General Help and Questions

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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?

Paul - I think a passive way to detect missing/empty required booking fields would be more successful than active. Should require little/no effort to detect this error condition.

Could a red warning count be placed on the booking tab above the selected calendar? Of the 3 calendar choices ...

ribbon - lots of room above, and should probably have the legend like the month view does anyway
month - there's space to the right of the legend
year - pushing the year view down shouldn't be a problem

My 'go to' tab in OR is the Booking tab anyway, so this would be a logical place to see error conditions of all sorts eventually, so as overdue tasks.

Yep, right now picking "pay by check" on a payment request displays the instructions but doesn't actually set anything on the booking. That's something you do when you record the check. Good idea to add a note about that for record-keeping -- it would be nice to see that the guest intended to mail a check.

The CC surcharge only shows up when you reserve via a quote -- because that actually does execute through to a pending booking on the check payment type selection. If you create a booking manually, we assume that you're taking care of the settings for things like a cc surcharge or what payment methods are allowed.

Make sure to set a "standard rate" on your period rates first. Or do that and then ask again. We found out that that was the holdup. If there is no standard rate, their code doesn't try to switch you over or ask "would you like to switch". Set a standard rate and then go to Calendar > Rates every day or two and check. It should pop up something asking if you'd like to switch automatically.

I called, they opened a ticket and then emailed me that it has been passed to support and it may take WEEKS before I am on new rate editor and that they do not have any ETA. I m still not on it, 2 out of 3 properties are PP

Yes, we had to switch our rates over to the new calendar version before it would work. We called the premier partner # and they did it for us, and then the OR rate push worked.

That blog is interesting but hardly useful. B.com has changed. It does not allow many things that that blog suggests (i.e setting prepayment etc) - b.com has disallowed that.

Ross C, thank you for your reply. In their push to soften the cancellation policies, apparently b.com does not give some owners all the options you describe. I have 60 days must pay in full and 60 day cancellation. They do not offer non refundable policies at least not till your listing is well established. The info about dealing with deadbeats is useful but this is not what I am asking- I am asking about statistics - does anyone get any bookings that actually "stick"(ie stay happen) from b.com.
My destination (TN Smoky Mountains) is not frequented by foreign travelers so that has not entered the picture at all.

I am just not understanding how this is a good business model even for them. if none of the bookings "stick" they do not get their commission either. So I do not get this "free for all" cancellation model which seems not to be intent on actually having ANY bookings.

I have not had any activity from b.com since early Dec.
Thinking of pulling the plug altogether, just wondering was it worth it for others.

Just to double check, channel bridge will only push vrbo rates if you are on new rates editor? (I am on old one).

Thank you!

Thank you, I am ok with 0, will test the other ones.

Paul,
I double-checked by looking at the "booking" I entered for my family's vacation week. If I go to send a "payment request" and look at the payment page via the link included, it does say "please send (full balance due)..." if I choose pay by check, even if I choose to pay 50% or a custom amount. That line never seems to update. Also, I've never actually paid much attention to this billing page, but if the guest chooses payment by check, there is no button to click or anything. I think if the guest chooses "pay by check" it would be great if like the "continue to confirmation" button that appears for credit card payments, instead you displayed a "print invoice" button that would let them print a copy of the payment request to include with their check. Just an idea. Many of my renters include a printout of my payment instructions when they mail me a check.

As for the CC surcharge, that never shows up. I manually created this booking for my family vacation, and now when I choose to pay by CC no surcharge ever shows up. I think that if you manually create a booking instead of sending a quote and having an initial credit card payment as part of the acceptance, that the CC surcharge doesn't work. I tried it on a couple of other reservations and the CC surcharge doesn't appear during the payment process.

From the app side of things...

Seems to be smooth overall. Their servers write to ours a couple times per day as needed. We have found them easy and straightforward to work with.

There is one thing that they are working on fixing. You need to have a "baseline rate" in OR first before their first sync/integration can kick off. Some users pointed out where they were getting a message "no availability for 365 days" or something like that. What that actually means is that PriceLabs was connecting to their OR account and not able to get a baseline RATE for a year and so they couldn't sync and their code bails out. As long as you provide some basic nightly/season rates, they'll take it from there and start writing in spot rates.

Hi Richard,

Sorry for the delay in responding. My first thought is - you'd need to ask ResortCleaning that! I'm sure that's not the answer you're looking for. 🤪

Let me reach out to my contacts on that side and get back to you. They developed the integration on that side, using our API, so we don't have docs on that. I believe that if you connect it (on their side) they basically pull in your bookings when they happen and you'll see bookings appearing in their app automatically which you can then schedule cleanings for and so on.

Sorry for the delay in responding, BlueMtnCabins. That's a great technique - I love it!

Use the {BTGUESTFEE} field code to insert the fees they paid. Couple caveats:

1) That will include all guest fees on the booking, even the ones that may be taxes the channel paid on their behalf. If you don't have that, then no worries.

2) This will only work if you've used Channel Bridge to bring in that fee data (or manually entered) it. If there are no recorded guest fees on the booking, that field code will be empty or show $0.

Hi Mitchell,

Sorry for the delay in responding. That would just be one 1 property. A property is one individually-rented unit. It doesn't matter how many national/regional listing sites (or even your own website) that it's booked through. That's just one property.

We have integration tools for all of those channels, some more than others. You would sync calendars or connect direct/API integration where possible.

Sorry for the delay. We're looking.

Good idea, Rich. Not sure we would do it exactly that way, but we could be watching for empty booking field codes that are marked as required and at least allowing you to filter for that (like not-signed renter agreements or balances not paid in full)