Feature Requests

Sort by

• Newest Reply
• Newest Topic

For these instances, which are few and far between in my particular business, I just send the agreement to myself and sign it. lol

Neither do I. We rent year round. But offering discounts proved fruitless. So I no longer offer them. Other than discounts, is there anything else that urges customers to open emails? 

I'm with you, email marketing does work, even if I only get a few k of bookings from it every year with templates and automation the ROI is definitely worth the effort.

That's a few K that's not going in an OTAS pocket.

Using Mailchimp effectively by dumping the ghosts on your list regularly helps to keep your open rate up. Typically my open rate is around 65%.

I am just curious how does it work if no one opens emails? Ken above said he does not either. Glad you have 80% open rate. 

With all due respect just because no one opens your emails does not mean email marketing doesn't work.

I have over an 80% open rate.

I only offer discounts in the slow season. My goal is to generate income all year round. I never ever lose money.

You said the dreaded two words, EVERY DAY!

Unfortunately, Airbnb provides no official API method to bring in guest photos.  At present, Channel Bridge can do this, but this is dependent on an unofficial approach and may be restricted by Airbnb at any time.

I do not give any of those. I really do not give discounts (except for auto-triggered OR email offering adjacent unbooked nights). I use dynamic pricing and its sets rates according to demand, season, competition etc. I guess it is different if you manage someone else's properties - you can give out discounts. In case of managing your own discounts aren't very effective and so far have not been fruitful, and thus, necessary. So going back to email marketing, I used to send MailChimp campaigns. Not anymore. Most go unopened (even if I offered some discount), I can count on the fingers of one hand when people ever used offers in those emails. I had 3 properties (now 2). Just my take. 

Overstock. com sends me emails every day, sometimes several. Same for Amazon, Ebay, Pizza Hut,  etc. They all offer "something of value" ( a "deal", a sale etc). Guess what: they all get deleted/unsubscribed/sent to spam. When I need something, I just go to that website and look for it. Then I would go to some coupon websites and see if there is a coupon for what I need. I have been Amazon prime member for YEARS. I do not remember EVER buying anything there from an email they sent me. I am no marketing expert, just a consumer. My take is: that consumers are overwhelmed with the amount of email they get. They just tune it out. Heck I do not even give out my real email addy anymore bc of the amount of spam. 

What if the first email I ever sent you offered 10 or 20% off your next booking?

What if the email after that offered free champaign and free airport transfers upon arrival?

What if the email after that offered a free night's stay if you booked 5 nights?

What if I sent you an email offering you up to 40% of last-minute travel?

What if I then sent an email offering free airport transfers to and from my villa in Punta Cana and an in-house professional massage?

I'm not saying you would take me up on any one of these offers. But I have to believe your curiosity would at least get you to open each and every email because your curiosity wants to see what I'm offering next and you have come to know that every email offers something of value. I also have to believe eventually you may take me up on one of these offers. I get about 20 to 30% of people eventually taking me up on one of these offers. They also book directly through my own website so know VRBO or Airbnb fees. 

I'm not looking for every person to take me up on every email. Just a very tiny percent.

It works for me. That much I know.

I couldn't help replying, as I'm fascinated by this discussion and watching it closely.  Let me note that I am speaking personally, and not expressing an official view of OwnerRez.

"If I sent you an email and it included something you could use and or you found value in..."

For myself personally, that basically never happens, except from people who I already know - and, even with companies that I have had dealings with in the past, the only useful information I receive is things along the lines of "Your order has shipped" which are easy to identify.  The time that would be spent on reading sales solicitations so vastly exceeds any possible benefits, that I basically never do - I just delete them out of hand.

I do myself personally occasionally go on vacation, and, yes, I am continually hounded to go back.  This ongoing annoyance of seeing yet another nag ever week has made it extremely unlikely that I ever will.

By way of a guess, I think if the place I stayed last summer sent me one email around 10 months later - so, around the time I'd be making plans to go again, if I were planning to do that - it almost certainly still wouldn't work but at least it wouldn't be annoying.

Think about this. If I sent you an email and it included something you could use and or you found value in. Would you open the next email I sent you? If that next email offered something of value and or something you could use would you open the next email? And so on......

I'm in the marketing business. Email marketing can be super successful if managed properly. The key is to offer something of value in every email that you send and send them sparingly.  Email marketing accounts for over 30% of my revenue. It absolutely works.

Do you really mean that email campaigns have any effect? In my experiences (from a consumer side ) they just clog people's inboxes, get deleted or are reported as spam. Am I wrong?  

