Latest Activity...
You can't set up "direct" syncing between HomeAway and Airbnb in the API sense but you can with calendar syncing, yes. That's just something to keep one side updating with bookings/blocks from the other. We don't recommend doing that however. Instead, we recommend treating OwnerRez as your "master" calendar and syncing out from there. So all channels should sync/import into OwnerRez and then you use a single calendar export to sync out to all channels/listing sites.
Thanks! I took the pics up there (DLSR, not phone lol) but actually have some pro pics coming soon and will add a lot more. :-)
Sexy looking site, Stacy! I notice the inquiry widget you dropped on the Contact page. If you get credit card processing (or some payment method configured) you should add a Book Now button to that as well. I'd also recommend adding a menu for availability and drop one of our calendar widgets on that. Also one showing reviews.
Cheryl's issue was something different - it was matching to a different booking than she thought for the same property/dates - so it's not related to this.
@Jim:
Can you create a ticket (email help@ownerreservations.com) with the import file and booking URL from OR that you're referring to. That sounds like something we'll have to take a look at. If you already have, we'll get on that this morning. Apologies for the delay!
@Jim:
No tutorials yet. Sorry for the lack of support on that subject. When you click the button, a little window will open that will show you what will be pushed across. Click the See Details link to expand it and see the "rate groups" that will be used. Rate groups are just the date ranges that we see in OR where the nightly rate has changed from a day/date range before it. We break that up into start/end date ranges so that we can update the channel in chunks. It will also show you if taxes and any rate adjuster (% markup) will be included in the numbers being used. In the case of VRBO/HomeAway, it will also send across fees for cleaning, pet and extra guests based on what we find in your OR surcharges. We definitely need tutorials around this - thanks for your patience on that.
@Robert:
That's because you don't have a HomeAway listing # right there next to the OR property. Fill in that HomeAway listing # column and the Push Rates link will work.
@Stacy:
Thanks for the feedback. We actually have a new beta feature that was just released (no joke - yesterday) where you can Import Rates from VRBO or Airbnb dynamically in OR. It's not a background thing - you have to press the button each time - but check that out. It's under Settings > Spot Rates > Import Spot Rates button. In order to use it, you have to have mapped VRBO or Airbnb listing #'s to your OR properties under Channels.
Yes, I'm also looking for a video on that. I'd actually like to set my rates in VRBO since I can dynamically watch trends and make adjustments there. Then pull rates from VRBO and push OUT to other OTAs. (I do not currently have those set up but planning on it.) Plus I'm currently using a widget with pricing on my website and would like to actually turn on the booking component but won't do it until I can trust true integration of pricing and booking rules from VRBO into OR and not have to manually manage it.
Thanks for any videos to walk us through it!!!
Cheryl
Did you get a response? solution?
Thanks for sharing your site @Stacy, your pictures are really well done!
I did not try it yet, but I read that you can set up direct syncing between Airbnb and the HomeAway family OTAs. I did not get to the point of seeing if Booking.com or TripAdvisor / FlipKey do this as well.
I kind of assumed this would be iCal, but not sure whether this is advisable or not advisable (interfere with?) when using the ownerrez syncing...
Is this damage insurance in place for every reservation that feeds into the platform? I have it on but have 2 VRBO guests that I had pay their $59 insurance fee. Does that mean I'm paying $20 and they're covered twice?
Just want to make sure I understand that before I take the VRBO option off of my booking settings.
Thanks!
I used Wix. It was really easy and super flexible. Here's my site so far: www.gulflesson.com
More work to do to build out content and SEO but they have great tools. I'm a marketer and I'm really impressed with what they've got to walk you through the process both for building but then for setting your site up for Google indexing, SEO and more. I already owned my domain and that was also easy to connect.
I only knew about them from their Super Bowl ad and coincidentally needed to get my site up after leaving my management company. Definitely recommend checking them out.
Hi Kimberly,
Here's a few I like to give out when answering similar questions in the ticket system:
https://www.shenrent.com
https://sasquatch.vacations
https://www.mtshastavacationrentals.com
https://www.rentalscbborrego.com
http://www.dawnsrentals.com
http://www.mountainsidetreasures.org
I am not sure if you really scrutinized your website. If I was on the right place, which redirects to another site, you have quite a few issues and glitches with the page I see in chrome on Android.
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!
