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Thanks Alissa. We answered this question on the email you submitted to us.
Without providing personal details here, your guest will want to check with their email domain provider to see if your inquiryspot email address is being blocked by them for some reason.
You can also acquire your own domain and associated email address, and have it verified. More info in this support article:
https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/email-from-reply-to-verified-sender
OwnerRez help needed: emails not going through to the guest
We have a guest who just placed a booking, they are a repeat guest and we have emailed them before with no issue. For this booking, our OwnerRez emails are not going through to the guest.The guest said they have received some emails, but not others (namely the payment form). I have reached out to OwnerRez but they haven't responded to the ticket yet, so we figured we'd ask here just in case
Additional context:
Thanks in advance!
Same request from me. I have been paying for a hospitable subscription to literally only distinguish between an inquiry and booking request on Airbnb. OwnerRez needs to figure this one out asap. Too easy to fix.
Vrbo let us know they fixed this issue. They were not including reservation IDs in the download.
They've said you'll see the fix with any new files they produce. Any existing files were not fixed.
Please check the next Vrbo commission statement generated and let us know if you still see issues. Help@ownerrez.com
You can export your contact information and use it to send marketing email manually or through your favorite CRM.
Since our messaging system is meant to be for transactional messaging related to inquiries or bookings, I don't believe you'll find a way to send an email to someone through OwnerRez that hasn't booked or inquired about a stay.
I have recently manually added some contacts that I have received via my META biz platform. I would like to send them an email through the template system. I cannot figure out if this is possible or not. Has anyone done this?
Hi All,
We are ramping up a co-hosting business using OwnerRez as the PMS and QuickBooks Online for financials. We are in a state where we need to walk a fine line between what we can do as a co-host and what is considered a property manager bc property managers are required to be licensed relators. Also, we are using a MTR/STR Hybrid approach. This means we are trying for 30 night minimum rentals first and filling in the gaps by opening it up to 2 night minimum. Our target guests are insurance company customers that had a fire/flood in their home; people relocating to Charlotte, but not sure where they want to buy yet; companies with employees on long term assignments that would be more comfortable in a house than an extended stay hotel.
The main thing we need to be careful of when it comes to systems/processes around OwnerRez is guest/channel payments must be paid directly to the owner, then we invoice for our commission and out of pocket expenses. We plan to have each owner have their own Stripe account or other method to collect payments.
A few questions and a general ask for any tips, tricks or gotchas below (remember, we are using OwnerRez and QuickBooks Online):
1) Do you have a solution in OR for channel (vrbo, airbnb) payment processing fees/commission charges that the channel subtracts before sending the owner the payment? I detailed this question out with screen shots in another forum post. Would appreciate your input on the separate post. https://www.ownerrez.com/forums/go/80018
2) How do you setup multi-month (lets say 5 months) stay where the guest (or insurance company) will pay monthly instead of in 2 payments before arrival? How do you show each monthly payment that was made to the owner (can only find a single Direct Remittance field on the PM tab of the Booking, so we could keep updating the total, however that doesn't provide us the detail of what happened when, and we have a feeling it will get even messier on the owner statements.
3) How do you do background checks, credit reports and income verification on a multi-month stay? We setup the integration with trustd.ai which handles the background check/id verification, however are open to other options and don't have any integrated solution for credit check/income verification
4) How do you handle accounting for security deposits in OR? They need to be in the Quote and charges on the Booking, but the $$ is being received/held/returned by the owner. How do you show it was paid, but not show it as paid to you? How do you show it was returned?
3) Do you have any other tips, tricks, gotchas you can call out using OR and QuickBooks Online for Co-hosting where the owner is paid directly by the guest/channel and we invoice the owner for our commission and out of pocket expenses?
Thank you!
We are Co-Hosting in a state that requires property managers to be licensed relators. This requires that payments, security deposits, etc. be paid directly to the owner, and we invoice the owner for our commission and out of pocket expenses. We believe we have this mostly figured out in OR, however, we can't figure out how to handle the payment processing fees and the channel commission that the channel deducts from the payment it sends to the owner. They show up in the OR booking as expenses, however there doesn't seem to be a way to indicate that owner paid these expenses directly. This causes the PM amount under the Profit section of the PM tab of the Booking to be too high bc it thinks the PM paid these expenses on the Owner's behalf.
The least wrong way we have found is to delete these as Expenses and add them as Discounts under the Charges. This makes all of the numbers on the PM tab of the booking come out correct (except that technically the Discount is too large and portions should be reflected as Owner Paid expenses, but it makes the Owner and PM profit correct). We then put the amount the Owner was paid directly by the Channel (VRBO) into the Direct Remittance field. This causes the Owner and PM amounts under Profit on the PM tab to be correct (Owner has a negative balance which is equal to the amount due to the PM).
