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I noticed in the listing sites under settings you have AirBnB. How do I set up airbnb to email OwnerReservations? Do I modify my primary email on ownerreservations to the inquiry email to OwnerReservations? Will this allow me to communicate through ownerreservations with the client or will I have to communicate through the AirBnB site?

Thanks in advance.

Damon

I really like the new functionality. As I looked into the data I realized my inquiries from my website show up as a blank for listing site. I went through the data and cleaned it up by modifying the listing site on the original inquiry. While this changed the "Inquiry Count" column it didn't change the "Booking Count" (e.g. I have bookings from these inquiries that I modified but they don't show as bookings, the still show in the "direct" column.

I also noticed that the data for inquiries where no property is selected don't show on the report but I would expect them to show up since they are inquiries that didn't result in a booking.

Finally, the color legends don't seem to come across for all listing sites.

Thanks in advance, let me know if I can help debug this.

Damon

Fantastic! Thank you!!!

Claudia

We don't have any plans to add that information to our HA/VRBO export right now.

If we do add that feature eventually, we'll have a control on our end that lets you choose how much information you want to share -- that way you can keep it as it (just dates), or add additional information if that makes sense.

Are you guys making any changes to your process by entering detailed information to VRBO/HomeAway calendars? For example, presently you are just entering the arrival date and the departure date. Perfectly fine with me. You are not giving email address or guest names, number of people, etc.

I do not want that information to get into HomeAway/VRBO system.

Thanks,
Claudia

Howdy,

I have put a second property on this system (I love the scheduled emails), but it is in Canada. I know that it could not be done before, but just checking in to see if it can now be done... is it possible to price and bill in Canadian dollars and is it possible to have the funds to go my Canadian bank account for this particular property?

Glenn

Hello Chris,

We had two bookings go through this morning and both have been uploaded onto the VRBO calendar - so it must be working now! Thank you.

Much appreciated,

Darillyn
Reservations manager, Riverside Properties
contracts@riversideproperties.org

This looks to have been a momentary glitch on VRBO's side where they returned a bad credentials error.

I reset your account and ran a verify calendar sync and everything went through smoothly.

Does your calendar look to be up to date now?

Hi Owner Rez,

We noticed this past week that our VRBO calendar does not seem to be updating.

Yesterday morning we received a message from you that said There is a problem with our linked VRBO account.

Status: User name or password is incorrect
How to Resolve: Please update your credentials so that we can access your VRBO account

I'm not sure what changed. I updated the rate page on VRBO for one of our rentals on Monday the 8th, but no change to user name or password.

Please advise what I need to check or fix - or if I need to call VRBO/HomeAway.

Thank you,
Laurie Elliott
laurie@riversideproperties.org
509-885-6077

I looked into the per-property scheduled email feature yesterday and was able to extract it from our larger changes. I did a hotfix release last night to add that (and also add support for VRBO's "New Reservation Manager" API).

You can now edit a scheduled email template and set specific properties you want to use it on (or All properties).

You're right -- we don't currently have a way to assign a scheduled email to one property and not another. This is high on our priority list, but we're working through a couple of things first to make sure we get it right and add the flexibility to handle all possibilities.

There are a couple of ways you can work around this to address your scenario:

- For the landscaper and cleaners, you could set up a third party alert on the property instead of using a scheduled email for this. That will send him a notification every time a booking is created. It's not as clean as the scheduled emails and it won't allow you to add custom information, but at least it will let you segregate the notifications.
- You can mail merge fields from the property into the email by using the custom fields feature. We've got a walkthrough of this here: https://www.ownerrez.com/blog/custom-fields-for-email-templates (when looking at that, the location to get to the custom fields has changed -- it's now in the settings menu at the top). You can create a custom field for, say, lock code or address, and then set different values in the property screen. Then refer to that field in the email itself and everything will merge through.

Hi, I love the scheduled emails that this system does - especially with variables.

