Feature Requests

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"Would the answers they provide be attached to the quote and then the quote be flagged as "acceptable" so that they could move on to booking?"

Maybe if there was an option at the beginning of the inquiry, where the owner can click on online booking (or something similiar). If it isn't clicked, then until the owner clicks on it, someone cannot do the online booking. OR vice versa. Click NO Online booking and then would have to be unclicked by owner.

As for answers being attached to history, I would say yes. As an owner, I would think you need the history part, just in case a problem arises and you need to refer back to what was exchanged.

Would something like the above be possible?

Claudia

"You'll be able to "answer without creating a quote" but for the time being you can always create a quote to get past that step but not send them the link. Each payment link is a unique URL that is virtually impossible to guess."

How do I not provide the link? Where is the link on the inquiry?

Claudia

Hi Claudia,

Couple of things here...

First, the only way the guest can accept/finalize the quote - thus creating the booking - is if they have the payment link. Even if you create a quote, whether manually or when answering an inquiry, the guest won't be able to accept/finalize it unless you actually include the payment link in your message.

We know there's a sort-of requirement to create a quote when answering inquiries right now. Others have pointed that out and we'll be working to resolve that inside the next two sprints. You'll be able to "answer without creating a quote" but for the time being you can always create a quote to get past that step but not send them the link. Each payment link is a unique URL that is virtually impossible to guess.

There was one other lady who asked about your "awaiting approval" thing a few months ago. She had the same worries - she wanted to know names and ages before moving forward.

We've given this a LOT of thought, but honestly we're not quite sure how to address it in a way that is simple and configurable for all users.

There are a lot of edges cases here...

Would the answers they provide be attached to the quote and then the quote be flagged as "acceptable" so that they could move on to booking?

To what extent are questions and answers possible? There are myriad things owners may want to ask of their guests.

This issue is kind of up in the air for us. We know some users want more transparency to their guests, but we need to design features in a way that don't box us in later on or take copious amounts of time. I'm sure you understand that.

You can certainly manage some of this offline. In other words, until we design how this would work in the system, you could ask those questions of guests before sending them the quote payment form. So basically prepare your own questions and answers via email.

I hope that helps,

-Michelle

This is where the attachments, we spoke about earlier, would come in handy. Attachments for Welcome Packets, Guest Registration Forms, etc... with scheduled options would be perfect!

Claudia

Is there a way that you the owner can click to accept a transaction, instead of being an online transaction. The reason I ask is that many people ask questions in their inquiry, which require followups. For example, I could send a quote, but they want to see more pictures. Or I want to know if they are bringing any pets, before I give them a quote. Just because they didn't click or mention the pet, does not mean they are not bringing one. Plus, I want to know it is a DOG and not a cat or a money or gerbil, or whatever. So, the first letter isn't necessarily the quote. Or, I want to know how old everyone in their group are. Nobody under 25 is allowed, without a parent.

I would want to know and evaluate if I want them to be in my house - no prom nights, etc...

Basically, I believe now, if I send a quote (or answer their email using the quote feature - is there another way to answer them?), they then can basically reserve, right there and then. Correct?

What if I want to be the one that says, ok, you can reserve those dates and then they go through the process. It won't be done, right at that time, but the customer would have to come back and do it.

Again, is there an OPTION to allow them to reserve, right there and then, or "waiting for approval"? Can we have that option?

Thanks!
Claudia

Hi Claudia,

Yes, we do plan on supporting upload/file-based agreements though that is not a high priority at the moment.

Thanks for the suggestion,

-Michelle

Hi Michelle,

Can we have an option for the way Rental Agreements are done, at this moment? Can I have it as an attachment, that the renter would have to fax or scan back to me? So, the owner can specify if they want it electronically, or manually. If manual, the transaction isn't complete until the owner goes in and confirms receipt. At which point, the confirmatioin goes out.

Claudia

I would love to be able to get an inquiry by email from within ownerrez, reply to it, track the conversation, add in things such as "called person, left a voicemail" or "this person wants a bottle of wine and flowers waiting when they arrive.", automatically add people who inquire to a third party mailing list service, add information to the lead as I converse with them such as name, phone, email (if not already captured), address, preferred property, lead source, dates of stay, current not-booking excuse, lead value, and track all of this information. Then when they are ready click one button to convert it to a quote or a booking and send it off to them. If you integrate with a service such as mailchimp what would be amazingly useful would be to add them to a certain list in inquiry state, then when they book add them to a list for the just booked state along with their dates booked, name, city, and other fields, then remove them from inquiry state list, then when they've just checked out the ability to shoot off a survey email, and if the survey is positive ask them to leave reviews on yelp, tripfinder, etc. THEN put them on another mailchimp list of previous guests and remove them from the booked state list.

I don't know about others, but this system we would gladly pay $199/month for, if integrated with what you already have.

While the emails sent when the creation of the booking is good, I know our cleaning service isn't organized enough to manage bookings that are far out in the future, and in that case they are basically rebuilding the booking calendar. It's much easier for them to just have a list of check-ins/check-outs that they can pull up every day, or even better a daily email. Most of our cleaning team has smart phones but some just have phones that do simple messaging. The twilio idea is kind of like the way that hotel maids mark the room as clean through the phone system from the room itself but in this case its from a cell phone, more geared towards vacation rentals and simpler for the person cleaning.

Good morning,

We do currently support Third Party Alerts that send emails when a booking is created, updated or canceled. You may have seen those already.

A daily email would be good as well. I'm going to add this to the dev roadmap.

It's funny that you mention Twilio. We've discussed the idea of tracking *phone* inquiries by routing through Twilio or a similar service. Basically, you would point all your ads to a unique phone number which would give the inquirer a message about the property, ask if they want to check real time availability, leave a message or be connected to the owner. There are lots of possibilities in this area.

