId=94ce1a90-35a5-4eb2-a491-2f0208097e2d&originUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wix.com%2Fwebsite%2Ftemplates%2Fhtml%2Ftravel-tourism

I also like the websites from Owner Reservation, however I'd like to use a 3rd party website unless there are huge advantages involved.

I mailed you at the support email - the two images are there now.

Is there a tutorial on "pushing rates". I am able to see the BUTTON for it in channel manager, but want to know about how it effects length of stay, min nights, ect in AirBnb and VRBO. Also jsut to get a good overview of what happens when you push rates and all the ins and outs of it. Thanks Jim

Yep, doing a $1 booking and paying is the best way to do it -- that way you exercise everything. There is also a test button on the payment method itself that makes sure the credentials are right but it doesn't verify that the account is fully ready for processing.

Also heads up if it's a new account you'll have to go to the Stripe settings and grant us permissions to store cards on file: https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/stripe-process-payments-unsafely-setting

Thanks @Ross!

@Stacy...
Right now if you hook up PriceLabs they'll push the spot rates directly into OwnerRez and there's currently no way to override that.

They've got a lot of options on their side though, so you can set min/max prices inside PriceLabs which will control what's pushed to OwnerRez.

This is PriceLabs pointer to OR, FWIW: http://blog.pricelabs.co/ownerrez/

If we use PriceLabs, do we have the option to accept or deny rates they suggest or does it automatically change them?

I setup an account with stripe recently. I would like to test that it is setup properly in ownerrez, ie that the money actually gets into my bank account. Is there a way to do this?

Should I create a $1 booking and pay for it to verify the money gets to my account?

I am sure someone else must have done something like this before.

I just threw that form up there for users that want to start applying early. Soon, we'll have a baked-in application page that you can use to start an application from within OwnerRez.

I saw your post from Feb 2018 which mentioned using Zapier and Twilio. Do you still think that is a viable near term approach?

Which parts are popping out as not wrapping correctly? I scanned through and it looks like it's mostly there with the wrapping. Only things I saw were a couple places where there are multiple spaces that may look weird if they're at the beginning of the line. That you can fix by removing the extra spaces and keeping it to one. The other thing was some long URL's -- you can fix that by editing them using the link/chains button and setting a different "Text to display" so that it's a bit shorter.

Are there other areas where you're seeing a wrapping issue? Maybe send over a screenshot? (we don't do photos on the forums, so go to imgur.com and post it there and then give me a link)

Right now it's all by email. Text messages is in the works but we don't have a firm ETA yet.

On my website, I use the same ID. The reason is I like to be able to follow users across and set up goals etc. to see what the flow is and it's hard if you use different id's.

Under the covers, Google should handle the counting -- you want to look at the unique visitors count where they drop out duplicates, and that way it doesn't matter if they were on both the site and the widget or on multiple pages on both.