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if I collect $225 as a cancellation fee, VRBO will not refund their $886 service fee.
This is not necessarily accurate.
According to Vrbo official policies, yes you are correct. And if you or the guest reaches out to Vrbo about a refund of the service fee, and they find that you the host did not issue a 100% full and complete refund, yes they'll keep the service fee.
But...
We have found that, if you clearly state and in fact keep a reasonably small cancellation fee using OwnerRez custom cancellation policies - and, yes, in our experience, 3% qualifies - and if you patiently allow the automatic systems to do their thing without getting any human beings involved... yes, you can keep your cancellation fee, but even so, the guest does get a refund of their Vrbo service fee.
Of course, to re-emphasize, if anyone calls Vrbo to ask, that will result in the Vrbo service fee not being refunded. And it can sometimes take a month or two for the fee refund to be processed. So there is indeed a certain risk there. Therefore, it becomes a business decision for each individual host as to which approach provides better security and less risk.
@BlueMtnCabins - Building into your rates... Are you principle or Prop manager. Trying to determine if "Rate" is consumers rental price or a management fee. I can see adding to the rate (price) to consumer. But, it may be hard to increase PM fee by 3% in a competitive market. I definitely see you point about VRBO not refunding service fee if you withold for a cancellation and how that can lead to chargebacks, bad reviews etc. This is a conundrum I'm working on. 3% adds up. A $7,000 booking credit card fee is $210. The guest booking fee is $886! So, if I collect $225 as a cancellation fee, VRBO will not refund their $886 service fee. Now guest is paying about $1,100 to cancel with lots of notice. I think avoiding this scenario is crucial. I appreciate your insight and need to figure out how best to structure this. Additionally, I fear an economic or health scenario can create Lots of cancellations in which case this could become a problem if it's just a business expense without collecting for it on each booking.
At present, it is not. However, I've moved this to the Features Request forum so it can garner votes of support.
It would be convenient when running sales reports to have the option to include historical data for deactivated properties. In looking at year over year, or past sales, a dropdown box to choose any or all deactivated properties would be nice. The process of reactivating, running reports, then deactivating properties is tedious.
I'm using the booking widget and once guests submit they are shown the response in the attached screen shot. Is it possible to edit this text?
For my particular use-case, people are putting in rooming requests for a lottery and it will be 4 weeks before they hear back. While that's explained up front, this message contradicts that and is confusing people.
April 7, 2025 Update:
The photo ID collection upon signing of the Rental Agreement needs to have an option to not require it for repeat guests, as well as for notes and files for Bookings be connected to Contacts.
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Right now, if I upload a file for a particular booking, such as a photo ID, that file is not associated with the contact that it is for. So the next time that contact books, I have to search for their last booking to get that ID. Same is true with Notes.
It makes sense to me that this needs to change so that there is an option to have files and note connected to particular contacts.
I should be able to create a Trigger or Tag based on a SURCHARGE payment. For example, if a guest pays for early check-in, I want to create an automation 3 days in advance to notify me so that I can manually modify the check-in time. Otherwise I would never know if a guest paid extra for a service.
It's a no-brainer. Make it happen!
I like being able to send SMS messages to guests, thanks for that feature.
The problem is once I've done that, they now think they can text me with trivial texts like "Which cupboard is the cheese grater in?" instead of just looking for it. With a chatty or needy guest, this is a huge problem.
I'd like an SMS number that cannot accept replies. Or, an auto-reply that responds to incoming texts with "Sorry, this number cannot receive text messages, please contact the host using the website you used to book the property."
agreed - I really think we should be able to create our own "default". I don't want to see blocks on my default list either - only reservations.
I really wish my default list of bookings did not include my cancelations. Normally if I need info from a cancellation I just search for them.
I really wish my default list of bookings did not include my cancelations. Normally if I need info from a cancellation I just search for them.
Any updates? Kind of annoying that we have this for Owners and not PM.
I would love to be able to just save my "default" options for generating PM statements instead of them rolling back.
I would like for the POC form to include 1. What made you decide to choose this property and 2. Will you be celebrating an occasion during your stay.
Thanks Lisa
I added Early Arrivals & Late Departure Fees on my booking page. Many of them sign up for it. However, i have to pull reports or wait for the guest to let me know that they've selected one of the above.
1) My request is that it notifies me when these add ons are selected (is there a way this can be done already?) since I have to manually change check in and check out times.