-Michelle

Good morning,

Thanks for the reference to guestfolio. I've never heard of them before. If they have an API, that's definitely a possibility for future integration.

-Michelle

The ability for the cleaning service to be notified with a daily report of check-ins/check-outs. In fact this would probably just be a report and if reports could be scheduled to send automatically that would be perfect for this. Even better would be a kind of service through maybe twilio.com the cleaning service can text like "CLEAN 2" to say room 2 is now in the clean state.

I imagine a lot of these features could be sold as add-ons to the main package. I would gladly pay an extra $10 per month for this kind of "add-on" service.

No, the grant access/permissions stuff was backburner'd for other work. You could always share the same login, of course.

Is there a way currently to have multiple users log in under a single property? Because currently we have the owner, the property manager, the salesperson, the marketing girl, me the tech guy, etc.

Interesting idea. We've outlined a "grant access" model that will allow any user to share properties with any other user and define a level of access. That would fit nicely with what you're talking about. More: https://www.ownerrez.com/features/access

Just an idea for your CRM - we have certain agents, realtors, and salespeople who sell our property for a commission percentage of the gross booking amount. The ability to make separate "booking pages" for each agent to access on the front-end would be great, as well as the ability to specify an agent when creating a booking. This would then allow a report to be generated for a certain time period for commissions to be paid out on the amounts that have been collected.

When you build your reporting system the ability to send specific reports at specific days/taimes automatically would be great as well.

That would be perfect... even better would be a way to "schedule" your add-ons, and the ability to have add-ons apply to multiple properties. So if our guests want a massage and to go on a whale watching safari they can pick dates and times for each within the range of their stay.

If you want to integrate with a system that is probably easy to integrate with, and would take care of all CRM and email marketing, as well as look great, I recommend that you take a look at guestfolio. I'm considering an email-parsing integration between ownerreservation and guestfolio, though I wish it was more direct! It allows automated email marketing, ROI reporting, and takes care of e-concierge services as well as transactional emails.

Hi thegmann,

We've been asked about integration with newsletter vendors before (like Mailchimp). It's a great idea, but we haven't added it to the dev roadmap yet because there are a number of things that would have to be built first. Our email/CRM overhaul needs to happen so that "contacts" are more entity independent from bookings, quotes and inquiries.

That being said, we understand how very important integration is in the Web 2.0 world. We were one of the first software packages to integrate with HomeAwayConnect calendar, for instance, and we're the only one I know of that updates it in near real time. Same with FlipKey.

As far as tracking leads and sources, that is very near and dear to our hearts. At the moment, we haven't released our reporting features yet, but that's something that's very important. We've consumed and tracked thousands of inquiries since we released our Inquiry section and we're really itching to show what listing sites do the best and which book well.

-Michelle

Hi thegmann,

At the moment, you can't add *optional* packages (ie. the guests selects if they want it or not at quote acceptance), but you can add them as mandatory surcharges that are always added to the quote. That would create a line item for the package on every quote by default.

You can also add individual line items to any quote manually of course, but I understand that you really want the guest to be able to select them optionally.

Optional line items is already on the dev roadmap. The design will be similar to how Travel Insurance is optionally selectable now.

-Michelle

Hi thegmann,

Having 'mail merge' fields in all email messages is definitely coming. That, and the inability to save a custom message, are both major annoyances for a lot of people and understandably so.

The design will be similar to the mail merge fields that you currently see with Custom Renter Agreements (click on a property, click on Legal, click on Add Custom). The drop-down on the menu field that lets you insert "fields".

-Michelle

Is there a way to add on packages such as bed and breakfast, romance packages, health packages, massages, etc?

I would like it if we could book multiple properties under a single quote, or have multiple properties at the same "location" governed by the same set of rules. For instance we have 8 separate vacation villas that are all a part of the same "compound" right by the beach, and the entire property has the same booking rules, etc, though pricing is different for each villa. Also, it would be cool if we could rent out the entire property as a virtual 9th unit, that would automatically book out all 8 units for the 9th as a kind of package.

I think that at least rudimentary CRM would be awesome, the ability to track lead sources, see the income from each source, track what customer preferences are, have profiles on different customers, etc, would be awesome.

If not, nutshell CRM is a great CRM to integrate with.

Maybe I'm missing this because I assumed it would be there already... but is there a website booking engine? Even better would be similar to checkfront, with wordpress, drupal, and joomla plugins.

Integrate with Mailchimp so that autoresponders can be started based on different criteria. Track leads and lead sources, and income from those individual lead sources.

I wanted to add to this - there should be custom fields that can be dropped into any of these messages, so the emails can be personalized, such as {name}, {date of stay}, {unit rented}, etc.

Another great request, AnaRita.

We do have a 'notes' feature that is going to be in development soon. This will allow you to record that kind of information.

-Michelle

For every booking, I need to register some extra info:
- check-in hour
- bed arrangement
- guest's mobile number (if they are bringing one)
This info is then passed to a 3rd party, the housekeeper. Right now, I write this information on a google calendar that I share with the housekeeper (I also include the balance value, as it is collected at check-in). It would be nice to have somewhere to take note of it in ownerreservations.

Hi Ana Rita,

Wow! What a great idea. I just talked to a developer about this and he said this is exactly the kind of integration we want to work on. He had never seen that Gmail plugin before.

One of the reasons we're going to be focusing on CRM features later this year is exactly for things like this. We want to be able to integrate with Google contacts, Postini and other systems so that you can see your OwnerRez guests in those places.

Imagine having your OwnerRez synced to your Google contacts so that when a guest calls your cell phone, their name/info shows up in the caller id. There are *lots* of practical applications to this.

I've added this to the dev roadmap.

Have a great day,

Michelle