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Nancy E said:
Thanks, Chris, I think you've answered my question about prioritization, and regarding the arrival/departure breaks for those high season months, I can just take care of those by talking to the incoming guests, or I can program in a pop up message on the page using Rapidweaver. I'm almost sold out again for next season at the one cottage where this was the biggest issue anyway. ;-)
Date based triggered emails are set out once a day right now. We do have a todo item to allow you to control the time.
I created an automated "check-out instructions" email to send the day before guest departure and noticed it sends out at 3:30am. Was wondering if there was any way to adjust the hourly timing. Thanks!
Yes! That's it. Sorry, I didn't see it. I was lookig in summary reports instead of detail reports for Payments.
Thank you!
There is a Payment Type on the Payment Detail report that lets you pick "Card processed elsewhere" etc. Will that work?
Hi there!
Is there a way to run reports per payment method? This will be useful to differentiate from payments taken via OwnerRez from payment taken outside but yet still included in the system here (created bookings).
Thank you in advance for your time :)
Ella
I guess I cannot figure out the setting that would give a discount UNLESS it is a holiday. It looks like if at least one of the periods is discount-eligible ( has a checkmark), the system will apply discount even though the other (holiday)period is not discount-eligible (does not have a checkmark). Oh well, I hope I can catch this before it happens.
Thanks, Chris, I think you've answered my question about prioritization, and regarding the arrival/departure breaks for those high season months, I can just take care of those by talking to the incoming guests, or I can program in a pop up message on the page using Rapidweaver. I'm almost sold out again for next season at the one cottage where this was the biggest issue anyway. ;-)
BTW, I'm loving OwnerRez. Haven't been "under the hood" in a while and you have really added so many valuable features. I'm still catching up.
I wondering how could I set a lower rate for specific dates.
Let's say that I have two reservations. One until Apr 17 and one from Apr 20. Since Apr 18 and 19 is not booked and it's in the middle of the week, I would like to lower the rate for this particular property for those two nights.
Or on the opposite side, let's say that the town is booked, my property becomes available, it's a weekend, there is a huge event going on and I would like to increase the price for this particular weekend.
What would be the easiest way to do so?
Thank you!
Daniel
The rate splits are working as desired, right? Split across seasons, rate each season at the correct rate.
I think the problem here is the surcharge and discount. Surcharges and discounts are applied once for all matching seasons. In this case, its matching the surcharge because that's in all seasons, and it's also matching the discount because that's matching for fall season. The number of days criteria match the entire booking, not just the days inside the season.
It sounds like you want a more specific criteria matching where the number of days criteria is only matched against seasons allowed on the surcharge, not all seasons on the booking.
Would that solve the issue here?
The way email is set up, it comes from OwnerRez with a reply to configured for your profile email address. We do this for maximum deliverability as we've configured our email addresses and servers to match that address.
We used to send email from a generic bookings@ email address, but recently switched to using your specific OwnerRez user email. This ensures that you receive any email responses from the guest even if they accidentally respond to the wrong address -- both of them are now direct to you.
This is the first part of a communication overhaul we're working on that is going to make all communication accessible in one spot rather than being partially in some emails and other parts in OwnerRez.
Are you seeing deliverability issues in any specific emails? The change to a specific user email address shouldn't have affected anything, but if you can point me some particular emails that had a problem, I'll take a look.
I noticed recently that my email responses are coming from oru5b815x@inquiryspot.com instead of my profile email address. Something's changed, not sure what but I think it might be sending this to people's junk email box when coming from this address.
Kind of related. Not sure I understand how splits work. for example, I have "labor day" defined as its own period with higher rate. The subsequent days are regular priced. I DO give "cleaning fee discount" on non holiday low season periods. But I do not want to give them on any 7 night rentals that include holiday. yet, here it is:
Rent – 5 nights (8/31 - 9/4) during Labor Day Holiday at $289.00 per Night: $1,445.00 (OK)
Rent – 2 nights (9/5, 9/6) during Low season - Fall at Weekday Night rate at $195.00 per Weekday Night: $390.00 (OK)
Surcharge – Cleaning Fee based on $150.00 per stay: $150.00 (OK)
Surcharge – WAIVE Cleaning Fee (weekly) based on $150.00 per stay: -$150.00 ( this should not be happening because 7 night rental includes a Labor day Holiday, and only "Low season fall" is eligible for this discount).
Am I setting priorities wrong?
If you're setting up a channel and sending the instructions over to TA/FK, we fixed the instructions just this morning for a couple of issues in the channel mapping.
Make sure to grab the instructions to send to them again -- you want the one with the {0} in the property url's.
Yep, that's basically how priority works. The higher numbers have higher priority. I like doing multiples of 5 or 10 so there is space to easily rearrange.
Also keep in mind that longer rates that fully cover the period will be chosen over shorter ones if the priority is the same (or blank). So if you have a 7 day quote, a week rate will take precedence over a night rate, but for a 4 day quote the night rate would take precedence. You can also set proration to apply to more days than the rate vs. going both ways, so you could make a 60 day rate that applied to 65 or 70 days.
All this is to say if you add 3 and 6 months it *should* just do the right thing -- of course, use the rate tester or quick quote to make sure it does what you expect.
If you give me the exact rates and dates I can set up a test here to see what happens.
For the arrival/departure break, I see what you're trying to do there, but how do you define it exactly? What's "the middle of the month"? The 15th? The second Sunday of the month?
Right now we have the capability to define arrival and departure days by day of week, so that wouldn't quite fit what you're looking for, although setting Saturday-Saturday would help a bit.
