General Help and Questions

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Thank you Ken - I did see one fired with a new rez that came in.

Can you address my question about imported reservations? Will I have to continue to manually send those messages or is this part of the glitches you mention?

I would suggest attending one of our regular webinars:

https://www.ownerrez.com/webinars

While they cover more topics than just the API, our APIs are always included, you can take live questions, and generally the "main subject" of the webinar can be adjusted based on demand from those attending.

If that doesn't do it for you, you can write in to the Helpdesk and request an account review and guidance, up to and including a scheduled live session if that's what's needed.

I want to suggest that if anyone commenting on, or reading this, go to forums>feature requests and up vote and comment on the feature requests related to reporting. (Ken, you should have recommended this as soon as ppl were making a call to action request.)

There is one regarding custom reports that is currently tagged as "planned" and would be a great opportunity to integrate our suggested change. 

I will try to link this thread in the comments of each feature request referring to custom reporting.

Read the room Ken....

Are there ever any training seminars for doing the api integrations? It just makes me nervous 😬 

Disabling properties is always optional - if you expect to need to regularly review their statistics on an ongoing basis, or for some period of time into the future, you can simply leave them enabled as long as you like and have full functionality for as long as needed.

Each Hosted Website, as well as each Widget, has the ability to specifically control which properties are included on it.  This record remains even if a property is disabled.  So, if you plan to disable a property but anticipate that you may need to re-enable it at some point in the future, you can configure your Hosted Website and/or Widgets to exclude that property (or, alternatively, to only include specific designated properties).  Of course, disabled properties do not appear in any Hosted Website or Widgets, but, if they have been excluded or are otherwise not included there, even if you re-enable them they still won't appear.

Sure they will, in fact one of the key features of the Vrbo API is that we integrate into the Vrbo internal messaging system, so you can use OwnerRez triggers to send automatic messages to your guests that way.

As with all things, of course, there can be glitches, and we've seen some recently which are being investigated.  But generally, yes, OwnerRez triggers and templates work fine with Vrbo.

I appreciate honesty but find Ken's response unhelpful. 

As a property manager with frequent property changes, reports for historical data are crucial.

The suggested workaround is simplistic. It requires a manual record check of which properties were active for a given year since there is no report for this data either, property reactivation, calendar blocking to prevent future bookings, report generation, and deactivation. Estimated time for just 5 properties within a particular year would take about 7 hours away from a day of work- a significant time investment.

This process of re-enabling, blocking calendars, and disabling properties just to see historical reports is cumbersome, ridiculous, inefficient, and unreasonable.

Data shouldn't be hidden. The data belongs to the user and should be readily available, not "held hostage."

100% agree. I just got off an hour-long phone call with one of my clients who was looking to buy another property in town. I had to go into my old properties and re-enable two of them so I could run comparable reports for him for other properties I managed in the two developments he was looking at. Doable, but very cumbersome, and also annoying that for the duration of my hour-long phone call, those properties showed as listed on my hosted website.

And I had to run reports on both properties for several different years to try to figure out which years I had managed them (turns out one was in 2021, the other was in 2022).

Definitely did not make me look very professional to my client and did not present a good look to anyone browsing my website at the time. OR can and should do better here.

Chris, I had about 20 properties that I had to reenable.  I decided to deactive my hosted website while the properties were being reenabled so they wouldn't get booked. This turned out to be easier than blocking the calendar for each one.  It was still unprofessional and I got about 3 phone calls during that time about the site being down :(

I appreciate honesty but find Ken's response unhelpful. 

As a property manager with frequent property changes, reports for historical data are crucial.

The suggested workaround is simplistic. It requires a manual record check of which properties were active for a given year since there is no report for this data either, property reactivation, calendar blocking to prevent future bookings, report generation, and deactivation. Estimated time for just 5 properties within a particular year would take about 7 hours away from a day of work- a significant time investment.

This process of re-enabling, blocking calendars, and disabling properties just to see historical reports is cumbersome, ridiculous, inefficient, and unreasonable.

Data shouldn't be hidden. The data belongs to the user and should be readily available, not "held hostage."

100% agree. I just got off an hour-long phone call with one of my clients who was looking to buy another property in town. I had to go into my old properties and re-enable two of them so I could run comparable reports for him for other properties I managed in the two developments he was looking at. Doable, but very cumbersome, and also annoying that for the duration of my hour-long phone call, those properties showed as listed on my hosted website.

And I had to run reports on both properties for several different years to try to figure out which years I had managed them (turns out one was in 2021, the other was in 2022).

Definitely did not make me look very professional to my client and did not present a good look to anyone browsing my website at the time. OR can and should do better here.

So VRBO triggers won't run at all??

:/

Hi Spencer - more details to come as we fully plan this out. I did want to answer your question about international restrictions on SMS. Before doing the Dialer work, we plan first to open up SMS to work internationally. Then when Dialer becomes available, it will work for the same countries that SMS supports. So you'll see the details on SMS come out first.

Hi,

We do have an availability/property search widget which has a location drop down. Once selected the widget will only show properties that match the criteria chosen by a potential guest, and then once that property is selected it generally would take the guest to a page where they can book that property.

If this still isn't quite what you're looking for, I'd recommend reaching out to our helpdesk with more specific details as to what you're trying to accomplish and we'll see if we can work with you any.

~Caleb

This is why I haven't integrated the API.  It seems like I will lose some personalizing capabilities. Right now I import their contact information manually and then push out my rental agreement contact form which then puts them in my system for future email triggers.  It is a bit clunky but since I only have 3 properties I can still manage it this way.

