Owner Bookings: option to add cleaning expense only (no surcharges)

Thanks for the addition of the new Owner Bookings option!

Right now I see that it adds all the standard applicable surcharges and taxes to an Owner Booking. In our typical use case (as is most common industry-wide), we only log a cleaning expense for an owner stay. There shouldn't be charges shown that the homeowner has to pay; there is simply an expense incurred that shows on the Owner Statement. Please add an option for this.

(Occasionally the owner wants to charge their friends/family the cleaning fee and applicable taxes, so that option is fine to keep available as well -- though it would be nice if we can select which surcharges should show/apply in these instances. (For instance we have a Safely Damage Protection surcharge, but these are waived on owner-related stay, so I would not want the surcharge showing up for owner family/friends.) Perhaps on each surcharge we can check a box on whether it should be included/excluded on Owner Stays?)

Hi Alece,

One nice feature now available thanks to the Owner Booking is the condition that you can add to a surcharge to specify whether the Booking Type is Guest, Owner, or both

Now you can define special handling for Owner Booking fees and how they are expensed compared to others.

OwnerRez won't know if this is a 'family and friends' guest that is going to pay the cleaning fee to you by credit card, or if this is the owner and you want the cost netted from their Owner Statement. If you decide to have a default surcharge configured for the owner stay, you can remove the charge and leave the expense

Please note: the Owner Booking is only available to PM premium feature users

I did notice that, but appreciate you making sure I hadn't missed it.

Unfortunately there are too many variables unaccounted for in the new Owner Booking setup that leaves it unusable to us at the moment. As stated here and in some other Feature Requests, owners are often blocking for other people as well as themselves. Some surcharges are to be sometimes charged; some aren't. Owners shouldn't have to PAY for their cleaning fee, just have the expense accounted for (as it comes off their revenue before payout). The list is long. Until there are more levers that can be pulled to clarify those nuances at the time of creating the booking, it causes too much for us to undo and redo afterwards. We're unfortunately stuck with owners still only being able to create blocks despite the "upgrade". I remain hopeful that this will be fully developed out sooner than later so we can put it to use! 

Edit:  (After I submitted this, I see Mike already said pretty much the same thing.  But figured I would leave my thoughts here.  lol)

Hi Alece,

One piece of your request that I did want to mention is the owner cleaning expense. While I agree this could be made much simpler, there actually is a way to automate it today.  

The trick is to create a $0 Cleaning Fee that has a Property Management Expense attached to it, then add a condition so it only applies to Owner Bookings.

The result is:

• The owner isn't charged during the booking.
• A cleaning expense is automatically created and deducted from the owner's revenue on their monthly statement.
• You don't have to manually add the expense to every Owner Booking.

Here is an example setup for a $150 cleaning fee aka Expense in this case.

That said, I completely agree the current setup of the Cleaning surcharge/expense isn't very intuitive. It's really more of a workaround than a purpose-built solution, which is why I agree there's room for improvement. Ideally, there could be a dedicated "Owner Expense" surcharge type (or similar) that handled this automatically without requiring the $0 surcharge workaround, and without displaying a potentially confusing $0 charge on the booking's financial details.

The other scenarios you mentioned, such as distinguishing between bookings for the owner versus friends and family and deciding which surcharges should or shouldn't apply, are definitely valid use cases that could merit additional flexibility in the Owner Booking workflow.

As a temporary workaround, you could let owners know they're welcome to use Owner Bookings for friends and family. The booking would still automatically generate the cleaning expense, which would be deducted from the owner's payout at the end of the month. The owner would simply collect the cleaning fee directly from their guest. This keeps you out of the middle of collecting cleaning fees for owner stays, while still ensuring the cleaning expense is accounted for through the owner's monthly statement.

With that understanding, it may be worth considering enabling Owner Bookings in the Owner Portal today. While it doesn't address every scenario you've described, it could still automate a significant portion of the workflow compared to the current process of having owners create a block and then having someone on your team manually convert it into a booking and adjust the charges afterward.

Hey Steve! I appreciate your time and input, as always. 

"As a temporary workaround, you could let owners know they're welcome to use Owner Bookings for friends and family." Unfortunately, I'm unable to do even that. We actually did that as a test-case, but it assigns the owner as the guest. In the booking, when I manually updated the guest contact info so that the owner's visitors would be the ones receiving the emails rather than the owner, it ended up changing the owner's contact details (which has obvious implications for owner statements, etc.). That's how we ultimately discovered that sadly nothing about the new Owner Booking element will work for us and we disabled the feature. Without significant updates, it remains unusable from a practical use-case scenario, at least for us.