I do have a question though.

I have been using it for a long time with a single property and that has worked out well. I now have a second property. I am not sure I am missing something, but how can I

a) Have some scheduled emails assigned to a booking for one property and not the other
b) Have content within the scheduled email relevant to the property

for example with point a) I have a landscaper for one property and I like sending him a reminder not to service while guests are there on one property, but the second property is a condo in another city and there is no landscaper needed. b) I have a reminder email to guests as to the address and codes. Obviously the codes and addresses are different per different properties. Also b) I send a reminder to cleaning staff for the property and therefore the email address is specific to property.

I think I am not finding the proper process to segregate my scheduled emails. Am I missing something?

Tx
Glenn

Thanks for the quick reply.

I am a programmer, C#,vb,php,python,bla bla

I am in the process of creating a few websites for the Gated Retirement Community where I live called Country Roads Village with 1200. I have gotten into the politics in Country Roads, which offers an unbelievable variety of activities from Dancing to the Arts. We have world class; Pottery studio, Lapidary Studio, Wood working Shop and much more. I am building a web application for Residents to get information on the activities for the Day or Week, there are a host of Clubs and Groups. 2 Tennis, 2 Pickle Ball, 10 Championship sized Pool Tables and on and on. I am also building a secure site for the Board of Directors and management of Country Roads Village. There are 35 maintenance people, so in the future I will build a job flow site.

I have been modifying an old Real Estate site that also includes rentals, but it is designed for property managers, not home owners. I could modify the code, but I have so many projects going right now, your app seems to eliminate a lot of my time.

There are a lot of older people here, that is going to require me to hold classes on how to operate the website and in many cases I will just do the work for them. I have already started taking pictures and logging into the database all the pertinent information on both Sales and Rentals.

This is a vacation village. There are maybe 200 people here right now. Why, it is Yuma Arizona where the outside temps are 110F

We are only one in many Retirement Communities in Yuma Arizona. My plan is to start in Country Roads and then reach out to others. Yuma grows from a population of 60,000 in the Summer to 120,000 in the Winter. Phoenix, Flagstaff, Tucson and the Grand Canyon to follow.

Now I will be anchored by the fact that Country Roads and many others maintain a strict 55 year old policy. The rules read "One house hold member must be 55 years old or older" Children are not allowed in the Common area(the pools and all of the activities) unless it is a major holiday.

All guests and potential renters must be 55 as well

If you think we might me a fit, please send over the API Docs.

Thanks for your time
Michael Alberga

We do have a full API, but currently it's shared with a select few partners as the surface area is a bit tight. Can you give me an idea of the kinds of operations you'd like to do (add properties, create bookings, answer inquiries, rate quotes, etc.)? We'd be happy to open things up to you if we've got the right fit. I can send you over an API doc that will outline what we currently support if that would help.

That sounds like a great opportunity for owners to make use of their properties and share with guests. To clarify, when you say 55 or older, does that mean that the owners must be 55 or all guests and potential renters must be 55 as well?

Yes, you are correct -- if you use our credit card processing, the app is free. We can set up direct processing, or white label with you integrating with owners separately.

Was there an answer to the post?

I am a programmer and would like to know what I am able to work with. I am building a website for our community of 1200 homes with about 40% used as rentals since we are in a very seasonal town, Yuma AZ. Many older adults where I am going to have to hold their hand or just do it myself.

Most owners are wanting to rent their places for the season 6 months Nov - April

I have lined up a house cleaning service, that will enable property owner the ability to rent their places by the week or more important, I am going to extend the season to include May and June by offering workshops in Pottery, Glass Blowing, Wood Carving, Lapidary, Jewelry making.

The limit I face is that the community is a 55 year old or older.