The problem with the above solution is the Owner Statement shows that the guest paid over 100% of the total due (b/c the guest paid X, but we had to add the processing/commission fees as a discount, so OR thinks the guest should have paid less (X - processing/commission fees).
Are we missing something? Any suggestions?
Screen shots attached.
Hey Jordan,
Google Vacation Rentals is not necessarily the issue. Your listing does market your direct book website to a broad audience. That's good and bad. Bad because scammers look for properties to vacation where they can check in at the last minute, using stolen credit cards. By the time the credit card is reported stolen and a chargeback is filed, they have enjoyed your place and are long gone.
While nothing is foolproof, there are some steps you can consider:
https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/integrations-overview#insurance
Also speak with your current merchant processor to see what checks they have on their side to help combat fraudulent charges. Some of them do have processes in place.
I'm sorry you're going through this, and I hope others will chime in with their experiences and suggestions.
Hi All, I have had all of my listings on Google Vacation Rentals for many months, but only recently got 2 bookings through that platform for the same listing.
For whatever reason, both bookings have been flagged by Stripe as being fraudulent credit card transactions. I have never had this happen before with any other platform, and I'm wondering if it has something to do with GVR, or if anyone else has experienced this before. We do have signed renter's agreements as proof of the booking being legitimate, so hopefully the fraud disputes are unsuccessful and we're able to keep the booking value.
Thanks in advance for your help with this!
Not sure what you mean by "templates and triggers that were not set up by me". I have 60 triggers for every imaginable scenario (I guess I may be over-detailed) and 35 templates (some templates may be used by more than 1 trigger). I also have templates that can be sent manually. It all works. So maybe something is set up incorrectly in your case? Not sure if that is an OR issue or user error, or condition of the bookings - you mention that triggered messages are only sent to those who booked after June 19th. Triggers are typically not retroactive, i.e, only bookings created after the trigger was defined will get the triggered message. That will, however, will correct itself as time progresses. If you are sure that Hostaway is better for you, of course. But I have a feeling that you may not have understood/implemented all the useful OR features before deeming it not useful to you. You do not need to be a "coder" to define triggers. There are multiple docs and vids explaining how to.
When you integrate with Vrbo via their API, they then act as a listing site & passing the rest of the booking details to you. However, they take precautions to keep guest inquiries within the Vrbo system to prevent off-platform bookings. Notably, Vrbo "inquiries" cannot be directly converted into bookings. Guests can use instant booking after their questions are answered through the inquiry process.
The quote and pre-approve buttons in your Vrbo dashboard are non-functional.
When you import an inquiry into OwnerRez, it may appear that you can send quotes and edit charges, but guests cannot accept the quote directly within the inquiry. They can respond to your messages and agree to changes, but Vrbo will block any live links that would allow the quote to be accepted and converted into a booking.
Here are a few strategies for adjusting pricing for a guest:
(Note: The Vrbo ~15% booking fee will not be reduced in amount if you adjust the price down on OwnerRez after the guest books.)
Or, if you are Request to Book: If you use the "Request to Book" feature, you can adjust the pricing on a booking request before confirming it. You and the guest agree on a price within the Vrbo inbox to make the guest comfortable with the request, then adjust the charges before confirming the booking.
Hi Karen!
You should be able to see this information with our Booking Detail report. You can set a specific time frame you wish to look at, and it should show you a list of bookings, with the total made at the bottom. It should also have a column that shows how much the owner gets, and the commission the PM made on the booking. We have this support article that goes over the report: https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/bookings-detail-report
If you have any other questions, please reach out to help@ownerrez.com.
If you are integrated, you cannot send a quote to VRBO in response to an inquiry. You can only send a verbal response. Guests can still book on vrbo and booking will flow into OR, "that's all". The amount not matching could be: 1) because Vrbo adds a service fee to the amount that the guest sees on the Vrbo side; 2) if you have a rate adjustment on vrbo channel setting ( ex: "Increase/decrease VRBO rates by X%").
I came from guesty and I could get a quick report that showed how much a property made for each month or time period I chose. Each property had to income or commission for the time period. So I could see how much I made for whatever time period. For instance, If I chose year to date, it would show me how much I made for each property total and total for commission. So if I owned a property, I would make 100% commission, on managed properties it would show the percentage made and give me a total of what the property in whole made AND what I made (owned + percentage). Is there a report like that on OR? I hope that makes sense. I like OR in a lot of ways but some things seem over complicated. I just want a quick simple gross income report with property total and what I made.
Sorry I'm new. I don't understand VRBO inquiries. When a guest inquires, do I have to send a quote or can they instant book. Also, the amount shown on VRBO do not match what is on the OR quote. None of this makes sense to me. I'm just used to guests booking and that's it.
