General Help and Questions

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VRScheduler handles scheduling very well, great pricing and product.

I’m getting started with ownerrez and have always used Airbnb and vrbo. I’m excited to start handling payments for vrbo and adding a direct booking site, and a bit nervous.

I’m curious how others have handled chargebacks and how helpful your processor has been, if at all. Which processor do you use and would you suggest?

I’m currently considering Costco/elavon and ascent.

Thank you!

This is a very old thread... Since it was originally written, we've decided not to add any additional cleaning features to OwnerRez.  That's because we have several partners that do a really first-class job of handling that kind of thing, and it doesn't make sense for us to use our resources duplicating their work.

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/housekeeping-service-connections-overview

was not my q-n, but thanks. Airbnb should worry more about party houses, lying scheming renters etc , not emojis in headlines. 

FWIW, emojis in a listing title are a violation of Airbnb's content policy, despite the fact that thousands of listings seem to be getting away with it. (If Airbnb really cared, you'd think they'd just block emojis from even showing up.)

 

FWIW, emojis in a listing title are a violation of Airbnb's content policy, despite the fact that thousands of listings seem to be getting away with it. (If Airbnb really cared, you'd think they'd just block emojis from even showing up.)

I am following up on this request.  Have features been added to OwnerRez to assign cleaners on a certain date so other team members know who is cleaning what property on what day?

Great list.

One thing I can't figure out is why there's no summary report that shows the same info as the Line Item Pivot report. I run the Line Item Pivot report when I want to see how much total revenue I collected from pet fees and how much I gave out in customer service discounts and other things like that, but then I have to scroll all the way to the bottom to see the totals and then scroll all the way to the top to try to figure out which column header I'm looking at. Freezing the header row would help, but...why not offer a summary report that breaks down the line items like Line Item Pivot does but without breaking it down by individual booking? Seems kind of like a glaring omission.

That's a great list!  Thanks for detailing that.  Several of those things, we already know about and plan to add.  In general, we are planning to do a lot of of accounting work in 2022, so stuff like this is great to be talking about!

Yes totally is but the crazy thing is it doesn’t matter either because the Airbnb staff don’t look at the house rules section or aware how to handle them I’ve mentioned to many customer service people it’s in my house rules and they haven’t or don’t want go in them… 

Interesting as we also know guests never read them or the rental agreements either.. 🤪

had a really good one the other day a litigation lawyer that wanted to book my home… was very happy to side with me and said it’s amazing Airbnb hasn’t had a massive case against them. Then rightly said have you seen there terms they are really a media company (totally are) they leave all the liabilities on the home owner. however want to control the homeowner like a letting agency he said he had never see a company or industry like that expect the few internet companies we know the ones and he said they couldn’t get away with that in physical world. 

VRBO allows you nicely to do rental agreements. Booking.com wish they just worked to better rules amazing. 

We need a Theranos moment in the STR industry these companies are faking a lot of things and then people are buying it. What they are saying to the public and there investors doesn’t line up to what they are practicing. We are slaves to this… 

> the latest one we have is Airbnb says we are not allowed a rental agreement that has more rules than on there website and getting to sign or communicate about rental agreement and deposit is not allowed which as we now is garbage and Something some made up the consistency of Airbnb is amazingly bad

There actually is a rule that you cannot make a guest sign a rental agreement that has more or different wording than is disclosed in your Airbnb listing. So the solution is to put the full text of your rental agreement in the Airbnb listing. Thankfully, the "House Rules" section of an Airbnb listing has a ridiculously huge character count, so I'm able to put the full text of my several-page rental agreement in it. That satisfies Airbnb's requirements.

Would be great like they have with camera section of health and safety they could point it too a specific website page also that highlights that we could take deposits. 

I know your pain and our pain also, totally now that more and more software companies are being allowed to do this also it’s crazy that they don’t have some way of communicating it. 

to be honest think it’s on purpose because it might put people off booking via Airbnb if they knew people could take deposits I’ve been told it’s quite a draw for renters as a trust thing… 

would be excellent if they could put a flag on the listings that says allowed to take deposits

There actually is such a flag, but it's internal only and visible just to Airbnb staff.  One of the longstanding bugs is that this flag is commonly not correctly set; we're working with Airbnb staff to manually check and update that flag as our clients start using this feature, which has helped a great deal but isn't perfect.

Interesting idea, to make that visible to guests.

Exactly exactly still not clear and very contradicting so no wonder why Airbnb call center staff and email staff don’t give out the right information either…  

Thanks Ken and Team totally as you might be aware we have had significant issues with Airbnb and this functionality to the fact bad reviews, Airbnb not reviewing the reviews either still to date. The account manager at Airbnb for ownerrez has been awesome but has not be able to fix this. 

