General Help and Questions

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Hi Buckwheat!

Yes, we do USD currency. It's hard-coded that way throughout the app. We hope to add different currencies and languages in the future.

Thanks,

-Devin

Hi!
I am active as an agent in the Caribbean, mainly the dutch speaking part.
That means that I have accomodations with pricing in Euro's.
I did a quick check around the settings, but couldn't find any currency setting.
Is OwnerRez limited to pricing/billing in US Dollars?

--Buckwheat

Or I think I can just put in receipt information for checks provided, if I'm not using credit cards, right? I will play around with it - this has been helpful thank you.

In terms of fees, we don't charge anything for bookings created within the trial period. So you can add as many of your bookings to the system as you want right now and they'll be free.

In terms of your existing operations - guests who have been told that their payments are due 60 or 30 days from arrival - our system shoudl be able to accomodate that smoothly.

You can create Scheduled Payments for any booking. So after entering those bookings, you would schedule their credit card to be processed at 60 and 30 days from arrival. Same with the security deposit - those can be scheduled too. You would have to have their credit card information to do this. Perhaps you can call and ask for it?

Thanks Michelle, appreciate it. I'll continue investigating. What I need to just confirm is that for any existing bookings we have for 2013, if I transfer those over I'll be able to do it in a "cost neutral" way, to preserve the integrity of our current system, even if it means work-arounds.

During the quote acceptance process, the guest does have to accept the renter agreement. That's one of the pages that they have to look at and accept. Your renter agreement is shown and they have to sign their name before moving to the payment part.

I have extended your trial for another 30 days. You can see your new trial ending date under the My Account menu.

Hi Michelle,
You raise excellent points. I'm moving from a very manual process to a nearly automated one with your solution, and have to re-think the process. The way that I do things today, if someone wants to rent 6 months from now, to "lock in" their rental I have them sign the rental agreement and send it back to me. Those who aren't interested won't sign and return the agreement. They then pay 1/2 60 days prior, and the balance + security 30 days prior. It's all done through checks. Since people can cancel with rentals so far off in the future, I didn't want to hold money unnecessarily.

That's today. And if I have bookings already in 2013 that I need to enter, with that current practice in place, I don't want to shift gears on those renters. Moving forward, I can probably just change my policy to work the way the tool works- because as you say if the benefit of this site is that people can book directly, without interacting with me as they do now, how do they "lock in" their rental. Could that be however by just providing a credit card to be put on file, as that is how it works with on-line hotel bookings?

On another note, I just received notice that my trial is ending soon... if I need more time to experiment with bookings/etc. to understand the process/tool before committing is there a way to extend by another 15-30 days?

Hi Jon,

Unfortunately, there isn't a way to set the billing settings to not collect a payment up front. If you enable the 'check' payment method, your guests could accept and finalize the quote using that, and then you could cancel the pending state. When someone accepts a quote with check payment, the system puts the booking into a [x] days 'pending' state until their payment arrives. That would sorta kinda get you what you wanted but it would probably be confusing.

I can push this to the dev team as a feature request, but I'm not sure it would be approved. I have, personally, never heard of an owner that didn't require a payment up front to hold the booking.

I'm curious... If guests were able to select dates from your website and book directly, without interacting with you or receiving a quote, would you let anyone do that without submitting a payment? I'm thinking longterm for when our website/booking integration is finished how this type of policy might affect that. I suppose you could limit a no-payment booking to just the people you sent quotes to.

-Michelle

I setup my rate structure, and experimented with various additional surcharge options, and I believe this can work so far.

For Billing Settings, is there a way to revise the first payment due date?. Today I do not require up front payment, because I have people who can book several months in advance but I do not want to collect any money until 60 days in advance for first payment, 30 days in advance for balance (plus security deposit at that time).

Any suggestions?

I was thinking perhaps of changing my policy to work with OwnerRez.

We are planning on integrating with regular PayPal - the thing that takes the user away to the PayPal website for credit card information and then brings them back - but that is not yet scheduled for development.

For the time being, you could use the Other Instructions field on the check payment method to tell the guest that they can pay you by PayPal. Maybe something like:

"As an alternative to check, you may send a PayPal payment to myemail@domain.com for the amount that is due. Please include your full name and the booking # with the payment so we know which guest is paying."

Then when the payment from PayPal arrives, you would simply enter the manual payment in OwnerRez under their booking and the pending status would disappear.

Thanks Michelle, you nailed it once again!! By the way, if I'm using regular PayPal, is there any way of having that as an option for payment methods versus the other PayPal Pro options, and then I could have something else other than checks flagged for payment methods?

There are several reasons that could be happening. Here are the two most common:

1) You only have a check payment type configured and the rules on the check method are making it so the check option is not showing up on the quote since the arrival date on the booking is too close to the current date.

For instance, your check payment method is configured to only allows checks for bookings that are more than 30 days away, but the quote is for a booking that is sooner than that.

If the only payment method you have configured it check and check is being restricted by the booking dates, then nothing will show and the guest will be instructed to "contact you directly for payment".

To make the check method show up, set the rules to be more lenient on the number of days.

