General Help and Questions

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Hi!

I've just started to use booking.com integrated with Owner Rez.

What kind of payout are you using? The booking.com payout or do you process it via Owner Rez and whichever payment processor you have set?

Thanks in advance.

Unfortunately no, OwnerRez does not have this capability.  PriceLabs does though, as noted, so you can accomplish your goal that way.

OwnerRez does not do currency conversions, so, an individual OwnerRez property can only be in one currency.

However, it is possible to create a copy of the property in OwnerRez, and assign a different currency to that copy.  You can use our Mutual Blocking system to link the calendars so as not to get double bookings.

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/combined-properties-blockoff-lockoff

That way, you could use the dollar-denominated copy of the property with Hopper, and the original Euro-denominated version everywhere else.

How do we respond with a quote to VRBO?

As noted above - you cannot.  Vrbo API simply does not support that.

Unfortunately, this is a restriction enforced by the lock - the lock simply will not accept the same code used twice at the same time.  Unfortunately, you will have to manually configure the code for one of the guests to be something else, and then notify them accordingly.

Has anybody used a pricing offset in PriceLabs to make this easier? I think this may be the solution:

PriceLabs Pricing Offset Customization

As I see it...

- Set the offset to 6%. That should feed OR with the PL calculated prices plus the 6%

- Set discounts for ABB and Vrbo as required.

I did email PL's support to understand if this makes sense to do. 

EDIT: They got back to me and this is indeed the best solution. 

In PL -> Customizations -> More Customizations -> Advanced Customizations -> Pricing Offset to whatever percent you wish.

Hey there, I believe I am having the same issue with VRBO, where I cannot send a quote back to the person at VRBO. I am new to this so maybe I am missing something. 

Here's what we did. 

I received a request to book through VRBO. We are running a 20% off on Airbnb, so we wanted to offer that discount to VRBO as well.

Since discount codes don't work with OwnerRez pushing through to VRBO, we adjusted the price in our pricing software. (that is correct, yes?) 

We then hit "create a quote" through owner rez. 

When it came time to send the quote, OwnerRez is looking for an email address. Since the offer came through VRBO. There's no email address. So how do we send the quote? Is there a randomized email you can copy and paste like craigslist? 

We logged into VRBO and tried to send through their server. That wouldn't let us send any quote either, and said we had to use OwnerRez.

Thanks for any advice or help.  How do we respond with a quote to VRBO? 

On the plus size. Using Owner Rez allowed us to create our direct listing on two channels. So that is a plus. 

I read some of your other responses and they seem like everything is working out for them.  Booking.com has been a bit of a nightmare for me ini the begninning.  Very high cancellation rates.  So i like the idea that someone commented on regarding setting the window to book not to far out.  I have not had any issues with lower class guests. I mean that can happen on any platform. 

My biggest issues are HIGH cancellations and people block your calendar.  I dont have many European travellers althought I know its a big site in Europe. I have been forced to use booking.com since for whatever reason I get way more traffic from that platform for my place in Puerto Rico than on the other sites.  I have otherr places in Pocono Mountains and I refuse to advertise on booking.com because Airbnb and Vrbo and direct bookings are sufficient. 

But Booking.com does have a huge following and i get allot of bookings for the Puerto Rico property but ALLOT of cancellations.    The other main issue is booking.com does NOT facilaite payment on my behalf. Meaning they dont process payments for me.  I got the run around at first indicating I had to be on their platform for a year before they would process payments on my behalf and then I was told that they dont do that for properties in Puerto Rico, etc... always som BS.  So having to chase people down for payment and credit card infomraton combined with the fact taht many people on booking.com are window shopping makes it very difficult to deal with.    My advice is if you get enough volume from other platforms then stay AWAY from bookng.com.  I am stuck with them for now for my place oin PR but that because its a semi new listing. Once I get enough volume from other platforms im done with booking.com and will keep them to fill gaps. But definitly not rely on them (which I unfortunately do now)

We always make these kinds of adjustments in our PriceLabs settings that then push into OR and out to all of the channels.

Thanks for the feedback! So is using a third party service like PriceLabs the only way to do this or is there a setting from within OR?  

Hi Scott! 

