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Anyone else frustrated with the recent Security Measures on Booking.com and the inability to send Rental Agreement links via proxy email or their messaging platform?
The end of last month, Booking.com implemented new "Security Measures" which has caused a host of issues and frustrations.
I used to use the Booking.com templates to let guests know that I would be sending them an email (going to the proxy email address provided by Booking) with a link to the Rental Agreement. I would then have automatic messages triggered to go out from OR with the link to the rental agreement. This message used to appear in the Booking.com messaging thread and guests were able to click on the rental agreement and completed it (also giving me their actual email address too)
With the new security measures, nothing is going through from OR and I can not even manually share url's in the Booking.com messaging thread nor can I ask guests for their email address because Booking.com is blocking everything. My guests are getting very frustrated as I am.
I have contacted OR about this and there is nothing they can do, believe me they tried. I have also contacted Booking.com multiple times.
So my question is, is anyone else having issues getting guests to complete the rental agreement? Or if you have found a work around, would you mind sharing that process?
Joel - OK. But, not being a ZAP expert, I'm not sure what to ask for. What I was trying to do, initially, is automate something I currently do manually.
1 - when a guest checks out I have a trigger to send me a msg if there is a gap of more than 2 nights to turn the HVAC off. I have to go to the ecobee app and do it manually.
2 - I have a tag if the guest has paid for pool heating or cooling. A day before a guest arrives I have a trigger to send me a msg to turn on the heat/cool. I have to go into the aqualink app and set this up.
Both the ecobee and aqualink apps work with Alexa.
So, I wanted to try and create zaps for this. So should I request that a trigger runs a Zap (is this even possible?) or request that something is exposed on check-in and check-out with days before after?
Just not really sure how to articulate my needs.
We don't have immediate plans for more, but feel free to suggest ones that you would find useful in our Feature Request forum.
Great looking forward to it.
When I go to Zapier i only see 4 triggers (contact/booking created/updated) for OR. Is this correct? If so, any plans to expand the number of triggers?
Hi Richard - you can do that using the "Booking Window: Max Days in Future" setting at the property-level: https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/property-availability-rules#booking-window
I would like to have my calendar automatically blocked for the dates beyond some specific date (e.g., 1 year from today) ensuring that I have the opportunity to change my rates in the future.
Hi,
I have a rental unit with 4 bedrooms, with a guest capacity of 8-10. For off-season, I would like to keep the rate of my unit lower and charge extra for additional guests beyond 4+. For peak season, I would like to keep the base rates higher (equivalent to rate for 8-10 guests) and charge less per additional guest or change the minimum free guest setting to 8 guests so that they only have to pay for 2 additional guests if at all.
Here's an example:
1. Off season rate: $300 per night for upto 4 guests and $25 per guest from 4+ to 10. i.e For 10 guests, the nightly rate would be $450.
2. Peak season rate: select one of the following policies:
The main purpose of having lower base rate for off season is to make it affordable for smaller parties to rent in off season. Whereas for peak seasons, I would like to ensure that it doesn't get rented for smaller parties at a lower rate.
Is it possible to implement something like the above. Or do you have suggestions on better ways to achieve this.
Hi,
I am in the process of setting up the following configuration for rent:
I intend to use the mutual blocking feature to ensure that when the whole house AB is blocked, individual units A and B are also blocked off. And vice-versa, when either A or B unit is blocked, it also blocks off the whole house AB.
https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/combined-properties-blockoff-lockoff
First question: Consider the following scenario - a guest books unit A, which in turns blocks-off whole house AB. However, since whole house AB is also linked to unit B, in turn it would block-off unit B as well (but this is not desired). I am assuming that it won't do this (i.e block off unit B as well), otherwise such a system would never work. So just wanted to confirm that it does the right thing.
Second question: During holidays such as Christmas or Thanksgiving weekends, I would like to ensure that only the whole house AB is available for rent. I do not want to offer the guest an ability to book individual units like A only or B only. How can I achieve this?
Third question: As you can see, unit A is 4 bedroom and whole house AB would be 5 bedroom house. I would like to set the pricing such that renting the whole house AB would be approx 10% cheaper than renting both the individual units A and B. To do so, I would like to setup the price for the whole house AB to amount $X and it should trickle down its rate to individual units at some proportional value. For ex:
Basically, the rental rate of unit A is 4/5 of the whole house rent + 10%. Similarly for unit B. Is there a way to setup the pricing of mutual units dependent on another unit like the whole house rent? Such a configuration will really help me setup the price for different seasonal rates, spot rates, etc in one place only without having to configure it in multiple places. Also, I may want to change the relative percent value based on season or spot rate. For ex, the rates of individual units
Fourth question: Similar to above request for mutual/relative pricing, I would also like to setup/configure min stay requirements for whole house AB and it should be propagated down to unit A and unit B settings.
Fifth question: My first preference will always be to rent the whole house to guests. If it doesn't get rented out, as the date approaches, I would like to rent out the unit A and unit B as individual units. I guess I can achieve this by setting time limit on how far individual units can be booked. For ex, if I set the advance booking limit for units A and B to two months, it should imply that users should be able to book only the whole house AB two+ months in advance. Any other or better way to achieve this?
We haven't seen any changes, but we'll keep an eye out for your support ticket with more detail and investigate further.
I'm not sure I understand exactly what you're dealing with here. Please write in to the Helpdesk with URLs and screenshots showing all what you've described, so we can investigate.