2) You don't have any payment methods set for the property of the quote in question. If you view your payment methods, they will show which payment methods are set for which properties.

Do either of these sound right?

-Michelle

Got it, thanks Michelle. Another question of a different subject if that is okay. I sent a quote to a person that inquired on my listing, and when they got it, they went to go through the motions of accepting by reading the rental agreement etc, but there was no button on the bottom for them to accept/electronically accept. Can you tell me how to rectify this?

Hi Roger and Kelly,

I'm glad you figured out the quote issues. Please let me know what trouble you're having with the rental agreement.

You mentioned "inserting" the rental agreement. Where are you trying to put it?

In the quote acceptance process (ie. where the guest sees their quote and accepts/pays) the renter agreement is shown to them as part of the workflow. It shows up there based on what you've entered for the property.

You can edit it by opening the property and clicking on the Legal tab. From there, you can edit the default one we provide or upload your own. There are a set of mail-merge fields that you can insert so as to pull names and values from your property without having to hardcode a unique agreement for every property.

Hope this helps,

-Michelle

I have the quote issue figured out now, but having trouble inserting/editing my rental agreement.

Why won't my actual quote summary and "view more details & accept/finalize" blue buttons get added onto my quote reply template when I reply back to an inquiry?

Hi Glenn,

This has been confirmed on our end. It has been flagged as a bug and escalated for fixing. Thanks for the feedback.

-Michelle

No ETA yet. We're in the middle of a large overhaul to the settings, properties and general design. After that is completed, we'll have a lot better ETA for some of the recently-promised changes.

Any idea when the public calendar form changes might be available

Thank for the quick response. Actually I found out the source of the problem. The renters had not put any people in the renter party. I resolved this by going to the inquiry and checking against the source. I manually added two guests (adults) and saved the inquiry. I was then able to generate a quote.

Thus - small bug - if the inquiry comes in with no guests on it then when you click the create quote, nothing happens. A better behaviour might be a pop-up message indicating the quote cannot be created with no guests.

Anyhow problem solved.

Cheers.

Glenn, I just ran a couple of inquiry/quote simulations. Everything seems normal. Are you on a certain browser or device that could be causing it? If you send over the inquiry ID, I can take a deeper look. The support people are out of the office, but you'll hear something in the morning if I can't figure it out for you tonight.

Hi, trying to respond to a new inquiry and suddenly when I click the quote button, nothing happens. I have tried on a few different computers.

Glenn

Thank you, Michelle.

Hi Damon,

To embed the OwnerRez calendar into your own website, open a property and click on the Widgets tab. That will walk you through the steps.

We are also planning on adding some public calendar forms that you can link to (or provide links to in an email) which are full pages like the quotes that you send out. Those will have more options and allow your guests to see multiple properties on the same calendar.

-Michelle

I like this.

What are your public calendar forms?

Damon

Hi Marinas Edge,

The quote body does include a message to that effect already. You'll notice in the gray area below the charges, it says:

"This quote does not put a hold on the dates requested. The dates will not be reserved until this quote is accepted"

And it's called out in bold.

That's the default quote email. You are able to change that email to say whatever you want. You could call it out ABOVE the charges area if you preferred to make it more obvious.

If our public calendar forms are done by then, the preempted quote will definitely have a link to it so the guest can peruse what is available.

-Michelle

Thanks for the responses. It seems like a proactive message in the quote would go a long way in preserving the relationship. "This quote is not a guaranteed reservation until the deposit is received. Due to incredible demand we recommend booking as soon as you receive this quote to ensure your spot."

Also, on the technology side a simple notification in the quote generation process saying this quote overlaps with another quote (click here).

thoughts?

<< We are working on some upgrades to the preempted view where the guest will be able to see your other properties that are available for the same dates range and/or email you (the owner) when preemption occurs. >>

Hi Michelle,

Don't forget to include a way for them to go to the calendar, of that same property, and see if they are interested in switching their dates to ones that are open.

Claudia

Hi Damon,

Our system ensures that no one can book the same (or overlapping) dates. You can send out as many quotes as you want for whatever dates you want.

When a quote is booked where there are other open quotes for the same (or overlapping) dates, those quotes automatically flip to "Preempted" status.

Guests are not able to accept or finalize preempted quotes.

As an example, here's a live example of an open quote that the guest sees:

https://app.ownerrez.com/forms/quotes/c4493365b01c453aaa6c4eba1d1c9d97

If that quote were to go into "Preempted" status, it would then look like this:

https://app.ownerrez.com/forms/quotes/67fe14fc904a4086bd435c68e8e89915

We are working on some upgrades to the preempted view where the guest will be able to see your other properties that are available for the same dates range and/or email you (the owner) when preemption occurs.

In the Quotes menu, you can filter by open, expired, preempted and booked status.

Hope this helps,

-Michelle

Given that quotes aren't displayed on the calendar, how do I ensure that I don't offer multiple quotes for the same person and the same date?

Stated differently, if I send out overlapping dates and one person books, what will happen when the other person tries to book?

Any best practices?

Damon