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I have a hosted website, also. Interested.
Thanks
Thanks for the info. If we are using hosted sites how do we go about being added to the beta? Thank you!
Thanks Paul.
I have a hosted website. How can I sign for the beta test?
As we pass 700 listings in the Google VR beta, I wanted to take a second to provide a very important update. This may sting a bit, but please read this thoroughly to understand the issue.
At this time, we are only allowing users with a Hosted Site (ie. the website engine managed by OwnerRez) to enter the Google VR beta. Yesterday, we reached out to the users who were already in the beta and were not using a Hosted Site, informed them of this decision, and removed their listings from the integration.
This is nothing something we want to do, but it has to be done to keep the integration in place.
Google measures what they call "Price Accuracy" for all the listings in a particular integration. We have access to a dashboard showing us the Price Accuracy of all users and listings from OwnerRez. Price Accuracy is a measurement of how many OwnerRez listings are showing the correct price on Google. Basically, Google wants to ensure that when a guest clicks through to the landing page (i.e. the user's actual website) to complete the booking, the price they see at the end is the same as what was advertised on Google back at the beginning. They also check for availability and branding to ensure the property looks the same and is still available if it is shown as available on Google.
Price Accuracy is a pivotal part of the integration. The integrating partner (OwnerRez) must maintain a high score or risk being delisted, and that means the entire integration, not just one or two specific listings.
The Price Accuracy score for OwnerRez is very low right now, even though we've been working with many individual users and listings for months to analyze and fix problem after problem. We have dropped into a range where our integration (the entire integration for all users) is at risk of being turned off completely. We don't believe it will come to that, but we have to take drastic actions to make large changes and then work towards bringing back new features after the pricing issues are first corrected.
So why is our Price Accuracy score so low? What's the problem?
As we do with all of our features, we built the Google VR integration with a lot of flexibility in mind. We designed the integration to highlight our user's brand and website - we wanted to give each of you the flexibility to showcase your own website so that it's a direct booking experience when the guest comes to your website from Google.
Our competitors don't do this. Our competitors use a single landing page for all traffic (like bookings.mypmssoftware.com), and force all guests to go through that same experience to book. This is what Google prefers and how their system is used to validate Price Accuracy. It's more of a hotel model where they assume all listings are the same. If you search on Google VR for vacation rentals that are listed by some of our competitors, you will see what I mean. Most of them go to a central booking landing page, not the PM's website. This allows Price Accuracy to be uniform and consistent across all listings.
Because our OwnerRez team built our integration to use each user's personal website, widget, or custom landing page, it means that Google has to check Price Accuracy in different ways for each and every user. This has created several problems:
1) Google's verification system is not designed to do this correctly. We have talked to Google exhaustively about many parsing/verification issues that are not actually correct. What they have deemed incorrect on one user's website may not be the same on another. In many cases, it comes down to presentation - do they believe that "this widget to book on" is the same as the listing that was on Google VR at the beginning?
2) In many cases, our OwnerRez users are using widgets or custom website landing pages in ways that do not correctly show the same rates or availability as what Google is looking for. When Google verifies the landing page, they don't see the same prices, so they drop the Price Accuracy score for that listing.
3) Google does not verify everyone, only a random handful of users day by day. As I mentioned above, Google's verification system assumes that all listings within an integration are the same booking experience. If 10 or 15 verifications fail overnight, they drop the score based on those failures and don't verify the other 500 listings. The next night, they may verify 10 or 15 others.
Solutions and steps forward...
It is imperative that we fix the Price Accuracy problem as quickly as possible. We have noticed that most problems come from those using widgets on other websites or custom landing pages because we cannot guarantee that those widgets and custom landing page experiences will show the correct pricing and availability when Google verifies that page. The users using our Hosted Website tend to be the most accurate as our hosted website booking and property pages use the same structure and forms. While they may be styled differently, the underlying property and booking pages are the same user by user, so our Hosted Website landing pages tend to verify at a much higher rate.
Our current roadmap is this:
1) As of this moment, only Hosted Website users will be allowed to participate in the Google VR integration. We have already removed those without a hosted site and are taking steps to put out a quick update so that new beta users don't see widget/custom landing page options.