Some useful additional information can be found on these pages:
https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/glossary-definitions
https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/booking-statistics-glossary-name
https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/reporting-common-issues-questions
Please write in to the Helpdesk and we'll take a look. We'll also need to know the email address you have at your domain.
Chris,
I am filtering my reservations for 2022 for a single property including cancelled booking. Before hitting "Search", Firefox is using about 650 Mb of memory. Hit Search and the memory consumption goes to 11-12 Gb and the system slowest significantly. I haven't tried this in a private window, will do that tomorrow.
Hi Michael,
Yep. Our documentation is in the works. Sorry we didn't have that out with the release, but we'll hopefully have that ready when we get out of public beta.
We do frequently use Firefox and haven't seen an issue. Can you identify a particular list or filter that causes the problem? We'll have a look.
Also, try opening Firefox Private window so that it doesn't load extensions... if you try the same thing there, do you still see an issue? We have seen problems in some cases where browser extensions conflict or slow down sites generally.
Thanks. Any word so far on if there’s a chance this would be resolved today?
If it’s not resolved today, does that mean we would have to wait until Monday for it to be worked on again?
That's a legitimate question. I'm not sure either but I'll try and find out.
Okay, I will wait to hear today. Also, the issue we have right now is only tied to our 2 new accounts. These are new listings that we’re trying to get published on our website and VRBO to collect bookings ASAP.
I just wanted to mention it in case the solution right now could possibly be to approve configuring the 2 new accounts, while they work to resolve the issues with the older accounts (4 old accounts). If that’s possible, it would solve our urgency with the two new accounts, since we would be able to request the API for VRBO and publish to our website while we wait to solve for the older 4 accounts. I don’t know the implications and structure of your set up of course, but was thinking about this today.
It's already escalated as far up as there is - the CTO has been involved in trying to get it resolved.
Hi Ken,
I understand those challenges, but when it becomes a hinderence on our business, our income, is when I become considered.
if it’s not resolved today I’d like to again request an escalation. Unless you are saying that OwnerRez has no staff available for escalations like these. Is that the case?
Because we are still working through the issues, which involve both us and Lynnbrook, we also do not have an expected resolution date, though I do think we're fairly close to getting it sorted out.
As has unfortunately been noted in other forum threads, we are currently experiencing an uncommonly heavy load of support requests and are having great challenges in catching up. We are growing the team as rapidly as possible, but training new staff to provide accurate assistance takes considerable time.
OwnerRez support has always primarily been email based; in very recent times we've added limited phone support, but that is commonly scheduled around a week in advance. This team is also growing - we have added two staff this week - but it will be some time before they're able to make an impact.
Phone voicemails are handled in the same system as email tickets, and unfortunately are subject to the same delays we're currently experiencing over there.
It’s fine if the process isn’t the smoothest, but I have left two voicemails with OwnerRez with no response. In an environment like OR, where these timelines can dramatically decrease revenue for us, there should be an SLA around this and a direct POC keep us informed of the timeline and expected resolution. Again, that’s fine, but considering our busines relys on posting our listing, this is an issue that I believe warrants atleast a call back and a POC over the phone.
We still have no insight into the expected resolution date.
We've run into some technical issues with getting your accounts configured, and our engineers are working through those with Lynnbrook. I've actually been in telecons with senior Lynnbrook staff earlier this week about improvements we are making to smoothen the integration process and eliminate some of these discontinuities.
Hello,
Has anyone experienced concern and frustration going through the process to set up new listings with a payment method? Our busines structure changed in January 2023 to an LLC and it affected our Lynbrook accounts, which caused a delay with Lynbrook. Then once they sorted that out, they sent the info to OwnerRez to configure in the system and that was 3 days ago. Now they’re saying OwnerRez needed their guidance on how to properly configure in order to make sure we could process refunds under our old account. Lynbrook has said they passed information already to OwnwrRez on how it should be configured.
Nobody will follow up with me or seems to have any care to call me about the issue. ownerrez has went dark and whenever I call I just get sent to voicemail even though I’ve requested a call back twice. Lynbrook has no answer and our client rep is our today.
OwnerRez has not communicated to me when it will be resolved or expected to be resolved. My clients are asking why listing haven’t been published on our website and I have no answer. What’s with this? This doesn’t seem like great customer service…
Thanks Ken, I will send a message to the help desk.
Yes, if you are API-integrated with another channel manager, that's exactly the problem - Vrbo doesn't actually store all the data for those bookings, your channel manager does, so Channel Bridge can't get the data from Vrbo. :-(
What Channel Manager are you using? We may be able to assist in bringing in data - please write the Helpdesk with particulars.
I would advise against this as well. I use VPNs extensively and have them automatically activate whenever I'm not on my home network. As former Info Sec, I also strongly advise their use on any public network, like those in airports, hotels, B&Bs, company networks, etc.
Is anyone else seeing this? I sent in a support request to OR already, just curious if it's me or if ABB made some change that's messing it up. It looks like ABB split out some fees on their site, so it's possible they made some backend field name change.
Ryan
Unfortunately, your analysis of the situation is correct - Airbnb considers that they (or their algorithm anyway) know better than you do as to which should be your first front-page photo. So they do what they want to do, and it is not possible to override it.
Not sure exactly what you're referring to, can you write in to the Helpdesk with additional details, including links and screenshots?
