General Help and Questions

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When I am on the general OwnerRez site, there is a Go to My Booking Area button.

Why is there no obvious corresponding button in the Booking Area to go to OwnerRez (NOT my booking area)? As in blog, forum, Tour, Support, etc?

Or am I missing something

The Airbnb calendar import doesn't bring in the number of guests and pricing, though...is there any way to have OwnerRez import these details from the Airbnb reservation or does Airbnb just not export that info? Typically when OwnerRez imports, guest # is 0 and pricing doesn't match the ones in OwnerRez, since I manually adjust them on Airbnb based on the market.

There are a couple of things going on here:
- The built-in security deposit is a hold on the card like a hotel would do. It's not an actual payment so it's not included in the payments criteria for "paid in full".

If you want to do a refundable deposit instead, you can do that -- turn off the built in one and add a surcharge for "refundable deposit", then refund that amount after the guest departs.

- If you do want to stick with the hold, we've got a release in testing that adds a ton of additional trigger criteria, including one for security deposit status. That should be out later this week and will let you do a trigger on both Paid In Full and Security Deposit Reserved.

I have an email trigger set up to send the guests their door code 1 day before check-in, as long as they have paid the reservation in full at that point. I just noticed that one of my reservations coming up next week has that email "cleared for takeoff" and ready to be sent on time, even though the security deposit has not been collected (and, thus, the reservation is not actually paid in full).

Is this an error, or an expected outcome? If it's expected, how can I set up my email triggers to also consider whether the security deposit has been received in addition to the booking charges being paid in full?

Yes, but then the guest has to "approve" the resolution request so.... good luck with that. 😉

If you collect the deposit through the resolution center, you're technically not taking a payment outside their system...so as long as its disclosed in the house rules that you'll be collecting a security deposit manually and you collect via the resolution center, I'd venture to guess you're still within Airbnb's terms.

We've considered QuickBooks Desktop integration, but it doesn't offer full sync support that would let us make updates to invoices and payments as incidentals are added and payments come in.

We do have reports and exports for bookings and charges and payments, so some folks will dump those to Excel and then import to QB desktop that way.

QBO integration is fully functional, and we're actually working on a bunch of updates for that right now which will be out in the next month or two.

Yep, we could put a search field in forums as well.

I am new to OR but have been using QB Pro Desktop 2016 for many years.
I really like the class option that let's me show separate columns for each property and for misc income.
Now the kicker.
OR only uses Quickbooks Online. This means you need to pay $60 a month to get that feature that I used to get included with the desktop.

Basically this is upsetting because both QB products should be able to be integrated.
I will dig into this a bit more but am a bit discouraged at this point. Hearing that the integration is not complete is not good news either.

That's a neat feature but I would really like to hear from users that use Quickbooks Desktop. I will post a question about that elsewhere in here. It is also nice to search the forum to ADD to an existing topic rather than create a new / redundant one.

Yes, go to the Support tab up top and use the search box. That will search forum and blog posts as well as support articles.

Is there a way to search globally across all forum topics?

Ella, please let us know how it turns out with Airbnb. I'm interested if they'll support you because you listed it in the House Rules or say that, as a site-wide policy, you can't do it because it's taking payments outside of their system. I've heard friends say that Airbnb has gone both ways in recent times. So please report back if you're successful with Airbnb.

So like many of us, I have my home listed in several places and therefore my guests come from various sites and channels. I would like to have my guests leave an online review on my VRBO guest book but it requires them to log-in and many of my guests don't have Homeaway/VRBO accounts and it's inconvenient to ask them to create a log-in just to leave a review.

Does OwnerRez have a form of some sort where I could direct guests to leave their reviews, regardless of where that guest booking originated? This way I could send out an automated email after the guests check out, and include a link the the OR guest book to collect reviews.

Thanks!
Monica

Ella, that is a good way to articulate the desire for a security deposit. I may begin to ask for a deposit from Air guests as well using that same language. People who tend to be respectful, great guests typically DO understand a homeowner's wanting to hold a deposit and are willing to submit a security deposit. If a guest can't even grasp the risk homeowners take when allowing a total stranger stay in your home, then to me, that may be an indicator that they won't respect your property.

Monica

I state in the listing description and in house rules that we collect security deposit separately after completed booking. Most guests don't have a problem submitting it. Currently I'm dealing with a person who is challenging this after I accepted them because of Airbnb rules. Unfortunately when someone does not trust me with a small security deposit, I cannot trust them in my house. We'll see if he submits it. I'm not sure what I will do if he sticks to not doing so.

noise complaints, noiseaware essentially notifies the owner that there is sustained noise. But Noiseaware has no knowledge of who the guests are. It would be cool if the decision to notify the owner instead (current) INSTEAD called/emailed several of the signing parties and said that a noise complaint was received and they are in violation of their agreement!!! The first complaint comes from software, not the owner.