It was also used as one factor also for having our account got disabled a year ago. Not the only factor and was provided to be retaliatory and we got enabled again..

think how people have been approaching the communications on this would really helpful. We list damage deposit on Airbnb advert, house rules , messages and communications as well as rental agreement and emails. 

the latest one we have is Airbnb says we are not allowed a rental agreement that has more rules than on there website and getting to sign or communicate about rental agreement and deposit is not allowed which as we now is garbage and Something some made up the consistency of Airbnb is amazingly bad. 

as mentioned last year would be excellent if they could put a flag on the listings that says allowed to take deposits and rental agreements be it an internal or public flag. They do it for other things and now it’s not just ownerrez would have hoped the training, T&Cs and communication from Airbnb would be much clearer. At least they could make the website very clear. 

thanks as always doing the leading job you guys do it’s hard being at the front 

Thanks Ken. The issue actually is around guests that push back as they read conflicting information on Airbnb’s site. Any chance you could Airbnb to at least up date their guest facing information?

Here's what we've found to be helpful:

 

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/channel-management-api-integrations-airbnb-common-issues-questions#offline-secdep-complaints

Hi there Chris this is super helpful. Would you be able to share what you send to guests as a message and what you send to Airbnb if there are issues would be awesome if you could… much appreciated 

Yes!  This!!  We need this, too!!

What about simply moving the Portal Access feature out of the PM module and into the "regular" area?  I would think that most customers here would appreciate the ability to use Portal Access to make the housekeeping schedule available to our housekeepers.   

Is there a notification that happens when someone buys an add-on or perhaps a report we can easily run that shows add-ons for a particular period?  For example, if we sell charcuteries, it would be useful to have a notification or report that would show us how many people bought charcuteries for a particular week coming up.  

Also, any chance your team is working on a larger revamp of the add-on functionality in the coming weeks/months? Ultimately, we'd love to have spa add-ons that can be connected to a calendar, time slots, waivers, etc.  If someone orders a massage as an add-on, for example, it would be helpful to offer them time slot options associated with it in the booking. 

 

Noticed that if you put emojis in property headline, they do propagate to ABB but not vrbo - there they are replaced by a ? . Only simple symbols such as ★ propagate to both OTAs. 

I have reply-to-inquiry email and I want to insert schedule of payments. 

 

Such as:

 

Due at the time of booking : $300 

Balance due on March 1st, 2022: $1200

Damage deposit reserved on Feb 28, 2022: $500

 

TIA

Poorly trained reps 

They have thousands of employees (and likely thousands more subcontracted call center reps). Disseminating policy updates on a large-scale company-wide basis like that is bound to take time and get missed by some people.

In other words, incompetence. ;)

Really curious why Airbnb would send conflicting information like that though. Anyone from OR have a guess?

If I get any pushback on my SecDeps, I send guests this Airbnb article:

https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/2827/collecting-fees-outside-of-airbnb

Of note (emphasis mine):

Hotels and software-connected hosts can charge guests additional fees that aren’t collected by Airbnb or used to calculate Airbnb service fees and taxes. These fees are collected directly from guests using a separate payment method outside of Airbnb. Fees are normally collected before a guest’s stay, at check-in, or within 48 hours of checkout.Fees that can be collected directly by the hostAirbnb only authorizes these fees to be collected if they’re detailed in the listing description and included in the price breakdown before guests book....

• Security deposit: A refundable deposit that can be used to cover any damage that occurs during the stay

I've even had to send that help article to Airbnb customer service agents. So far, I've had 100% compliance from both Airbnb employees and guests after sending that.

Getting the following error on a file with one header row plus one data row with XLSX format? Do I need to delete header row?  Do I need to delete certain columns?  Do I need to convert file format to CSV or TXT? 

 

 

 

Getting the following error on a file with one header row plus one data row with XLSX format? Do I need to delete header row?  Do I need to delete certain columns?  Do I need to convert file format to CSV or TXT? 

 

 No records were updated. When an import fails, no updates are done – not even for valid records. This is a safety feature to ensure that no bad data gets processed.

1 row is invalid or caused errors while trying to import.

Fix the errors below in your file and try importing again. If you can't figure it out, ask us directly. You can also post a question on our public forums which we monitor.

 

 

I've been collecting separate deposits on Airbnb for a couple of months no problem but then I had a guest send me this and inquire why I was asking for something Airbnb says isn't allowed. Any thoughts from OR team how to navigate this with a guest that is inquiring?

 

I've been collecting separate deposits on Airbnb for a couple of months no problem but then I had a guest send me this and inquire why I was asking for something Airbnb says isn't allowed. Any thoughts from OR team how to navigate this with a guest that is inquiring?