General Help and Questions

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Right, yeah. We may add Firefox support for channel bridge at some point (FF does allow extensions on mobile) -- that wouldn't help iOS but it would help having a maybe more trusted browser on Android.

Names and dates should come over automatically on the VRBO iCal import. Looks like you don't have this set up yet, but go to the Calendar Import tab of each property and you can add iCal feeds from sites like VRBO and Airbnb.

So iCal will keep the calendar up to date automatically, and then channel bridge will merge with the booking and add the other info like guest email, party size, financials etc. Alls you really need to copy over is the email address so you can email them, and channel bridge will add the rest later.

Today I noticed that my 37 bookings showed a collection of different statuses after I did an import. Some showed unchanged, some updated and there was a 3rd label (new?).

It looks slick, and reassuring to see old/untouched items not being changed.

I bet I could run Yandex on an old android phone connected via wifi only.

I'm a little leery of putting a russian based closed-source browser on my primary phone these days, and buying a tablet seems silly for a single operation once in awhile.

Question - if I want to manually create a booking using my Ipad and OR through safari browser, what's the minimum information I'd want to copy over from the VRBO website? Is it enough to capture first/last name, email and arrive/depart dates? Maybe I also need the VRBO booking ID so in the future (some days later probably) I could use chrome with channel bridge and it would merge/overwrite and life would be good?

Same request - for a fee like $1 per cleaning it's a no brainer for us to use this, but our cleaning person cleans 20 units and we are just 2 of them.

But if it's handy to the cleaner I be she'll get other owners on board with the app as well. Keep us informed please !!

No, Channel Bridge is currently developed as a Chrome extension, so there's no way to run it without Chrome. Since Apple blocks all non Safari browsers from running on iOS, and since Safari doesn't support rich extensions compatible with other browsers, there's nothing we can do about that, unfortunately. I'm always hoping they'll loosen up the restrictions on apps, but it's been 10 years and nothing yet.

Do you happen to have an alternate Android device? We've got some folks with Androids using the Yandex Browser: https://browser.yandex.com/ and running Channel Bridge that way.

For sure. The only one that doesn't appear to completely hate owners is Booking.com, but then Booking.com's engineer team is kind of all over the map with their settings and features. In general, they tend to lean in the favor of owners and develop tools that owners need, but they have QA problems in keeping all that consistent.

VRBO, Air and TA appear to completely hate owners. Makes me wonder what would happen if owners had a "boycott the channels" and disabled their listings for like a week. If most of the inventory disappeared and VRBO and Air lost 90% of their revenue for a week, I would wonder if they would change their attitude towards owners.

Please share your thoughts. I only do 20-30 rentals a year so for $20-30 it may be worth it to me just to be able to coordinate my cleaners more efficiently/automatically.

I emailed them for more info...

Tim

We're warming up to the Resort Cleaning app as we learn more about what it does for the price. I think we'll see where we are after the demo and 30 day trial.

Randy

"draconian treatment of owners"

They all seem to do that in one way or another.
...One owner says she is averaging about 5% loss on AirBnB due to their self imposed "Extenuating Circumstances" that makes the owner the free trip insurance provider.
...The opinions of HA/VRBO people about their required payment processor and chargebacks/etc.
...Booking.com with their 15% owner commission and the high rate of cancellations.
...Property Managers
...The ridiculous cancellation metrics used by some

I will be new starting in a few months, but I am going to use them all in the beginning to get rolling, with the goal of repeat/referral/direct booking eventually. But I still always plan to use them for shoulder and off seasons. I am also going to plunge into SEO, Craigslist (yea yea), blogging, working with other area businesses, etc.

I am mostly trying to understand their warts. The OTA stupidities just seems to go with the territory. If anyone ever opens up a robust, well advertised OTA that treats the owners and guests like gold, I think they will outclass the competition in time.

great, I will try , thank you

That's the "send me a copy" copy you are getting. The guest is getting one too. If you look at the outbound email (top Email menu) it will show you all the email going out, including ones to you and the guest.

Sort of, yes. You can just not send the second quote email. You would change the "available" reply to use the same message body (same field codes, etc) as the quote email so that it looks the same. All of those templates are the same type of message templates, under the covers, with bodies and field codes that can be customized to say whatever. We just create helper templates to assist in responding with certain default messages.

It must have changed, at least for the PMs that use our API integration. Even with one payment made, the contact info is shown (we have it in OR immediately) and you can email them.

Randy, we haven't partnered with any other cleaning apps specifically, but they could have used our API and built in integration on their end without us knowing. Jim and the guys at ResortCleaning are pretty good so we haven't felt the need to branch out or look for other partnerships in that area. You might want to ask other housekeeping apps if they integrate with OR to see if they've used our API.

