General Help and Questions

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Hi Christina,

It's not impossible to do - you can always change your Airbnb profile email address to one of our @inquiryspot email addresses - but we don't recommend doing that as it doesn't provide you any advantage. Answer inquiries in VRBO or Airbnb in the channel and then when they convert to bookings, that's where OwnerRez steps in and imports that and bring that information in. You then want to flesh out the booking in OwnerRez (using Channel Bridge) and manage the booking directly.

Hi Rich,

We've got you covered on that. First, our booking/guest exports can target (and remove) records that have fake/proxy email addresses. We also have a special report and export for mailing lists that will also remove certain email addresses.

You can use Guests > Merge feature to merge guest records as well. Filter to the ones you want to include, then select using the check boxes on each row and click the Merge button up top.

Is this expected? A guest first inquires, then books, and I import using channel bridge.

I see one guest entry with the fake vrbo email and one with the real email. I imagine this is expected, and the OR either cannot or isn't recognizing a guest with same name as a recent inquiry.

Doesn't seem to be a problem at the moment, but I imagine when I start sending marketing emails I'll need to somehow filter out the unwanted guest entry.

I called Airbnb and they are telling me this is impossible to do? I don't really think the CR I spoke to understood what I was asking. Is this possible with Airbnb or no?

Speicifically I said I wanted to use a push process to send the inquiries to the software I use to manage my rental.

Good morning!

Can you set up a trigger that automatically sends out the rental agreement after a booking is entered?

Marcy

@Mike M

There's two approaches here .... push the information to your cleaner, or have them pull it.

For them to pull it
- I'm interested in the property mgmt module but didn't want the extra cost just for a single cleaner on 2 units
- another approach, you can use an iCal link that they can put into their calendar (I've tried Outlook and Google, both work but I think Google looks better for the display)

For you to push it to them
- you can set up an email to trigger/be sent at booking creation. Easy to do, and let's cleaner add to the calendar they must have already unless the only cleanings they do are for you
- you can set up another email to be sent N days before arrival, or maybe better N days before departure.

None of these are perfect. It's easy for the cleaner to overlook a single email, which is why I'd prefer an automated 1x weekly email report showing all listing arrival/departure dates to be sent. In the meantime I'm supplementing the 'push' items myself by doing a screen capture of the current and next month's ribbon display and just emailing them. Hopefully the combination of all these will help the cleaner avoid missing a cleaning... Thinking about this, might be good to add a day of departure email too.

@Mike M - I would also like this capability... I added a feature request on Jan 8 for this.

THANK YOU CHRIS for your help. :)

M.

I signed up for the "property management module" which grants access to my cleaners and maintenance. However, the calendar view they have is hard to view when on your phone. I Is there a way to for the cleaners to see who is checking in and who is checking out?

i found my own answer.
https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/setup-checklist

is there a way to save a report and have it emailed daily? This would save time based on other softwares that I use in my business. Example: I would like to have a daily report of what properties are checking in/checking out.

Besides Vacation Rentals, I also plan to offer some tours. I will be using tour booking software for that. It allows Travel agents to earn commission if they send me tour customers. There is a Travel Agent sign-in that will be a link on my Tour website(to track their commissions)

The question. On an OR hosted website, can I put a link elsewhere that has nothing to do with OwnerRez? It doesn't need to hook to OR functionality, just be there to let them log in and go elsewhere. Then they can also request to book my Vacation rentals.

I am new to OR. Is there any type of checklist to make sure I am doing all the necessary items. I am afraid I’m going to miss something and not getting full usage of the website or miss something that may be needed and not realize it.

Ross,
Since you clearly took the time to search my other posts, you should have seen where I offered to pay Chris or ANYONE ELSE for consulting assistance more than one time. Not that it's any of your business. And pardon me for thinking wrongly that this was a forum where users assisted users. My bad.

And you're right -- I AM a business owner. In fact, I own TWO businesses, which is why after spending MANY MANY hours in the beginning trying to get everything set up properly, I still find myself frustrated now and again when a function just doesn't seem to exist.

But hey, thank you for your response, Ross. I'm so glad you took the time out of your busy day to craft it and I hope it makes you feel good to have put me in my place.

Yes, we have ever so cleverly hidden it from you :-P

Just kidding... here's where to find it.

- Go to the Quotes menu up top
- Click on the quote you want in the list
- Click on the Email tab of the quote
- Check the email to make sure it's all good, then hit "Send Email Now" to send it

There are times it pays to pay someone to help you with the problem areas. I would say every property management system can be bewildering if it offers a lot of functionality.

I am not sure expecting someone to walk you through each step is a fair request, We are business owners; you are responsible to review all available help materials, ask some questions, and perhaps pay for in depth functionality that you are trying to use or customize to your own use.

Did you read through all their introductory materials? From your past questions, I get the feeling of someone who may not be aggressively learning the functions they plan to use, but rather, being either overwhelmed or hoping others will fix your problem.

Maybe the owners will let you pay them a consulting fee to do some in depth set up. Not sure how they work on that.

I've manually created a quote twice now, before sending it, I edited the charges to reflect what I actually want to charge the guest, and there is NO WAY to send the quote if you do that. Or if there is, it's cleverly hidden.

I've gone to the quotes tab and I can see both the quotes there, but there's no way to send the quote from there. I've clicked on it a hundred times, thinking maybe I've missed something, and I can see NO way to email it, as far as I can tell. I really need to start using the functionality on this site because I've been paying for it for a while now and not using it because it's confusing. So can someone please explain to me how to do this??

Thanks

If you have "send create triggers" enabled, it will send any ones where the create triggers have never been sent before for that booking OR there was never an email address in the system for that booking.

