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Hi Damon,
This is something we've debated in the past and decided not to support (at least for the time being).
The problem is that we (OwnerRez) can create liability issues for ourselves because we released the hold before the owner had a chance to inspect the property and make a decision. Even if 9 times out of 10, the release is fine, that one time when the owner needed to keep some of the money but we auto-released it too fast, we'd put ourselves in hot water.
In the future, it's possible that we could create a system of rules so that some are auto-released and some aren't. For instance, you could set a rule so that any booking with a group size of 2 or less is auto-released 3 days after departure, but bigger groups require manual. Something like that.
Hope this helps,
-Michelle
Is it possible to release the security deposit? Manually releasing becomes quite cumbersome.
Damon
Glad it worked! One caution - be careful to use as small/compressed images as possible that you're inserting into your templates. If you put big massive high rez images on Imgur and then link to those, every single email will take awhile to load for your guests. A lot of times, you can shrink the **file size** (not the viewable size) of the image by using different compression programs.
That worked great. Thanks for the tip, it got me started!
What's kinda cool is once you embed one picture you can then use the WYSIWG editor to move them around, etc. so you don't need to be an expert in HTML to do this!
Damon
@Diarmuid: You'd have to have some kind of shared login to the same account for all your clients to share, which I'm sure would be out of the question for you. We've designed "shared account" ideas in the past but they never finished development due to higher-priority items. Do you have more clients asking you to do their own bookings, or more that send them to you for processing? ~Sam
Hi Michelle,
I have another twist to this I would like to ask you about.
Most of our property owners like to do their own bookings. This means that I would be entering the bookings they send me to help me with my scheduling and keeping track of cleaning costs and commission.
Then some clients ask me to do all the bookings also.
How would this work within your system?
Thanks,
Diarmuid
Perfect. I will try this!
I've been slow in responding to Claudia about this one (sorry, Claudia!) but I am getting around to it eventually.
Here are some quick steps for those of you that want to attempt it on your own:
1) Take whatever image you want to use and upload to a image hosting service. Basically, that means a web service or website that will upload your original image file and give you a public URL where it can be seen. imgur.com is probably the best. It's free, featureful and easy to use.
2) As an example, here's an image of an old cabin that I just uploaded to imgur.com:
https://i.imgur.com/6fj1jnl.jpg
After upload, they give you some tools that will show you the URL to use. You want to use the "direct link" option so that the URL goes directly to the image and not an intermediary page.
3) Now that you have your image publicly hosted, you'll want to use that in your OwnerRez emails. Here is a sample chunk of HTML that you can insert into your emails:
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/6fj1jnl.jpg" style="width:250px;" />
The 'src' attribute is where you put your image URL. Put the image URL inside the quotes exactly as you see above.
4) Use the 'style' attribute to change the image in other ways such as varying the width, height or border. For instance, here I'm adding a 5 pixel red border around the image:
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/6fj1jnl.jpg" style="width:250px;border:solid 5px red;" />
You can see how the above HTML looks by going to this URL in your browser:
http://fiddle.jshell.net/Fn5tV/show
JSFiddle is a great online tool you can use to play with HTML and see how it looks. Go to http://jsfiddle.net and put your HTML in the appropriate frame, then click the Run button to see how it looks.
5) After you have configured the HTML to look exactly as you want, copy that into your OwnerRez email template using the HTML editor button. Do NOT copy it directly into the message body. You must click the 'HTML' button on the editor toolbar and insert it there. You will have to determine where in the existing HTML is the correct place to put it. Make sure that your new image HTML does not break existing HTML that is already there. If you don't understand where to put it, to get your image to show up in the correct spot, feel free to ask us for help.
Hi Diarmuid,
I just sent you the Excel file, with some instructions, in an email. Let me know if you have any questions about that.
Yes, those bookings will be free. Additionally, anything you enter within the trial period (30 days from sign up) is free.
At the moment, we only support the PayPal gateways. They are called PayPal Payments Pro and PayPal PayFlow. We don't support regular PayPal where the user is taken to PayPal's website to enter/select their payment information. We do plan on supporting that in the near future.
The "$" notation is hard-coded throughout the system. Unfortunately, there is no way to disable or hide that. I will let you know what we decide here as this develops further.
-Michelle
Hi Michelle,
Thank you for the reply.
The excel sheet is a good idea. I take it that I can copy and paste my sheet to it and then import it so it would save me a lot of back and forth entering. Please send it to me.
I read in another thread that you don't charge for existing bookings, is that correct?
We already use paypal to receive payments and also bank transfers. Only these two options. As we are living in Switzerland and working within Chf we only take payments in Chf. However we have guests from all over the world so they need the ability to convert.
Even if we could leave the $ sign out of the correspondence and we could mention Chf ourselves in normal script somewhere, then that could work.... Maybe?
So yes to paypal.
thanks
Diarmuid
Hi Beyulapartments,
Yes, it's unfortunate and something we'd like to change. In the other topic, I asked you a few questions about your currency. It would be wonderful if you could let me know those things so we can plan accordingly.
-Michelle
Hi Beyulapartments,
At the moment, we don't have any way of importing rates and old bookings from HomeAway. You'd need to manually enter them into your system. We do offer an Excel import for new customers. If you're interested, I'll send you the Excel template to you (this is for importing bookings).
At the moment, we only support USD currency. We've discussed (many many times) adding non-USD currencies, but there are several obstacles that we have to overcome to make that work seamlessly.