I just set up a Hosted Website thru OR, and have the same questions. I haven't found any definitive answers on this, searching thru the Forums. Did you find an answer on how to direct the "contact us" or "Inquiries" messages to OR's Inquiry box from the Hosted website? I emailed Help desk, no response yet... 

After going live, when I tested the "contact us" button on the hosted website, the message is sent to the domain's email box (vs. coming into the inquiry section on OR). 

I tested the Inquiry button also, this also goes to the domain's email box (vs. coming into the inquiry section on OR). 

I followed the DNS set up to a "T" but haven't figured out how to route those inquiries/contact us back to OR (vs. chasing 2 inboxes of inquiries)... 

Let me know if you've found any answers on this or what's possible. Ultimately, just would love to manage emails in one central location on OR's site (Inquiries and the CRM Inbox) (much appreciated!) 

-Tracy 

This isn't working for me how I expect it to.

I raised the minimum, base, and max prices by 6.5% in PL. My off season rates reflect the new minimum price increase. All other pricing has remained the same. 

Am I going to need to set a modifier? Am I doing something wrong?

Sure! We operate in the Smoky Mountains. BDC has a very large reach so we get guests funneling in via BDC even if they didn't specifically search on BDC (Similar to VRBO and Expedia - some of your VRBO guests are finding you on Expedia or their other consumer-facing brands). 

I'd say that the majority of guests we get on Booking are good but there are bad - same as on Airbnb/VRBO.  We do not have a lot of European guests but the few that we have had have booked through a BDC-related channel.

Cancellations:  BDC guests typically don't have to make a down payment to hold a reservation so they may hold your place while continuing to shop. BDC Bookings have a way higher rate of cancellation, at no cost to the guest, than other OTAs. We have a 30-day cancellation policy so we limit our open inventory to about 45 days out so that we are not allowing their guests to hold our far-out dates without "skin in the game". This limits the number of cancellations as those guests are more serious about staying at your place than those who are just window shopping. Hope that makes sense!

Stacia & Larry -  Thanks, this is very helpful and thanks for taking the time to respond.  Would you be open to two follow-up questions? 1. Are you comfortable sharing where your vacation rental is located and any observations about the type of people booking through BDC?  I know Booking.com has a larger market share in Europe so I'm wondering if you are getting Europeans through booking.com who might not look at Airbnb or VRBO, or are you getting US based people who are shopping for the same property on multiple platforms?  2.Can you clarify your comment about cancellations?  This article seems to imply that you can set up any cancellation policy you want as a host on booking.com: https://partner.booking.com/en-us/solutions/cancellation-deposit-and-prepayment-policies Could you just set your cancellation policy on booking.com to match whatever you use on Airbnb and would that solve the cancellation problem? 

Hi, my main currency is EUR but my listing for Hopper gives an error, stating I have to give a price in USD.

Can I change this just for Hopper? Changing all to USD doesn't make a lot of sense, the majority of my guests are European

I had two guests that have the same last four digits of their phone number, so the system generated the error below. I still want the code to generate for the user but it wont let me set the code to the last four digits of her phone number. I would prefer not to have to change my templated channel message that says the code is the last four digits of your phone number for this one off guest. Any way around this?

The requested access code is already in use on the device. The entered code matches the pattern of an existing access code. Please enter a code where the first 4 digits do not match the first 4 digits of an existing code.

Thank you, Shawn! I understand that it might be difficult to develop a way to insert field codes inside of the Airbnb House Rules, but would there be any way to get some field codes that are able to reference the channel rules for each property?

It would be really great to be able to insert the channel rules into templates without having to duplicate that info into an additional custom property field.

We get a fair number of bookings through BDC. However, we have found that many of their guests are shopping around even at the point they book your home and we get far more cancellations from their guests than the other OTAs.

To solve for this we have limited the number of days out anyone can book on BDC to fit within our cancellation policy and that has helped a lot - we use them to fill empty nights. An extreme example of the problem was when a single guest booked two of our listings, across town from each other, for the same nights!  As soon as we saw that we called BDC and had them cancel both reservations - I would say that the BDC customer service is far better than the CSRs on any of the other platforms.

