Feature Requests

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There is currently no ability to force guests to enter their initials when e-signing an OwnerRez rental agreement. This is kind of meaningless - they are electronically signing the entire document. It's not separate pages, like when you sign a physical contract, where theoretically someone could switch out a page later - it's all one big document that's signed in one piece, and is impossible to change in any way later without being noticeable.

Nevertheless, lots of our clients are asking for this.

Personally I find it infuriating when online companies try to demand my initials typed everywhere in an e-signature doc, and there have actually been situations where I got fed up with my time being wasted and just went with a different vendor that was easier to use. But that should be your choice, and we are likely to add this ability in the future.

Hmm. Well, when we have the Housekeeping module that's in development, there would be a report of what needs to be cleaned when, and records of what was in fact cleaned when. I'm not sure it was intended to display that on the ribbon calendar, but I can see where that might be a useful option or overlay anyway.

In separate work, we're wanting to add the ability to customize what is displayed on the ribbon calendar and how, so this might tie into that work at some point.

Could you please add an Australian Holidays List to the list of UK , USA, Mexico, Spain etc.

Valerie,

In my setup I have a custom field named BXALLGUESTS, and when I inspect it in OR it has all of these settings/checkboxes.

Type Booking
Name All Guests
Code BXALLGUESTS
Rich Text? Yes
Show During Quote Acceptance? Show, required entry

Maybe this will help you, I think the important part might be the 'Show, required entry' setting.

Lydia has shared some specific information where we can add fields to our rental agreement to "personalize" it with guest or booking specific information.

What I still don't understand is how do we add a section in the RA where the guest would be required to enter their initials?

I created a custom field for initials like Rich suggested: {BXCANCEL} and put it in our rental agreement after the cancellation policy.

Then I sent the rental agreement to myself on a test booking. But it just shows up on the rental agreement as BXCANCEL and there was no where for the guest to click to "add" their initials.

I am obviously not understanding the correct way to do this. Do I need to somehow capture the guest's initials elsewhere and this macro will fill them in? I don't know how much good that will do, if the guest does not have to actually take a step to click to add their initials.

Ken - when you have multiple properties it is easy to make a mistake. I only have three properties, but even then it takes mental effort to carefully scan the current date and then looking ahead at future dates as well. Would be nice to have OR automatically determine if there are *any* cleans needed on any day at a glance, especially when looking at the ribbon on a phone where you can only see part of a month.

Yes, you've all figured out the right way to do this: Create a custom field for "Guest List", that's tagged as required. It will be presented to the guest as part of the booking process, or as part of the rental-agreement-signing process for channel guests.

Then, include that same custom field in your rental agreement, underneath a statement something like:

"I understand that the following specific people, and no others, may be permitted into the Property. Admission of anyone else into the Property constitutes violation of this Agreement, and may subject me to immediate eviction without refund as well as additional penalty charges:"

{custom field code here}

I'd make the same assumption you do - that a cleaning is needed after every booking. Not sure why a special indicator would be required.

Thank you Lydia, I'll check out that Facebook group.

I had no idea we could add customized information to the rental agreement! This is wonderful, thank you very much for taking the time to send these instructions. I'm definitely going to give it a try!

Would be nice if the ribbon showed a symbol for any day when a cleaning would be required.

Details
- have a property setting (checkbox) to either include or exclude from the feature (default to include)
- have a ribbon setting to either display or not display the feature
- put a discrete circle around any day number (eg: around the 15 for Jan-15) and use hover text to state 'cleaning required'

I'm paranoid that my cleaners will forget a cleaning date, so everyday I double check whether a cleaning is needed, this would make it really obvious. My assumption is that cleans always happen on day of departure but I suppose an offset per property might be nice if there are owners who clean on day after departure.

Valerie - if you're on Facebook you might want to join the Unofficial OwnerRez Support Group page. We've chatted about this because it's not really clear. That's also just a great support page.