Could you tell me what all you'd like supported with CHF? Some questions...
Are you looking to support multiple/mixed currencies for your guests, or just CHF for everyone?
Do you have a payment gateway (for credit card payments) that you work with already that supports CHF?
PayPal supports CHF. Are you fine using that if we required it in order to support CHF?
-Michelle
I'd like to learn how to do this through HTML. Since we have a 4-plex, I'd like to have each quote show specific pictures of the property, and now that you have custom fields, this is very easy to do in the quote!
Can you send me a small snippet of HTML code I could use with a few random pictures and a description of where I'd store my pictures so I could just replace your pictures with mine?
Thanks!
Hi,
When setting up a new property is it possible to import the info of rates and availability from pre-existing homeaway advert?
Secondly we only work in Swiss francs, CHF, is there any sign of this being supported soon?
Thanks,
d.
That is a real shame. Your product looks good but zero flexibility for currencies kills it.
That would be perfect!
By the way, if it helps, we have been working on an "auto responder" feature for awhile that is very high on the release schedule. Auto Responders will basically answer your inquiries for you, with a generated quote, in the event that an inquiry meets certain rules. Don't know if that's what you're referring to.
-Michelle
Hi Damon,
Can you be more specific about this? I don't believe we've ever had this request before. You're saying when YOU (the owner) are away for a few days and you have no back-up answering emails or phone calls, you want the system to have a general/high level "Away" mode?
-Michelle
Hi Damon,
Currently, we do not have field codes for those items. However, I know that those and others are on the list to add. I believe there were some issues with how to represent them in the event security deposits were turned off.
-Michelle
I am setting up an automated email and wanted to include the security deposit amount, date of hold, and date of release as fields, but couldn't find them. Please advise.
Damon
Any way to set an out of office message from the system to auto respond while we are on vacation?
Damon
Here-to-fore, the OwnerRez calendar, in printed form, wasn't suitable as a "quick availability" desk side reference tool. Now the "bars" have distinctive color bars with appropriate schedule "move in/move out" breaks that now show all bookings on a single monthly printout. You can carry this around with you for those telephone availability inquires you get when you're "out & about"!
We'll get clear of Homeaway yet!
Hi Damon,
No. Scheduled emails are only ever auto-created for FUTURE bookings. If you add a template and leave the "add to current bookings" checkbox selected, it will only apply to any bookings whose arrival days have not yet occurred. If the booking already has a scheduled email of that type, it will not create a second one. And if the scheduled email was already sent, nothing will happen. We make sure not to double them up or blanket old bookings.
All scheduled emails are sent at roughly 12:30 AM PST. This is roughly 30 minutes after the morning collector services have run (the things that collect scheduled payments and security deposits).
-Michelle
Does this mean anytime I add a new scheduled email After an event has happened it will apply to everything that previously happened? Example: send a survey email 2 days after departure? Will it send to everyone that has already left? Send a check in email 7 days before, will it send to all or only future check ins?
Also, what is the time zone that the system uses? Example: My property is in Chelan, I want to send a reminder to my maid service that says "reminder, unit xxx needs to be cleaned tomorrow", what time (pst) will it go out?
Thanks.
Damon
I took the liberty of looking at your template. You've fixed the field code issue (notice how it's showing in Preview mode now?) but you've set the template to be disabled. Because it's disabled, new bookings will not automatically generate a scheduled email based on this template. You can only add scheduled emails MANUALLY based on this template. To do that, open a booking, go to Email tab and click Add Scheduled Email. You can then select this template from which to create a scheduled emails. If you want every new booking to automatically create a scheduled email based on this template, re-enable the template.
-Michelle
Hi Marinas Edge,
That checkbox is used to control what happens to the scheduled emails already in place for current bookings. So when you add or update templates, it allows you to update all the current bookings in bulk instead of having to run around and manually touch each one.
If a booking has already sent a scheduled email for that type of template, it won't be sent again. To see what I mean, open a future booking, go to the Email tab and look at the bottom of the page. See the scheduled email there? You can add, update or delete the scheduled email at the booking level.
The reason you got 50 emails all of a sudden is because you added a booking that was 0 days after booked and you had 50 future bookings. When you saved the template, the system went and created a scheduled email for all of those future 50 bookings and since the scheduled sending time (0 days after booked) was past, they all went out.
Does this make sense?
-Michelle
ok that worked, but now there seems to be a different issue. I uncheck the checkbox for "overwrite all current bookings to use these settings", I hit save, and when I re-open to edit, it is checked again. This resulted in 50 emails in my wife's inbox this morning :(.
Thanks again
Awesome. THANKS and happy 4th of July!
This is happening because you changed the field code. You colored the "BID" part (without the curly brackets) red. That makes the code invalid because the actual HTML of the code now shows something like "{<span>BID</span>}" under the covers. You can see what I mean by looking at the HTML view of the email template. The original code of "{BID}" needs to remain unchanged in order for the transformation to work correctly. If you want the Booking ID to be red, put the red color around the entire code. In other words, put the the curly brackets inside the red part.
Remember to use the preview button when creating email templates to see how it will look after transformation. If you can still see the field codes in preview, then something is wrong.
-Paul
Awesome work on email scheduler. This is a huge improvement.
I was experimenting last night and the fields I added to the body of email didn't come through. For example, instead of the property name I got pname.
Let me know if I have done some thing wrong.
Damon