"send create triggers" sends create triggers and those by arrival that are due in the next 36 hours. Any others like the 1 day prior or day of arrival would not be sent.

What I'd recommend to do here is do disable your create trigger, then run the channel bridge on that file with "send create triggers" enabled. Then re-enable the create trigger. That way channel bridge will know that it tried to send create triggers at the time for those bookings and won't try again next time. Then manually send the create trigger on the new one. In future, as new bookings come across, the send create triggers would work for the additional ones.

Interesting thought on that. It would be good to show a bit of status there, but it's a little complex because it could be completely new or have come in via iCal and be getting populated with charges for the first time, or being updated with new charges, or not changed at all because it hasn't changed since last time.

Yep, we've bounced around the idea of having an email template area where folks can share their templates and anyone can click a button to import the template into OwnerRez. Similarly ideas on web design etc. And we do plan to add images and links... but that's harder than you'd think to do in a way that's not a spam magnet :-/

You're right though... lets just get started! I created a new forum here: https://www.ownerrez.com/forums/templateshare

There isn't a detection or trigger for that right now. You can run off a Date Range type Stay Report -- that'll includes the custom fields alongside the booking so you can see which ones are populated or not.

Right now we don't error on missing fields because there are a lot of cases where you might want an empty field value -- maybe it's a property trash instructions field that is applicable to one property but not another etc.

Great!

FYI you can also populate the values for all properties at once in the detail section of the property field.

You can't do that exactly but you can get close.

The system will check the second payment days on booking and if it's past the deadline it'll require everything up front. In other words, if you put second payment days at 60 days, and the guests books on day 59, they'll be charged everything up front. If they book at 100 days, it'll take 50% up front and 50% on day 60.

What you can't do right now is to vary up the days so the second payment is due at 14 days if over 60 days from arrival but due at 60 days if less than 60 days from arrival.

Okay - So I have just set up my email triggers for these
a) at create
b) 1-day prior
c) day of arrival

When use the channel bridge I'm grabbing about 30 past bookings along with one new one. Is it safe to leave the 'send create triggers' enabled? I hesitated this time since of course I don't want all those past bookings to get the initial 'at create' email, just the most recent one. The rest I had emailed outside of OR. The description implies they would be sent if they haven't been sent already (which they haven't). But maybe OR actually just would send for completely new bookings?

Unrelated to this, when I import bookings that were previously imported the message next to each booking is 'Imported' whereas it would be nice to see which bookings OR thinks are completely new versus updated bookings.

I think the OR community would benefit if there were a forum dedicated to sharing email templates and website design ideas. We're rarely competing (if ever) against each other, and I bet there are folks here who have way more experience who would enjoy sharing the content they've developed over time... I imagine this would work better with having the ability to add images, links and other rich text content, however even as the forum is set up today we could make meaningful contributions .... Chris/Paul what do you think ?

If my automated emails are expecting a custom field to be supplied for the booking (eg: Lock Codes) is there any way that I can detect the absence of the field being filled out for a given booking?

Perhaps this would be a new feature to trigger on an empty custom field with an email back to myself.

I don't see a custom field report, but that would be another way. Meaning a booking report that lists the contents of custom fields.

Without some kind of check like this I run the risk of assuming I added key codes to a particular booking when in fact I didn't.

Another idea would be to have OR implement a check when automated emails go out containing a custom field with a null value. I think it would be best to halt the sending of the email but alert the account owner about the failure to send due to missing information. But this would be a safety net and I'd prefer some method prior to the arrival date where I'd be reminded to supply missing custom booking field info.

Okay - In hindsight it's obvious how this needs to work, and it works perfectly for both Booking and Property codes.

I just got confused when creating the custom field and not realizing that their values of course need to be entered from the property tab.

This is the point where the time savings is becoming really obvious, thanks for building the custom codes in a robust way !!

If you want to go per booking, like a lock code that is unique per booking, then use a Booking type field definition. The per property field definition would be for a manual programmed lock where it's always the same.

Parking instructions that are different per property would be where you also want to use a Property type field definition.

So in this case, you would create one Booking type field definition called KABACODE or some such, populate that per booking, and then reference that in your arrival day instructions email.

Then create one Property type field definition called PARKINGINSTRUCTIONS, populate that per property, and then reference that in your arrival day instructions as well.

When the email template is sent, it'll look at the booking and property and substitute in the correct values for each.

Here's an article with step by step: https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/pre-arrival-email-templates-triggers-custom-fields

Chris - I also don't see how custom fields can work on a per-property basis either.

I just wanted to make different parking instructions per property. So that I can have a single Arrival Day Instructions where the custom field is replaced with the parking instructions appropriate for the guest's booking.

It doesn't seem like this is possible on a per-property basis either. Hopefully I'm missing something but even though there are different types of custom fields for booking or property it seems they all act like account level custom fields.

Chris - I don't see how this can work ...

It looks like there can only be one value of the lock codes at any point in time per property. For this to be automated properly the field needs to be associated with the booking, so that I can create a value for keycodes for Property A on January 1st for a visit in March, and then created another value for Property A on January 10th for a visit in February, etc.

Maybe I'm missing something?

I personally am using Kaba and would like to have this integrated but that's not available yet, right?

So for now, I'd like to create key codes at the same time that I use channel bridge to import from VRBO and create the booking. That will of course happen in whatever sequence the bookings are imported. Then I'll use a trigger on the day before arrival to send the email. In case it's not clear, my keycodes get varied for each guest so that everyone knows that no one else can have codes that allow entry during their booked stay.

Just a quick THANK YOU for this feature. I've used other (more expensive) software that required me to create a new template for each property and for each communication that required property-specific info.

The custom field is life-changing and really sets OR apart.

Kudos.