Leaving Hostaway because of the 2% booking fee?

Reviews from Direct Bookings

Most listing channel sites allow guests to leave reviews of your property - but, what about guests who made a booking directly with you?  You can get reviews from them too!

In fact, reviews are so important that OwnerRez' collection of standard automatic emails includes one for "Send Review Form to Guest".  It can be found under Settings > System Messages.  This email asks the guest to write a review and provides them with a link to an online form where they can do that.

By default, OwnerRez does not ask guests to complete a review automatically, because you may not necessarily want a review from each and every guest.  If you do want all guests asked to write a review, set up an automatic email template and trigger like this example.

If you want to send out the review form for a particular guest, or even multiple guests, go to the Reviews tab of a booking and use the Request from Guest button to email them a review link:

OwnerRez users can send email links to multiple guests for one individual booking but each guest should change the Display Name field to their own name when completing the review.

If you prefer to have a custom email template with your own message, perhaps one that's triggered automatically, you can create one similar to this example and create a trigger to send it if desired.  OwnerRez provides a field code that will automatically populate email templates with a URL link to a form letting guests write a review for their booking:

{BUREVIEW}

This is a custom URL unique to each booking.

You can usefully include other things in the review request email too, like a link to your Facebook page or other social media.

When guests write a review, by default, it will be Hidden.  If you want it to be visible on your website or Widgets, select the review from the list in CRM > Reviews, and Show it.

If you are using the Vrbo API, there is a checkbox in its Settings to allow reviews to be pushed to Vrbo.  Only reviews directly written in OwnerRez by your guests (that is, not imported into OwnerRez in any way) will be pushed to Vrbo.  And, only reviews that are not Hidden will be pushed.  Once a review has been pushed to Vrbo, it cannot be removed or hidden there, even if you hide it in OwnerRez later.

All reviews collected this way must be tied to a booking - but reviews can also be tied to canceled booking.  This may be useful if your guest thought you were very fair in handling their cancellation.