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Please look into Outswitch. It's a flat fee based dynamic pricing tool. It's not as flashy as BeyondPricing or Wheelhouse but it offers powerful tools for dynamic pricing, the most useful of which is a matrix that looks at the immediacy of vacancies vs. occupancy rates to apply a multiplier to rents. It also manipulates my minimum night requirements based on gaps and seasons.
Currently it integrates with AirBnB, Booking.com, agoda and RentalsUnited. They could use more partners.
http://outswitch.com
My contact is Anton Croy
anton@outswitch.com
I do not have a contact per se, but an observation. when I stared with Wheelhouse, they had integration with Homeaway, Airbnb , tripadvisor and a few others. then apparently Homeway paused the integration. For a while on the WH dashboard there was a banner saying that they are investigating the problem and will update as soon as integration is restored. Now banner is gone, but so is Homeaway from the list of supported platforms. I have asked the question on Homeaway owners forum and had been told that there are "no plans" to restore integration with Wheelhouse. I think the reason is 2 fold: 1st, Homeaway is /will be rolling out their own dynamic pricing tool; 2nd, HA's fee is already dynamic, so 3rd party dynamic pricing potentially won't leave much room for the fee when it prices to market.
So I tried to use BP for my Homeaway properties. I find it wanting compared to Wheelhouse - some days were priced too low, some too high, I ended up turning it off for my 3 bd cabin and going back to manual pricing. I still have it on 4 bd, but it is hard to judge whether it is of any benefit - as I have been getting so few bookings via HA lately for that property.
if I were to choose, i would choose Wheelhouse.
We've looked into a couple, such as Wheelhouse and Beyond Pricing. What we heard was that they're all waiting on additional integrations till the new year.
If you've got a contact at one of those, we're happy to get talks started so we can work on the integration.
As far as I know, no. I use wheelhouse for my AirBNB and Tripadvisor listings, and when it comes to tripadvisor, I had to disconnect OR auto response with quote as I want to use WH set pricing, so I have to change my OR quotes to match the price set by wheelhouse..
Does Ownerez integrate with any dynamic pricing tools.
We don't currently have a way to customize the ribbon display, but that would be very useful.
We do currently use a signature method where they type their name and it's stamped onto the agreement, with copies sent to both the owner, guest, and also stored within OwnerRez.
Callouts with initialing is a great idea and is on our to-do list.
the calendar bookings view is my go-to page. Since now bookings come from so many places, i thought it would be neat if there was some sort of at-a-glance indicator on the ribbon (maybe before guest's name) where that booking originated 9AirBNB, VRBO etc). Direct ones do not need indicator.
Such as , if I am looking at the calendar, I see a color coded (property color) ribbon of guest's stay with guest name and number of guests in parenthesis. Would be great if somewhere there it also indicated 'AB' - for AiBNb, 'VR' - for VRBO, etc. or nothing is it was a direct-book.
here is what one of the owners posted in Smoky mountains group as follow up to VRM Intel panel discussion:
""Something I thought I'd share about credit card processing after a panel discussion at VRM Intel yesterday. Processors are seeing record numbers of chargebacks. They recommend: do not take multiple cards for payments without due diligence (as in someone who books it uses one card and the final payment is made on another card.) It's preferable to have a signed rental agreement, but Docusign-type ones with a signature that's "stamped" onto your agreement is better than just an electronic one where they just click a check box. Also, they recommended you have guests initial the sections that say things like not pet friendly, no smoking property, age/number of guest restrictions, etc. Anything that could become embroiled in a chargeback case. It was also suggested you have your cancellation policy language located at the bottom of your agreement...right next to the signature and date. In a chargeback case, they suggested you have as much documentation as possible: dated emails and texts can support your case. Phone calls cannot. So whenever changes are made, make sure there is a always paper trail.""
with that, is it possible to make guest initial certain sections or pages of rental agreement as part of the process?
OwnerRez is oriented around short term rentals, but there's nothing keeping you from making longer term bookings in the system, or multiple one month bookings depending on how you want to do it. You can alter charges, schedule or record additional payments etc. and override built in rules on a quote or booking basis.
We have clients using OwnerRez for longer term bookings in the number of months, although I'm not sure if there are any doing multiple year bookings.
Are there any particular issues you're running into with the long term bookings? I'll either be able to point you to a solution or outline the limitations of OwnerRez for the long term, depending on the issue.