Basically, start with Settings. - Messaging - Custom Field Definitions.

For example, I want to know the name and phone number for someone other than the primary renter. So I have 2 Custom Field Definitions. The first one has the following fields:

Type: Booking (so this field will be part of your booking process)
Name: Emergency Contact Name (the guest will see this "field name" beside the blank field)
Merge Code: BX EMERGNAME

Display: Yes, required entry (which means this will show up in the form sent to the guest to complete as part of the rental agreement signing)
Order: 6 (this is totally up to you - once you know all the fields you want toe guest to complete, you should assign numbers in a logical order)
Description: Please enter the name of someone OTHER THAN THE PRIMARY GUEST that we may contact in the event of an emergency. (basically, this is the place where you tell the guest what you want them to enter in the field)

Then just decide which properties this info will apply to an whether you want the field to be active (which you do!)

SAVE THIS CUSTOM FIELD!!!

Then I set up another field where the enter this person's phone number. All the same process as above.

THEN: Go to Settings - Branding & Legal - Legal Agreements.

Open the legal agreement you will be using.

Scroll to where you want the guest info to show up in your agreement. This might be a place in a critical section where you've asked them to initial that they understand certain terms. Or, in my example, I have a bunch of info, entered by the guest, that I include at the end of my rental agreement which ends up looking like this:

Reservation Number:  {BIDRAW}
Guest's Primary Email:  {CEMAIL}
Guest's Primary Phone:  {CPHONE}
Guest's Home Address:  {CADDRPRIMES}
Number of Adults in Party:  {BNADULT}   Number of Children in Party:  {BNCHILD}
Make and Model of Primary Vehicle to Be Used at Property:  {BXCAR}
Name and Phone Number of Emergency Contact:  {BXEMERGNAME}   {BXEMERGPHONE}

You insert the guest's response by picking "Insert Field" from the options at the top of the "Body" of your agreement.

Hope that helps. You'll get there! And when it's done you'll love it. Just test the #%&$ out of it. Hahahaaa!

Auuuggghhh! Don't give them any ideas! :-0

Rich,

Wouldn't the current Reports > Detail Reports > Bookings report do the trick? It can be configured per property and per date range.

Yes, it would simplify things like this if the channels would remove the restrictions and property minimums...but I can't imagine VRBO would be so eager for ALL of their listings to start processing payments on their own instead of using VRBO's system.

Having recently integrated my VRBO account with OR, I think the greatest benefit for me (even more than the simplicity of managing all aspects of my properties from my OR dashboard) is having all of the payments processed through MY merchant account instead of through VRBO's payment system.

I hadn't anticipated this and LOVE it! No more worrying about VRBO refunding a guest without my knowledge or permission and no waiting for VRBO to send the payment to me.

If VRBO dropped the restriction to use a channel manager from 5 properties to one, then just imagine how many payments will be leaving their system and how much less control they would have over the reservations.

Anyway, I'm really happy that I made the decision to use OR's channel manager and integrate my VRBO account with OR.

It IS interesting that Airbnb allows accounts with only one listing to use the channel manager, AND Airbnb still processes the guest payments; Airbnb does not allow the host to process the payments through their own merchant account like VRBO does. That is a huge difference....and I wonder how long it might be until VRBO decides to copy Airbnb (which they seem to want to do often.)

Hi Beth,

Yes, I have the same situation as you, multiple properties with property-specific information that can't really be combined into one generic message and custom tags.

For now, (until we can associate email templates to specific properties so that when we need to send an email template on a booking we are only presented with those templates associated with that property instead of ALL of them), I've changed the way I've labeled my templates to help weed out templates I don't need to see.

I did this by adding a prefix of "y (auto)" to each email template that is linked to a trigger and sent automatically. I chose "y" because it was near the end of the alphabet so would put the template at the bottom of the list and added "(auto)" to remind myself that it is a triggered message.