Like that, Ring Video has no knowledge of the guests, only the owners. The PMS knows the guests currently booked. I plan to tell everyone that when they arrive (note on door and in communications), they need to push the doorbell. That will be my way of "meeting them." I will see them on my phone. And of course I am looking for unannounced animals, too many people, a frat party group.

In addition, the Doorbell camera should activate when they come and go, perhaps carrying out my television or bringing in a keg or large group or animal later.

Useful functions would be cutting a record of who stayed along with the Ring Video recordings. Without integration, OwnerRez knows who they are during that time, and the Doorbell knows nothing. It would help noting who came and potential violations. I am sure clever ideas could be thought up. Imagine if you worked with Ring Video to record a snapshot when they pushed the doorbell that became part of their PMS record! You integrate the information with the technology, and you get nice possibilities

I now see that INSIDE each individual booking, when you click on it, there is a notes field. However it doesn't show up in a column when you select BOOKINGS>LIST. Also, even though each booking does have its own notes field, those notes aren't global -- they refer to just that particular booking, right? So if I had an issue with a guest, or they have a particular preference I want to remember, having that info under a Guest Notes field under the GUESTS tab would be super helpful.

Yep, those are both on the booking right now -- "Listing Site" for the referral source and a notes field. The referral source will probably stay on the booking because you could have different sources each time -- hopefully it starts with "Airbnb" and then switches over to "our website" ;-)

Notes makes sense to have on the guest as well as the booking -- probably should show both on the guest, both guest specific notes and also notes from all of the bookings.

I'd want to add a column that would indicate the referral source (Airbnb, our website, Evolve, etc), as well as a column for whether I sent them a snail mail thank you card yet, or just a "notes" column that I can refer to if they re-book another time.

For example, if a guest had a specific preference for a particular kind of pillow, or if they were celebrating something, or if they tried to sneak dogs in without telling me, or if they were just a real pain in my butt... I'd love a "notes" field to be able to record those things. That way if/when they re-book, I have some context on who they are and what their situation was.

Awesome

I will chime in. My interest is integration of Honeywell 9000 series thermostats...

partially. they have "verified" my property, but no change in payment methods yet - still shows Booking.com payments. Thank you for the advice - I will go with payment due at booking, free cancellation at 60 days or more as it is my policy on other sites as well. Waiting for payment enablement to see if they have CVV set up

Wow, that's a great idea! We don't have support for that now, but I'll see what it'd take.

We've considered integrating with cameras and other monitoring solutions, but as of yet have not -- our main integrations are door locks.

What sorts of features would be useful for a video or noise monitoring integration on a PMS? Automatically sending out noise complaint emails or some such? Actual video displays would probably be better done directly in their UI's, so I'm not sure what else would be useful on the integrations.

Have you heard back from booking.com yet?

For my properties, I've got it set to require address, phone, and card security code. That's the big thing. If your account doesn't have a switch to require card security code, contact booking.com support and they can add that for you.

In terms of payment policies, I'm doing payment due upon booking, but free cancellation until 60 days before arrival. They've got a pretty rich settings section for that, so some folks will do 30% nonrefundable on booking, the remainder 30 days before arrival, cancellation until 30 days before arrival, stuff like that.

Nope, you're not missing anything! Right now you can only email in the context of a booking, quote, etc -- we don't have email blasting or newsletter capability. Turns out that the legalities and requirements for a bulk email are different than the normal transactional back and forth emails you get for a booking, and our current email provider does exclusively transactional email to ensure the highest delivery rates.

We do have plans to add an email blast/newsletter module, but in the meantime the best thing to do would be to go to Reports and export an Email List, then import that into MailChimp. They've got a free version for up a list of up to 2000 contacts, so that's an easy way to go and they cover all of the email newsletter unsubscribing and contact requirements etc.

That's a good question. The search box up top is a full text search like Google so it decides which partial matches to find and looks for words, so half a name won't always come up.

Makes sense though, if you put in a partial name or prefix, you should always get a result. I'll see what we can do about that.

In the meantime, if you go to the Guests or Bookings grids and do a filter, that will do a normal wildcard search automatically, so a partial will come up.

@Marinas Edge -- we've tracked down an issue with the Evolve calendar system. They change the dates to be off by a day every morning around 1AM eastern, then change them back to the correct dates around 4AM.

If you want proof of that so you can contact Evolve support, let me know and I'll put a trace on your account and provide you with the specific files where they show wrong dates. Happy to help communicate with their tech folks to see if they can fix this bug -- it seems to be affecting all Evolve customers we've worked with so far.

I'm assuming they have some issue where their timezone code is off so that it thinks it's the wrong day when the calendar is viewed early in the morning, but they haven't admitted anything yet.

Not right now. We've got custom fields for bookings, but not for guests, yet.

What sorts of data points would be tracking?