2) Work with Google to monitor Price Accuracy scoring and restore our integration scores to excellent.
3) Develop a default landing page that all users can use (no matter your website situation) that uses an OwnerRez-provided guest form, which will accept Google VR traffic and ask the guest if they want to book after showing a standard landing page with charges. This will become the new default landing page option when turning on Google VR. All of the current beta users that were kicked out will be immediately added back using this landing page option.
4) Work to establish our own international verifications and vetting process to allow widget and custom landing page experiences. As with all OwnerRez features, we are deeply committed to promoting your brand and website experience, so we will work to get back to this option as time allows. It will be difficult and take time because of how Google verifies things, but it will remain on the roadmap as a goal for Google VR. However, in the meantime, using the default landing page (bullet 3 above) will make it so that all users can get their listings into Google VR without waiting for this.
I understand this will surprise some of you and create frustration. Please understand that this decision is about creating long-term stability in the Google VR integration and opening it up to as many as possible as soon as possible. This integration is unlike any other we've worked on over the years, but we are committed to making it a success.
I use TouchStay for this. I send them the link via email and repeatedly remind them to use this link and download as icon onto their phone. they can send to their guest. The app is linked up to OwnerRez and disables once guests checks out.
#1 - Consistent Discounts Applied:
When a surcharge has the check box "Categorize at Rent" it is also not "Discounted" when you check the box under discounts "Percentage of Rent".
Surcharge Items that are "Categorize as Rent" should also be Discounted as a "Percentage of Rent".
#2 - Treat Direct Booking Websites/Widgets as a Channel.
The ability to place a "Rate Adjustment" to the direct booking website (either posative or negative) outside of the "Rate Calendar" rates would be super helpful.
There are times where you might want to charge a premium for direct bookings if you are trying to steer guest to a channel.
You can accomplish this as a "Surcharge" and categorize it as rent, but then as noted in part #1, discounts are not applied correctly.
I agree, a guest portal link to their booking would be sufficient. An app is overkill.
It would be extremely helpful if we could move the curser over available dates on the ribbon screen and see rates for that time frame. Thank you.
Hi Erik,
There is not an automatic means built into OwnerRez currently, generally we recommend dynamic pricing tools such as PriceLabs. I've moved your request to our feature requests so everyone can vote and discuss on this further.
~Caleb
But can we maybe categorize it as something else to trick the system? I tried with a few categories but it didn’t without. Maybe if we just don’t call it “cleaning fee”?
Airbnb is a bit particular about what Surcharges they'll allow. They'll only accept Surcharge descriptions that include one of their approved "magic words", as we jokingly call them here.
You can read more about creating acceptable Airbnb Surcharges here - https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/channel-management-api-integrations-airbnb-rules-settings
But can we maybe categorize it as something else to trick the system? I tried with a few categories but it didn’t without. Maybe if we just don’t call it “cleaning fee”?
No, Airbnb generally displays cleaning fees on their own, but combines all other fees into the overall rate.
This is the response I get from Guest Guru: “We contacted them(OR) about integration, but unfortunately, their API lacks the capability for integration. Thus, it's not feasible currently. “
hopefully they can get something worked out because this would be very helpful for my team of 1 responding to all messaging :)
That makes sense for orphan pricing, but we need a way to increase prices for all lengths of stays. It sounds like this works smoothly with other PMS, but not working with OR for some reason. If there is any more information I can provide or anyone I can talk to to keep the ball rolling please let me know.
Thanks for all your work!
That definitely would be great, everything is too scattered into different apps at this point, in my opinion, I don't want a different app for every portion of my business, I feel OR should have that and true cleaning portal and accounting, I hate having to use a digital guidebook and separate cleaning app for information that's already in OR, just needs a way to present it, A guest portal that shows them all the info in one simple place would be awesome.
I would actually prefer a simple guest portal link, so guests don’t have to go download a whole new app. Just one link with all their stay info, including access to the legal agreement & amenities list, etc. to bookmark until the end of their stay.
Yes please! It’s so embarrassing when I forget to skip my review follow up message. I have thought this many times, thanks for reading my mind. 😄
Makes me wonder - I currently have 3 legal agreements. One for channel bookings, one for direct & one for pets. The booking agreements are exactly the same except for the payment clauses. Sounds like a feature like this could allow me to fold them into one agreement with just the payment clauses swapped out.