As a developer of software myself, Zapier should not be a consideration, it should be a must, a priority. I love the OwnerRez platform but I'm now looking at other vacation rental management platforms because they integrate with Zapier. I use Active Campaign for my email marketing. Active Campaign has a very powerful automated email messaging section which I can't fully take advantage of.  Would be a shame to have to leave OwnerRez because they don't integrate with Zapier. I hope it doesn't come to that. Every serious software company on the planet practically integrates with Zapier.

It would be nice to have the ability for guests to upload a photo to go along with their review, should they choose to and for the profile pic from Air B&B to be pulled in with the review from AB&B.  It adds a greater level of authenticity to the reviews, which is why Air B&B and most review plugins have images on their reviews.  I use images on my direct booking site and the lack of images (as well as not having the full last name displayed) has prevented me from using the review widgets on my site.

That's not something that we would control from the OwnerRez end, but, enough information is available via our API to ResortCleaning for them to be able to make this distinction.  I'd recommend reaching out to them.

I'd like to request that if an owner blocks time, but leaves the Cleaning Date empty, that no appointment is pushed over to ResortCleaning.com for a cleaning. I'm experiencing an appointment being made on any booking using the last day of the booking, regardless of what type of booking it is ... even if it's still really a Quote but with dates held on the calendar for it. I've changed the Cleaning Date just to see what happens, but nothing is adjusted in ResortCleaning.com from updating the date.

Perhaps to simplify the feature request:

• Do not generate a ResortCleaning.com appointment if the Booking is a Quote Hold.
• For a Booking that is a Block, only generate a cleaning appointment if there is a date in the Cleaning Date field.

If I'm missing something, let me know!

Would like to request 2 new fields that would just list

#1 {TOMORROWSSARRIVALS}  just displays property guest arrival date departure date

#2 {TOMORROWSDEPARTURES} same as above but just departures

In our case we would use these to send to cleaners, inspectors, and maintenance personnel via email in the morning day prior to.

Randy House

I would like to request being able to set holds on pending bookings or quote holds by number of hours.

Either a drop down in 12 hour increments or even 24 hour increment or just ability to enter number of hours.

This is of course technically possible, but, I'm not sure how useful it is to have that in OwnerRez.  Wouldn't it be more flexible to use a tool like Dropbox?

I would love to trigger a message with link to Golf Cart Rental Agreement if the guest indicates that they would like to rent that.

I would love a way to trigger a message with a link to a golf cart rental agreement if the guest indicated that they wanted to rent it for an additional fee.  A standard Y/N response or just clicking a button would work for me.

Contract Descriptions above the box that gets filled in and other features:

Move Text to above the boxes in the other information section of the contract questions: 

Right now, the text is below the other information box on the contract completion. This sometimes confuses people thinking the text is for the next box instead of the one above; maybe this can be a toggle switch above or below. 

Find people in Europe seem to get the below, but in US and Americas, they seem to not get the text is below the box is for the box above the text

Have the ability to have radio buttons or tick boxes:

Have the ability to have radion buttons or tick boxes to answer simple questions such as yes or no, agree or disagree. 

Have answers to questions as flags that can be added to rental booking to allow triggers and templates to work:

Have answers to questions as flags that can be added to rental booking to allow triggers and templates to work so example Pool Heating, Crib, BBQ then triggers can use them to to action things. 

File Store per Vacation Home: 

Just as you can do for the rentals, would it be possible to have a digital file store for each property and upload your licenses, floor plans, warranties, surveys, insurance, and certificates? 

The same for the business profile, business license, insurance, etc. 

This is getting more and more need and required to show this material to people, fire departments, states, counties, airbnb, etc. 

Just makes it easy to have all the information in the one place and tool :) 

Absolutely agree

Maybe I am slow. Went to zapier website and I still cannot understand what it does. Seems to be some social media auto poster? 

As we grow our business and get a little more sophisticated with email marketing campaigns, we're using automation tools like Zapier to more efficiently run our business. We've discussed Zapier for the past several years in the forums, but it's time to consider bumping this up on the roadmap to help hosts/small biz owners run their businesses more efficiently and effectively. Would be a great value add for OR and hopefully minimize development work that's outside of OR's core competencies! 

#1 - For the Availability/Property Search Widget can you please add functionality to show all search results on one page? Currently it shows 12 and then prompts the user to click page 2. It would be a huge advantage to have all my listings on one page instead of 12 on one and 3 on the next.
#2 - For the Wordpress Widget code Property Description , can you add an accordion feature after 150 words of property description that reads "read more" and then allows the user to read the rest of the content?