That is a weird Booking.com quirk. Booking.com does not count kids in room counts. If you have a sleeps 4 room with 2 adults and 2 kids - that is considered a 2 person room.
Hi James,
I'm in the UK and using Stripe with tokenised set up in Ownerrez and not having any issues with security holds. Have you tried turning on the "Use Radar on payment methods saved for future use" within Stripe>Settings>Radar?
Hi Glenn,
I do not think you need to keep the Cornerstone account, especially if you are are not seeing any traffic through it. However, I also agree with BlueMtnCabins -- It would be advisable to confirm with Lynnbrook before closing that account.
maybe contact support@lynnbrookgroup.com and ask?
Hi James,
I see you've had some back and forth with our Support team on this issue. The last we wrote to you was just a few hours after your last post, but we haven't received a reply. I'll send that last email out to you again to make sure it was received.
I only have one property and some time ago… maybe 2013 I set up a payment method so that I could accept credit cards. At the time I set up Sage payments. I guess at the same time there was a merchant account set up for this process using Cornerstone? which has now morphed into Paya.
About six months ago was instructed that Sage was going away and I needed to set up a new payment account and I chose Lynnbrook group. I simply followed what the OR staff guided me to do. That all seems fine, and I have had a few bookings that have gone through Lynnbrook and they have gone well. I was given no instructions on the Cornerstone account by anyone during this switch and am assuming that Lynnbrook needs Cornerstone to keep operating. Is this correct?
But I have noticed no activity on my Cornerstone account for the last half yer and am also noticing larger monthly charges on the Cornerstone/Paya account (ie. 29.99 last month for “WEB REPORTS/ALERTS BUSINESS COACH+”) and I did not even have any volume moving though it. So it looks like nothing is going though Cornerstone now? But I am getting hit with larger and larger monthly fixed fees...
My question is: How do the payments work… specifically Lynnbrook Group. Do I need Lynnbrook AND Cornerstone or should I be closing down my cornerstone account? I don’t know how the payment accounts work.
Glenn
Thanks. Beautiful cottage by the way.
Since I posted this, the FAQs are now on the Home Page along with all-in-one source reviews and an AI chat bot in the lower-right corner of the home page.
Look no more! I've added an FAQs section to my website found here: Cattail Cottage.
Clicked on the link and got a page not found.
Yes, we've noticed the same. Our engineers are actively looking at this - we'll post here when there's news.
Hi Folks,
Has anyone else encountered issues with the VRBO commission CSV import to OwnerRez? First, VRBO had a bug/outage earlier this month which resulted in a delay in being able to download the commission CSV statements. Now that the issue is resolved, I noticed the VRBO commission CSV download is missing all data in the "Reservation ID" column. Also, there is no corresponding Reservation ID accompanying VRBO bookings in OwnerRez for June (previous months, such as May, have this information).
As a result, I believe this is causing the "Import VRBO Commissions" feature in OwnerRez to not work correctly:
"Unable to import the following records. 13 invalid formatted records during import."
I've been using this feature without issue for more than a year now and found it an incredible time saver, so I'm curious if I've identified an issue that can be resolved or if something else is going on. Going to manually upload these for now. Curious for anyone's thoughts - thanks!
Correct, Vaskin.
If you’ve chosen to use Request to Book (RTB) on Booking.com, just send us a screenshot showing that setting, and we can apply an override for Airbnb to match.
However, if you’re using Instant Book on Booking.com, then Airbnb must also be set to Instant Book. That said, you still have flexibility—Airbnb allows you to limit Instant Book to guests with positive reviews and even adjust the booking lead time. For example, you can require Request to Book for any reservations made within 7 days of arrival.
After turning off the tokenized tab and switching to direct I was greeted by a raft of failed transactions this morning. So I've switched back to tokenized and sent out a load of apology messages to guests.
Currently OR support is telling me that it's up to Stripe to sort out and Stripe are telling me it's an OR issue?
I've also been advised by another European user that OwnerRez and security holds in Europe doesn't work so I'll have to find another system.
Can anyone on here confirm please? I recommend OR to lots of people but now it seems I'll have to pay another system to do the deposits or move to another PMS?
Security holds in the UK.
Is there anybody out there that uses OR in the UK willing to share their settings for taking a security hold?
I’m getting somewhat frustrated by the security holds failing.
They either fail when the guest inputs their details onto the OR page and the guest is left with a permanent ‘processing please wait’ while nothing happens.
Or….
They fail on the 2 factor challenge when the deposit is held.
I’ve got 25 properties running through OR and this seems to cause a failure on 60-70% of my bookings.
It’s driving me nuts.
My latest discussion with support was that the spinning processing problem is caused by the details being tokenized so I need to turn that off. However as I’m in the UK and all of my guests are UK/EU if I don’t have tokenized on it will fail on the 2fa!?!