2) I would like to vote for a function that automatically changes the time of check-in or check-out if selected. This may be an advanced feature but just throwing it out there.
Thank you!
Do you have any time frame in mind for 2023 as we are about to jump ship to another provider who offers comprehensive accounting system built in. It would be great to understand when and what you are planning to offer so we could maybe delay our decision.
Just checking to to if this has been added yet. This would make expenses that happen every month at the same price so much easier to capture for charges on an owners statement.
You are correct, in certain cases the channels wipe out the historical charges. It would be a great feature to keep a snapshot of that history. This feature has been suggested and is on the roadmap, though I have no ETA to share.
I have Schlage Encode locks integrated with OR and I've been very happy with the integration automatically setting the door code for each guest. I would love it if I could create a low battery trigger to email the cleaners to replace the batteries on their next visit when the batteries start getting low.
The MTR market request could be even bigger. Dynamically generating quotes that allow for a minimum of 30 nights between them. If you get saddled with 29 day gab between two MTR dates you would be out of luck. My idea is to build a financial model that would incentivize dynamically the dates of the MTR.
So basically It is $1.00 per day except the last day which you could work with to maximize it at 7-8 30 night MTR stays. 12 would be ideal but un-realistic in most markets.
I have a ton of algorithm ideas documented and happy to jump on a Zoom call and brainstorm. Blending STR and MTR could be the best of both worlds and set OwnerRez apart.
I am looking for an easy way on a cancelled booking to go back and look at the prior quote that was executed and booked on.
Right now the only way I can find it is go into "Messages", History, Email to see what was sent in the booking message.
When you cancel a booking it wipes out all the financial numbers for line items on charges.
Historical charges tab would be helpful.
Thank you!
We're in exact same situation! Fingers crossed for the API integration sooner than later, but in the meantime a custom report would make the manual process easier for sure. Thanks for your post, we will be watching from here.
This really doesn't help when none of this shows in the calendar we are viewing when we are creating quotes!!!!!
I need to see this stuff when I'm preparing quotes for guests. I also need to see availability for ALL of my properties, and to be able to prepare multiple quotes for multiple properties in response to a single inquiry.
While we're on the subject...
Could we please have the facility to add multi-day holidays, or seasons, to the calendar instead of individual days? I'm currently adding two different two week seasons to each of the next two years, and it is really tedious to enter 14 individual days for each of them.
And please duplicate holidays so that they can be easily edited for subsequent years?
Thanks!
It is in the roadmap for later this year.
Several different ideas are in this one Feature Request. But I wanted to point out you can create custom Holidays if you want them to be guest-facing (when on your Hosted website or on OR Widgets on your external site). For example, I created a custom holiday with 2 occurrences (back to back - 2 days) as being NCAA Tourney days. You can apply the holidays to all or specific properties. Here's what that looks like on the mult-calendar widget:
They show in-app on the Month or Ribbon views:
Hello all - while there is not a native Files area under Property, you can create custom field types for Property (and choose File as the format) and then upload documents under Custom Fields for each property. You can create as many as you need and title them as you see fit. Read more about custom fields here.
No movement as of yet. We're working on things we have access to: Vrbo Reviews and having surcharges go by category. Those are the next Vrbo things up on the roadmap.
I think there may be some misunderstanding here. The Airbnb host fee is indeed included in the Booking information, on the Transactions tab, assuming you are using either Channel Bridge or our Airbnb API connection to bring the data in.
However, it is true that, at present, the host fees are not transmitted into QuickBooks.
PLEASE PLEASE see if you can have the AirBnB host fee as a separate line item that will sync with Quickbooks Online.
Like the above poster, I have to go into every single invoice on Quickbooks and add the host fee as it shows a guest balance on each invoice for the amount of the host fee.
Thank you!
This is a great idea, Alece! It really deserves more votes!
We are currently working through redesigning and modernizing all of the guest/booking forms. The first two completed were Guest Reviews and Travel Insurance (i.e. when using {BUTRAV} purchase link).
Once that is complete, our plan is to bundle them up into a portal that guests can use. What that fully looks like is TBD but similar to what was described here in this feature request. No ETA on the portal but the prerequisite is in active development.
In Airbnb I can set a pre-booking message for each property that the guest has to agree to before booking. Typically I put to contact us before booking if they are bringing pets and another note about letting us know if they want a pool heated. In OZ I only see the pre booking message under the Airbnb API and not per property.
Is there a way to set up pre booking message per property in OZ?