Do I understand correct, if we use your credit card processing, then we will not be charged for the app?
Your comments are appreciated

Hi Claudia,

Yes, it's been awhile - that's because we've had to spend a lot of time with some of our partner integrations, both in terms of calendar syncing and payment processing. We're in the middle of a large months-long overhaul to payments and security deposits. We plan on some new onboarding features, better payment features, notes and auto-responders in the near future.

-Michelle

Hi All,

We haven't heard from anyone in a while. I was wondering if you guys were working on something or if things are status quo?

Any exciting changes coming? If so, when are they expected in?

Thanks,
Claudia

We don't have anything in place to do this automatically right now.

I've added rate bands like you've suggested to our list of ideas to research and implement.

Thank you, Chris. We'll give this a try! Will definitely save us some extra work.

Laurie

Thank you! We'll give this a try.

Laurie

There's not a "send test email" button right now, but you can do it like this:
- Disable the email template (so it won't automatically go out)
- Create a test booking with your email address
- Go to the email tab of the booking
- Add the scheduled email for the template you added (you can still manually add disabled email templates here)
- Click the "Send Now" button for that email to send a test -- you can do this over and over

You can also see a generic preview of the email as you're editing it by clicking the "Preview" button in the bottom right.

You can export any master grid (quotes, bookings, inquires, etc.) to Excel or CSV using the export button at the top right of the screen. When exporting, we add several extra columns that aren't on the grid, like email address, phone, inquiry source, etc. Filter the grid to show all, then click export, and that should give you a spreadsheet with all of the data you need.

We don't have a specific export for Constant Contact, but you should be able to pull the email and name columns from the normal export and make something that Constant Contact can handle.

Hi,
We've used Owner Reservations for 18 months now and really appreciate the system. It makes us more efficient in many ways. However, we band our rates by the size of the group staying at our homes, for example - 4 to 9 guests, 10 to 15 guests, and and 16-20 guests. We aren't structured in a way where we have a base rate which increases with each additional person, so we have to manually adjust each quote before it goes out. That's okay, but just wondered if there was any way to customize your system a bit more for our needs.
Thank you!
Laurie Elliott

We are going to construct several scheduled templates, and just wondered if there was a 'best way' to test these before fully putting them into production.

Thank you!
Laurie Elliott

Hi,
We are using 'Constant Contact' as a marketing tool and wondered if there was a way to upload/export email addresses collected on Orez with our quotes or bookings. Right now we add them manually to a spreadsheet and send them from there, but cutting out that middle step would be very helpful - and you have the most up-to-date info stored on your system.
Thanks!
Laurie Elliott

I figured that was my best bet, but trying to avoid cut/pasting whenever possible. Thanks for confirmation.

There's no way to automatically send the same email twice. You could manually go into the email tab of the booking and resend it, but that sort of defeats the whole point of what it sounds like you're trying to do.

I'd recommend just creating two separate email templates, and then copy/paste the body between them. You'll likely want to make the email body slightly different anyway, if one goes with the payment and one goes the week before the stay.

Historically, I have sent an email with basic information about a stay at the time of first payment, and then the same thing plus a few specifics (as well as anything that might have changed since then) 1 week before the stay begins.

Is there any way to schedule 2 of the same email without cut/pasting. I think I can't make the whole text a custom field, because I use a lot of {PXfoo} scattered throughout the checkin email.

Thanks for checking into it for me. Not going to work with my current setup, since I'm not synch'ing homeaway and VR so that I can use the pay-per-booking on homeaway to try to fill my last 4 vacancies for the summer. No biggie for this year, as we're closing in on full. Won't necessarily be using VR again, it doesn't seem as effective as it was in past years.

The way it works in OwnerRez, you'll create a Quote and send it to the guest. That Quote contains a link that lets them check out (using your merchant account), pay, and once payment is complete it will create a Booking for the Quote.

To see this process in action:
- Set up your merchant account info by going to Settings -> Payment Methods
- Create a quote for one of your properties
- Go to the Payment Form tab on the quote. This is the checkout screen that is sent to guests.