I guess I did not explain it well. if you are set up as 2 payments (1st deposit, then payment), and not 100% upfront., TA does NOt release renter contact after deposit is paid. meaning you can only send rental agreement and get ID from renter AFTER they had paid balance also. That was my experience last year - I do not know if it changed as you describe.

The PMs that have set up TA integration are getting inquiries and bookings for sure - there's a steady stream of them coming through per day/week - but it's definitely a lot less than in years past. I think their dev team killed that user base after gobbling up FlipKey and VacationHomeRentals years ago. They tried to roll those user bases into the main TA rentals and they basically just killed off what was there.

FYI - You can send a renter agreement to the guest after the fact (and custom/HTML emails directly to the guest email address) but only after they've booked. And your house rules should mention that the RA is coming. There are no problems if you do that.

I was the OP of that topic. I have not had an inquiry (3 properties) since Dec or even a single booking in probably 6-8 months if not more .
problems are abound - draconian treatment of owners (uuuuge cancellation penalty, censorship of emails), NOT releasing renter contact even if renter paid deposit (i.e you cannot send them rental agreement) and so on. But kind of moot point as THERE ARE NO INQUIRIES AND BOOKINGS anyhow.

I was reading on another forum by HomeAway users, that they believe that FlipKey, on TripAdvisor, was no longer worth it. Not getting bookings anymore, payment issues, and a high listing cost. I have not done anything with that.

Does anybody have recent FlipKey experience that they could share? Are you still getting a reasonable number bookings from them? Any problems you've noted?

Hi Tim,

Yes, the price is 99 cents per booking (cleaning). It doesn't matter how big the property is or how much the cleaning costs. You have the choice of the owner paying or the cleaner paying depending on how you set it up. We are still learning. Going to have a demo on Friday using one of our live properties. Jim Duncan is the contact at Resort Cleaning. He has been quite helpful so far.

Randy

Randy, Can you confirm the pricing? Is it $1 per booking (ie per cleaning). Is that charged to the owner? Is there a fee for the cleaner? I'm looking for a better way to coordinate with my cleaners for my 2 units.....something better than emailing them a list of cleaning dates and times updating it as more come in.

We decided to try the 30 day free trial with ResortCleaning app. Is there anything that has to be done on the OwnerRez side for the connection to work? We found a setting on the cleaning app side to hook up to an OR property using the ORP name.

Randy

I know there is an 'available" reply and "reply with quote" option to trigger sending written quote when property is available. So essentially guests gets 2 emails. In my case it is redundant as my contents of "available" email and "reply with quote" emails are identical except the latter has also quote embedded. is it possible to trigger ONLY quote email if property is available and bypass "available" email? So that inquirer only gets one email. TIA

Answer without Quote option does not send email to guest. It sends it back to me.

It would be nice to not have to travel with a laptop just to use OR. Is it possible to access the functionality of the channel bridge chrome extension within the iOS ecosystem? Without that, pretty much means it I always need to have ready access to a chrome browser with the extension . I seem to always have an iPad with me, so would be a great solution if that would work.

$1 per booking seems like an awful lot. Does the price go down the more units you have like with OwnerRez? Has OwnerRez tried integrating with cheaper options for cleaning apps?

Hi Chris,

Your response is very helpful. As you can see we are in the startup phase of getting our operations and systems in place before we expand. I suspect that we will start out by doing the most efficient operations we can using OR the way it is now. We haven't decided yet how to handle payments so anything is an option at the moment. Our approach is going to be get the best we can do and be ready for a few properties by the end of March and incrementally streamline it.

Right now you can generate all of the statements at once, but there's no way to automatically do that. We have plans to go full auto eventually. Are you writing your own payment service, or do you have programmers interacting with a payment API? If so, we may be able to make something work with our API so you could make it generate the owner statements, populate automatically for payments, and then API to create the payouts as well..

OK, great.

Yep, I believe it's $1/booking.

We just turned on the Property Management module. It looks great and appears to do what we will need it to do. It isn't clear at first blush how much it is/ can be automated. For example, can it be set up to automatically generate the PM and owner statements every week or do we have to manually do it? Ideally, we'd like to get to the point where statements are automatically generated, triggering a payment service to make the transfers and record the fact of the payouts in the payouts section of OR. How much of this process is automated vs manual the way OR is set up now?

Hi Paul,

Thanks, that sounds great. No issue with the delay. We're working on the PM and finance stuff at the moment. At some point within the next month, we'll need to set up a demo with them and get a free trail as their website (probably on purpose) contains very little real information. We thought that we'd check what you know first about the interface before going that route since OwnerRez has recommended them. Any idea how pricey they are going to be?