Hi! I am a little confused about how to set up rates so that people get more accurate quotes from me. I have a fairly complicated rate schedule.
I set my rates by the week or the month depending on the time of the year, and I just completed setting and inputting these rates for the next year. I also offer special rates off season for people renting 3-6 months, or 6 months or greater. But right now I only have the week and monthly rates plugged in to OwnerRez. I ask people to contact me for the 3 and 6 month rates because I can't figure out how to set that up. Those deals only apply to certain months of the year (our off season April-Dec.)
I see where I can seet prioritization in the back end, but I don't understand what number to plug in there. Would I plug in a 2, for instance, if a monthly rate takes priority over a weekly rate? So a 2 for monthly and a 1 for weekly? And if I set the 3 and 6 month rates, I'd give them higher numbers? I'm a little confused about that.
If you have any suggestions for how I can set up and prioritize the 3 and 6 month rates, I'd appreciate it. I'm concerned now that if they plugged in a three month or six month request, the quote would be a lot higher than it should be.
One more thing, in February and March I have two week minimums, and the vacations must break in the middle of the month. In other words, I can't have someone rent the middle two weeks of the month because then I'd be hung out for one week at the beginning and end of the month, and I would not be able to rent those easily. I've done the two week blocks for the past two years and it's worked out perfectly. Some people take the whole month, but if people only want two weeks, they can choose the first two or last two. My issue is this: How do I set it up so that they get an unavailable email back with a custom message that February and March are first two weeks, second two weeks only?
Thanks for the help. My head is spinning a little bit with all of this.
Check your email contact information, they changed my log in email to the OR one, so I was on the phone for 30 minutes to be able to log in. Email was different than what I had or is in the system. They also think I have another account so my main business email that is listed in there isn't assigned to me... anyway check your contact information.
Wendy
here is another tidbit. So it does work with OR auto responder (good). But what happens since auto response email is sent to the inquirer directly, now there is a ticking clock in the TA dashboard that expects owner to respond or send quote via their dashboard. which means owner still has to log in and at least send some meaningless response via dashboard to the inquirer to stop the clock (bad).
No doubt! Most guests don't bother even reading the listing, let alone the notes and additional info! But at least this lets you cover yourself against accusations of false advertising.
well, I did that, but as we all know most people do not read ANYTHING :)
The listing sites - not just TripAdvisor but HomeAway and the rest too - almost never have enough settings to let you control your rates and policies the way you really need to.
I'd recommend using the Additional Rules box in TripAdvisor to type out exactly what all you require.
here is update. If you are a VHR owner, your listing has been migrated
To TA/FK interface. everything, to me , looks like FK. Except you do see travelers contact.
You still need to log in and make some updates:
Tax rate; cleaning fee; booking deposit; features etc.
What I did is I set up "other" email address with "inquiryspot" address.
On OR side, you need to set it up as "Flipkey" listing site and make sure you enter FK/TA property number there. It works. moreover, inquires originated on FK version of your listing will come to OR as "flipkey". Inquiries from VHR site will show as "Tripadvisor".
issue with FK/TA side of things 9at least for me) - is that a) they can only allow to define booking deposit as a percentage of total (mine is fixed number $300) and b) they only allow to define "weekend" as Fri Sat or Fri Sat Sun. My weekends are Thu Fri Sat or Thu Fri Sat Sun. So quote displayed on Ta side will NEVER match the OR quote because FK/TA treats Thu as weekday (weekday price). I expect traveler complaints.
If it doesn't parse through correctly (into OR as an inquiry with all the fields filled in) just let us know the inquiry number or URL. You can send that to the ticket system at help@ownerreservations.com. And thanks!
I just sent myself a test inquiry. You can use it for format. Where you want it forwarded?
They've contacted users in the event that they can't figure out which VHR listings match up with TA listings. If you don't have TA listings, they probably just moved your VHR over. No need to refund or call you in that case. My information here is from users and 3rd parties, not TA itself, so it may not be 100% correct. I'm just reporting what we know on this side. If you start getting new inquiry emails with a different format, please forward that to us (or let us know the OR # or URL of the inquiry) so we can get a hotfix going for the parsing.
I am A VHR subscriber, and I have not been contacted to close my listing nor sent a refund. Only thing change is that when I log in to VHR it takes me to TA dashboard. All VHR and TA side reviwws have been combined and now seen on both sides. Thanks
@BlueMtnCabins: TripAdvisor has been steadily closing all the independent VR brands they own (VacationHomeRentals, FlipKey, Niumba, HolidayLettings) and merging them into the TAVR platform so that all brands are fed by TAVR listing data. They have been contacting owners and sending refunds for VHR listings over the past few months. We do not have any updates yet about what the VHR inquiry emails will look like, so we can't update our parsing engine yet. At the moment, the VHR inquiries remain the same. Only the owner dashboard side of VHR has been turned off.
Do we need to change our settings for email parsing etc now to Flipkey?
Thank you. this is not a frequent scenario, but this year it did happen! Thankfully, wile group #1 was going back and forth with me, Group #2 booked Dec 23-28, so not an issue this time:)
Hi BlueMtnCabins,
Very sorry for the long delay in responding on this! Missed it until today. Thanks for the nudge.
There isn't a way, at the moment, to handle to that type of situation. We'd need to add a property rule disallowing check-in on specific dates (or days of the year) or perhaps holidays. That's not something that we currently support.
If the housekeepers were willing to work those days, it might actually be a good thing because then you'd have two groups you could bill for holiday rates! But it's understandable that they won't.
-Michelle
