Price comparison widget
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Hi Carole,
Thank you for volunteering to help test BookDirectIQ.
I'd love to include your properties in the beta program.
If you're willing, please send the following for each property:
- Property name
- Website URL
- OwnerRez Property ID
- Airbnb URL (if applicable)
- Vrbo URL (if applicable)
- Any OTA pricing variance you may use
You mentioned that both sites use WordPress and OwnerRez widgets, which makes them excellent candidates for testing.
Once I have the information, I'll create demo pages and send them over for you to review and test.
I appreciate your willingness to provide feedback and help improve the product.
Best regards,
Paul
BookDirectIQ
info@bookdirectiq.com
Hi Paul - Emailing the info to you.
Quick update: BookDirectIQ is now live and no longer in private beta. It currently supports OwnerRez and helps hosts show guests their direct-booking price alongside estimated Airbnb and Vrbo totals so they can see the value of booking direct. Additional PMS integrations are planned.
https://bookdirectiq.com/
While some guest may value this tool, OwnerRez should combine the rate checker tools to show all channels at once, and allow us to see our total payout per channel so we can validate that our channel rate adjustments are working. With all of the adjustments to how fees are collected with AirBNb and now VRBO it would be helpful to run these in bulk against many properties.
I was able to point Claude at the OwnerRez API and build out a basic version of this feature as an overlay on the OR booking widget for self-hosted Wordpress sites. It took about an hour and then maybe another 30 mins for formatting. You can check it out on my direct booking page if interested: https://www.ribbonrockmaui.com/book/
It's a bit of cheat because it basically just takes the direct booking amount (nightly rate + cleaning + taxes) and juices it by 10%, which is my standard markup for Airbnb. It's accurate as long as I don't have any channel-specific discounts running for the dates in question. The nice thing is that Claude was able to code it so that the date picker that calculates the comparison: 1) only shows available nights and, 2) automatically passes the values into the OR widget, which then allows me to hide the OR date fields without breaking the booking form.
This works for Airbnb because their markup is a fixed percentage. And it's much preferred to run the Airbnb calc locally (fast) versus pinging some remote server (slow) to get inputs. Vrbo is a different story with their black box "guest service fee" for which they refuse to even publish a schedule.
Nonetheless, this approach gets me 80% of the upside with maybe 10% of the effort and it's free. You may want to give it a shot.