At 15% minimum, the BDC commissions are much higher than the others so we adjust the rates up to cover some of it and we do not buy into any of their Genius or Partner programs that are going to give extra unnecessary discounts. We do use "promotional discounts" that they offer IF they promote our listing AND the discounts auto expire so we don't have to remember. 

Use the Payments by Booking so you don't have to chase payments - they will pay you the gross and you remit the commissions when invoiced at the beginning of the month.

The last thing to know is that you should not use anything other than the standard rate - not discounts for non-refundable etc, as the details attached to your stay do not flow from parent to child. For example, if you have minimum night stays set those will push into your standard rate profile but will not push to other rate profiles. You can do them manually but that's a giant pain.

Hope that helps.

We always make these kinds of adjustments in our PriceLabs settings that then push into OR and out to all of the channels.

 

 

Is there a way to adjust the minimum nights stay based on lead time? For example, let's say our minimum is 5 nights in general, but anything less than 30 days out we'd go down to three nights. 

Hi Sherri,

Could you tell me the correct setting 

Thanks

Stacey

Is there a way to adjust the minimum nights stay based on lead time? For example, let's say our minimum is 5 nights in general, but anything less than 30 days out we'd go down to three nights. 

You set the prices in PriceLabs like normal.

The adjustment part (Airbnb/VRBO) happens in OwnerRez in Account -> Settings -> API Integrations -> Airbnb/VRBO/etc channel

Once you edit the Channel (Airbnb/VRBO/etc) you can click "Change".  There's a section for "Rate Adjustment".

There doesn't appear to be a way to adjust your Ownerrez direct booking site.  So the strategy is basically decide what your direct booking site rates should be, set that in PriceLabs, then adjust the channels lower.  You have a higher rate in your direct booking site because there's no service fee like Airbnb/VRBO charges.

Perfect! Thank you Ken that fixed it!

That sounds like you're doing a Refundable Damage Deposit-style surcharge, and, you may need to adjust your settings in the Surcharge.

Please write in to the Helpdesk with a specific example, and we can tell you exactly what setting needs to be changed.

We are trying to do owner statements and payouts and it's calculating the security deposit in the statement as something the owner gets. Is there a possible solution?

Thanks

Agent@AlaskaTravelers

Can I get a little more detail on where in PL you're changing the prices? Is adjusting the base rate up by X% enough to handle this or is there more to do - or a better way?

Since OwnerRez does not integrate with bank transfers, it is not possible for this to be handled automatically.

Of course, you can manually do anything you like, by entering and removing charges and offline transactions, so if you wanted to do it that way it's certainly possible.  There's just no way for OwnerRez to handle it automatically for you, as it can with credit cards.

Hello! We have just run into an issue involving security deposits. We are trying to pay our owners, but the numbers aren’t matching because we have the security deposits under surcharges. We don’t like the idea of using a card for a security deposit hold, is there anyway to do the security deposits with a bank transfer that’s not in the surcharge section?

Thank you!

Hi Mark,

Under Amenities for any given property, there is an "Entertainment" field. Within this subsection you'll find a few different amenities, but the Game console amenity can be found here as "Video Games"

When it comes to searches made for properties on channels, we do pass them the data, but it is generally up to the channel to determine how to display that information. Here's how the Video Game Amenity would be passed through the API to Airbnb.

~Caleb

Is it because it it only pull that amount from a booking?

Yes - each rental agreement is populated with data from its specific booking, which can be different, particularly when specific different channels are involved.

I imagine that if it's Airbnb, that amount will be zero

Given your current settings, yes, but...

as they will not allow Deposits, yes? 

In fact they do, if you're using OwnerRez and our Airbnb API connection!  Here's how:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/security-deposit-holds#airbnb 

Hey there OwnerRez. Thank you so much for setting up a wonderful program.

I noticed that in my contract, my security deposit is showing up as 0.00. The field code is {BSDAMT}. I checked on the listing under Rules, and we have our security deposit listed at $1500.00 When I hit preview, the amount shows up as 0.00. Am I missing something? Is it because it it only pull that amount from a booking? Also, I imagine that if it's Airbnb, that amount will be zero, as they will not allow Deposits, yes?