This leaves all of the other templates without the "y (auto)" displayed at the top of my list. I identify each property's templates by using its property code at the beginning of the template name so that all of the templates belonging to that property are grouped together.

Each property has 5-6 email templates that can be manually sent for each booking so this makes it a lot easier to see those templates quickly when sending rather than having to scan through the list of 110 templates (currently) to find the one I'm looking for.

Maybe this suggestion might help anyone else facing the same situation.

Hi Chris,

Here is an example of what Rich S is describing:

https://snipboard.io/YXU6IO.jpg

Hi Tim,

Perhaps you could create a booking custom field for "Misc" or "Notes"? Then, when you run the Daily Checklist report you'll be able to see those notes.

I have a similar custom field we call "ETA" (estimated time of arrival). If the guest lets us know when they expect to check in we add that information to the ETA custom field on that guest's booking. Then each day when we run the Daily Checklist report we can see that information if the guest is checking in that day.

Hi Richter Vacation, can you describe in more detail how you were able to add a field to request more information from the guest? Was it in the rental agreement itself or on a separate form/email template?

Unfortunately, Square doesn't support cards on file or passing in card numbers which is required for API integrations with HomeAway, booking.com etc. They only support the model where you send a Square form or embed to the guest and they key in their card numbers that way. That's why we haven't gotten to adding support for Square at this point.

Lynnbrook has different pricing models depending on your volume and mix of cards, so they can get you the best price for your situation, which is why they don't have a published price that applies to everybody.

If you want a processor similar to Square, look at Stripe. They're also 2.9% + 0.30 like Square.

Can you please add SquareUp as a credit card processor???? I would guess many of us use them. (Ps: dismissed Lynnbrook because they don’t publish their fees).

What would you actually use this for? There are several hundred individual data points for each property if you include them all - that would be one huge and clumsy spreadsheet! And if you didn't include them all, you'd still have to go back and review the listing manually anyway.

An annual review is an excellent idea and a good practice. The best way to do this would be to check your Hosted Website's listing for each property, if you have one, because that will always show exactly what is in the OwnerRez database.

It would be nice to be able to run a report which will show all the listing details for a property. We could use something like this for our yearly property audits to make sure all listing details are current and up-to-date. This would also highlight any new listing feature/detail fields that have been added/modified during your system upgrades.

We could also use a blank one for when we are on boarding a new property.

Yes, we're seeing more and more requests for this feature, so it'll probably come along eventually.

Take a look at "Tools" then "Email History". Use the "Filter" tab at the upper, left to narrow your results.

Would be nice if there was an easier way to block dates for check-in & out. For example, I don't want anyone checking in or out on a holiday, but there's no place in the holiday settings to show that. That seems to mean I have to set up a season for every holiday, every year, because the day-of-week or the date changes each year. Maybe you could add something on the Holidays page with generic check boxes to allow in/out day of, day before and day after. Would love check boxes for every holiday, but that may be too much. Thanks!

Its great that we can see the history of emails that are related to a reservations.

It would ALSO be good to see the history of emails related to an email template or Trigger. This is useful when we need to change or update a template and may need to see who received it BEFORE we changed it so we can send an update to them. At the moment, that requires going through each reservation -- or does it?

The OwnerRez rental agreements are designed to be signed electronically, so they don't need to be printed out.

However, they're really HTML and can be rendered into PDFs, so it's possible to design an agreement that could be printed out and physically signed.

Would love a report that could be downloaded for each guest for a registration form, where it populates name, email, check-in and check-out dates and space where I could add policies to the bottom, etc. Print to get guests to sign when they check in.

It would be really good to have the S&U tax report break out the taxes for each day or the month. In our jurisdictions, taxes are due in the month they are incurred. So, if a booking crosses month boundaries you are supposed to pay the taxes of the days in the month. Also, makes it easy to document the tax payments should the jurisdiction ever do an audit. Print out the report and show the check register.

figured it out, with the field thing--it isn't IN my agreement but on the form that they fill out.