I have imported VRBO bookings (and AirBNB) that won't fire the automated triggers b/c the system says there's no message thread. Now that my API is integrated, I tried to "create" a thread by sending a VRBO msg via ORez, that didn't work.

Will this be fixed with NEW reservations created via VRBO and I just have to manually send the imported bookings?

All sorted. Had to get the listing owner to go into his account and confirm his identity? Everything worked again after that?

Snooze still exists in the mobile app if anyone else needs it.

This could be the Airbnb API screwing around with their launch.

This morning I spotted the warning

Attention needed! There is a problem with your Airbnb channel account.  The connection is no longer authorized.  Please reauthorize your Airbnb channel account.  

So i check and it is one of my customers accounts. I click reauthorise and OR says your listing is verified. But it takes me to my airbnb settings page.

Go back to the customers. repeat and the same happens.

Click on fix it and it takes me to my airbnb account (on airbnb) with my details. I confirm an it says done.

Come back to OR and nothing has changed.

nb the whole layout on AIRBNB has changed. The snooze option is hiding so i've switched it to request to book.

This might just be me but its probably not a coincidence that it happens today.

Any help gratefully received.

More detailed information is in the above posts in this thread - it is not necessary to pre-approve anything. The guest should simply proceed to book via Vrbo, your manual participation in advance is not required.

Since I'm using OwnerRez, I'm using their "trust accounting model" for my property management clients.

Unless I'm missing a trick, while the accounting makes sense, the banking doesn't. It would seem, in order to keep everything straight, that I will need to open a new "trust" account for each client. Also, since I'm listing on Vrbo and have a private site as well, that I'll also need to open an account for each client on Stripe.

Banks don't like this. To them, multiple accounts means something fishy is going on. I'm being met with disbelief and obstacles.

How do other people manage this? Do you have one "trust account" for multiple clients?  Is there a bank that understands this and you like?

I'm a little stuck. I need to onboard clients and I've been delaying until I found a solution.

Thanks for anyone's help.

Good to hear, good to know. So far I'm happy I just get frustrated and stuck from time to time.

I'm thoroughly confused on how to handle VRBO inquiries. I've responded, but I'm unable to pre-approve via VRBO's portal and the guest info wasn't imported to send a quote via OR.

What are the proper steps when an inquiry is received?

I have my own website and have the booking widget on it but there is not a search option for location. We have properties across NC so this is very important to us and in fact, the website capability is one of the main reasons we chose OwnerRez. At this point I am considering changing to Guesty unless someone has a work around?

Hi All,

Received a message from Booking.com today encouraging turning on Security Settings for Messaging including only allowing certain emails for contact guests and blocking links in messages with guests.  I was wondering if anyone else received this and what your approach is going to be or if there is guidance for how we should set this up to ensure that links to rental agreements, our websites etc still work and that messages still get to the guests.

The settings are found under Property | Messaging Preferences | Security Settings.

Thanks

the company that can be trusted to guide people through it all is going to become a dominant player.

Well, that's the trick for sure.  If you examine our ratings and evaluations as I do, there's a clear pattern - OwnerRez is known as having the best quality support in the industry, but certainly not the fastest.  What we are working to do is to increase the speed without compromising the quality, which is why we can't "just hire" people - we need to carefully select the very best, and then train thoroughly.

Those who have been with OwnerRez for any length of time can testify that the support team has grown enormously over the past few years, and this will continue as we seek to provide the very best possible service.  I can assure you that OwnerRez leadership does not view support as an expense in the sense you mean - we know full well that improving the areas where it's needed while not compromising what we do well, is absolutely essential to our continued success.

Thanks for your response.  It sounds like from other responses that timely communication is an issue. This may need to be prioritized over further development until it's running smoothly or you may begin to lose competitive advantage.

Thanks for the response. These are good tips!

The other way to do this is set a higher base price and then use discounts to achieve your pricing.  You can do this both on OwnerRez, or if you use a pricing engine like PriceLabs, you may be able to do it there.  Or you can use a combination (but be careful not to stack them unintentionally).

As an example, if you wanted to charge $250 a night except for one- and two-day stays, where you wanted the price to be $500, you could set a base rate of $500 and then set a 50% discount for stays of 3, 4, 5, or 6 nights, which would yield the result you want.  (After 6 days, you'd run into your weekly discount....)  Obviously, you could vary what discounts you want to to encourage or discourage particular lengths of stay. 

I wrote a similar complaint recently.  It's far from ideal, but I was encouraged to see that OwnerRez was hiring help-desk personnel.  

Personally I think they might be missing a trick because in an area as fast-moving, complex, and stuffed with cash as this industry is, the company that can be trusted to guide people through it all is going to become a dominant player. Companies generally need to stop looking at customer service as a cost, and more as ongoing customer retention marketing, and word-of-mouth marketing for future customers.

But I digress.  As OwnerRez deals with their scaling problems, I've found that the best way to get assistance with a pressing issue is to use these forums, and follow up with the help desk if it's an issue specific to my account.

If you do send a message into the help desk by email, you will get a response saying that they got it. If you *don't* get that response, maybe that's a clue that your message went to spam. I always look for the confirmation before settling in to wait for a few days.

As a side note, I also read the forums and contribute when I can help.  If everyone did this it would alleviate some pressure on the help desk staff.

That's a bit more difficult, but it can be done using CSS.  Here's more information:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/hosted-website-css-magic#hosted-site-hero-unit-font-color 

Thank you for this.  I was able to get the text in, but I would like to edit the font, size, and position on the page.  The place that the words land on the photo is not ideal for reading if that makes sense...  Any tips on changing just the font type and size of the banner text on top of the hero unit photo?  Thanks!