Personally I would prioritize other high value feature requests like the unified inbox and more customization for discount codes & gift certs, but this would be a nice upgrade eventually.
Yes!!!
Almost 14 years ago my previous PMS Software had this feature.
Inquiries and quotes and emails opened (or not) need to be included in triggers. Not just bookings.
This is at the heart of effective marketing:
- Three days after sending a quote that has not been opened by the guest, send this email.
- Three days after sending a quote that was opened by the guest, but not booked, send this email.
- And so on...
What would be REALLY cool would be the means to have automated emails go out along the lines of:
Dear Guest,Just so you are aware, we just quoted your requested dates to three (actual number filled in here) other guest parties in the last week. To ensure you get your dates at property XYZ, you must act promptly to book them before someone else does.Click here to book and secure your dates before they're gone!Sincerely,Your helpful host
I realize that this gets in to the territory of email funnels and services like Constant Contact or Mail Chimp, etc. but the data relating to the inquiries is stored in OwnerRez, so I expect it needs to come from here.
Further, Tags for Quotes need to be included in Triggers.
I am aware that this could possibly be accomplished with tags already (I checked and it doesn't look like it. If I'm wrong, I'll update this post.) but a means to classify quotes would be a great feature also, such that Triggers could be based on the classification.
So for example, the above email sample would only go out to those quotes Tagged with a "Booking is Desired" moniker, so it is only sent to those particular inquiries that we the user want to identify as such. Often times requests come in that are a bad fit in the calendar, or not our best guest profile, but likewise, sometimes they come in and they would be 'perfect'; they would perfectly fill an existing gap, the guest would be a great center of influence amongst a group we want to market to, that sort of thing. There should be a means to create email follow-up chains for various quotes that we send out that could dramatically increase our chances of getting bookings.
Finally, ideally the email templates could include Trigger Links or Tag Links IN them as well, so if a guest clicks and replies to a particular email, it changes the Tag setting in OwnerRez, thereby stopping an email chain from going out (and if one wants to get really creative with Trigger programming, could actually start a different one).
Thanks!
This is true, Airbnb now supports Short Stay Cleaning fees. This can be configured in OwnerRez! Here's how:
Both surcharges will be pushed to Airbnb and used with bookings of the corresponding durations.
Airbnb requires a Short Stay Cleaning Fee to be lower than your regular cleaning fee - so, you cannot use this as a proxy short-stay surcharge.
More information on common scenarios for surcharges can be found here - https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/common-surcharge-discounts
For some reason, Airbnb seems to think that cleaners charge less for a 2-night stay vs a 4-night stay (spoiler: they don't). So looked at the Airbnb listing - and yes, it is there alright.
you can capture this in a custom field as guests are completing the rental agreement
If you don't mind my asking, how does one do this?
you can capture this in a custom field as guests are completing the rental agreement
I have two different listings at the same house, one listed as a two bedroom, one listed as a three bedroom. I want the rates for both listings to be the same at all times.
I know there's a "batch copy rate" feature, which is manual and a one-time sync. Is there a way to automatically mirror the rates from one property to another, so if any changes are made, it's reflected in both listings without the manual batch copy process?
Is there a way to blend it with the cleaning fees for Airbnb? When I blend it for direct quotes it doesn’t show up but cleaning fees are still broken out on Airbnb….
Hi,
This is a great idea, and already possible in some capacity. To clarify we have developed some related code and worked with clients in the past to change the "Comments" field to read as you've requested.
If you'd like to do the same you'd do so by going to Settings > Widgets > select that Booking/Inquiry Widget > click the Change button. Then, scroll down until you see Conversion Tracking > Widget Loaded
You'll then enter this code on line 1 within the "Widget Loaded" field:
<script> $('[for="Comments"]').text('How did you hear about us?'); </script>
If you're having difficulties, please reach out to our helpdesk and we'd be glad to offer support.
~Caleb
We really need this! Team Access permissions would let us provide granular access where needed (e.g. Messaging is important in my case) rather than full admin access to everything, or ReadOnly access to everything. This would be very helpful.
Here's more helpful information:
https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/local-laws-regulations