My company manages both long term and vacation rentals. I understand this is a vacation rental software, but I need to operate two separate systems for my business, and it would be very helpful to add in long term properties to this software that I can track my tenants information as well and provide owner reports to those long term rental owners.
If you use the "simplify charges" option on the booking widget, it'll collapse the taxes to one for display there, but it still shows individual taxes on the checkout and emails.
Perhaps we should add an account wide "collapse taxes" setting so it shows one tax line for all guest facing interactions.
I have 2 taxes - a 9.75% state and 3% county. I have one tax line item for total 12.75% and I break tax down into 2 parts and remit accordingly on my own. Showing potential guests multiple tax lines is not a good marketing idea imo.
Not really sure yet. I think I'd do something like AirBnB does...offer $50 for every referral that books and offer the referral a discount because they were recommended by a friend (kinda like an affiliate program).
That looks pretty cool, although I'm not sure exactly what it does from their website.
How would we integrate? Discount codes or some such?
Hey..
I've been thinking about this for a long time and I think I might know how to make it work. If I could automate the viral marketing for my vacation rental by rewarding people that refer their friends (and they book)...I'd have a viral marketing engine....
Here's some software that I just found that I think might work if we could figure out how to integrate it with OwnerRez!! https://upviral.com/
I'd love your thoughts on this.
Thank you, Chris. That would be awesome.
That's a good point! We'll add a listing site criteria on taxes so you can disable the city tax for Airbnb.
I imagine it as a column graph.
For example, if a reservation was made for 10.01.2017 - 10.04.2017 for $900, it would show the average price per night:
10.01.2017 $300
10.02.2017 $300
10.03.2017 $300
and then, let's say it was not rented for two days, so it would show $0.
10.04.2017 $0
10.05.2017 $0
It could also show years in different colors so would see not just 10.01.2017, but also 10.01.2016 and 10.01.2015 and be able to easily compare the rates it was rented for or see if it was not rented and evaluate your performance.
I would use it as a guide to set up future prices.
Calendar view is also interesting idea.
Rent only.
Thank you, Chris. You guys are amazing!
Yes, but then it shows three taxes and it freaks people out. :) I know it's the same, I just think that it would "look" better. No big deal. Thanks!
Hmm, that's an interesting idea, sort of similar to the occupancy report. Do you have an example you've seen?
A lot of questions in the details of what would be the best information ... How would it break down the amount? Is it showing average per period, like month or week or year? If so, how do unoccupied nights factor in? Or would it be better to show a calendar view where you see a cell for each night, with a value only if it was rented. Rent only or including surcharges and taxes?
The best way is to create one tax for each -- that way it will be broken out on reports etc.
Is there a problem with showing the individual taxes somewhere vs. the rollup?
This feature is AWESOME!
The only problem I have is that Airbnb collects and remits city tax in certain areas. So if the reservation is made on VRBO or directly on my website, I have to collect and remit 10.725%. But if the reservation is made on Airbnb I have to collect and remit only 6.375% (Airbnb remits the rest). Since the report doesn't know which tax rate to use it makes the calculations wrong.
It would be great if there was a way to select the correct tax rate under the Taxes Section, before clicking on the Import button.
Thank you!
Our Total Sales/Accommodation Tax is 12.275%.
It consist of:
State Tax 2.9%
County Tax 3.475%
City Tax 5.9%
It would be great if we could set a combined tax of 12.275%, and then see a report that would show each of these three taxes separately - to know how much tax we own to each agency.
It would be awesome to have a report that would show which night was booked in the past and for how much - it would give us a nice overview and help us to set prices for the future.
We don't have trigger events for those yet, but they are coming.
In the meantime, another option could be to do a filter on your email for those specific notifications to break them out into another folder or bump up the priority so they stand out from everything else.
Yeah...I get these alerts. I was thinking about sending an explicit email that says 'make sure to update the calendar in the other site'. Just trying to figure out how to quadruple check that I don't get double bookings...
Hmm. You should get owner notifications when bookings are changed or canceled, whether manually or by the iCal import. Are those coming through? Or are you wanting notifications to another person? What about setting up third party alerts? Those also go out when a booking is created, changed, or canceled.
We use a third party provider as another sales channel. We have to manually update their calendar when we get a booking or a booking is cancelled and we've had a few misses almost resulting in double bookings.
We just need extra reminders....so wondering if it's possible to add a reminder trigger for when a booking is cancelled or blocked off time is removed from an iCal import?
Chris Hynes said:
Yep! This is something that would be very useful in a lot of ways.