OwnerRez currently supports inquiry communications with listing sites via email parsing of notification emails.
This article will cover the integration of inquiries for your local/regional listing sites. There are a couple of other methods of getting inquiries from other sources -- like widgets on your site and contact forms or other listing sites. These are covered in other articles:
- Adding widgets to your site
- Custom email inquiry parsing (body text method)
- Custom email inquiry parsing (SMTP header method)
First, go to the Settings > Channels-Identifier Mapping section of your account.
You'll see a list of channels for which we have built-in inquiry parsing and calendar instructions. Scroll down and find the listing site or channel that you use to receive inquiries. For instance, if your property is in Alabama, you may use the Alabama Vacation Home Rentals listing site.
Once you find a channel or listing site that you use, click the button next to it and follow the prompts to add it to your OwnerRez account. This will bring you to a settings page for that listing site. Each site has a customized setup guide, so we won't replicate that here. We'll cover some general concepts and then dig into some walkthroughs of where to configure common sites.
Our integration is based on parsing emails from the listing site, so the basic flow will be to get an OwnerRez email address and put it into the listing site contact communication setting. That way, the listing site will send emails to us as well as to you, and we can accept the inquiries on your behalf and allow you to respond within OwnerRez.
Nowadays, this type of inquiry forwarding-and-parsing is only useful for regional or local listing sites like "GatlinburgCabins.com" or "DisneyVacationHomes.com" where it serves a small local area. Set the inquiry email address on the listing site to use your user level inquiry forwarding address (starting with oru) and use the manual property mapping feature to match the listing site property ID against the OwnerRez property ID.
Please note for Vrbo, Airbnb and TripAdvisor inquiries: We are limited to the information contained within the inquiry email. Channels like Vrbo and TripAdvisor may only give a "double blind" email address, not the actual guest email, so forwarding inquiries to OwnerRez is pointless.
OwnerRez integrates into the Vrbo and Airbnb internal messaging systems via our API connections, so, you can communicate with guests via those systems from within OwnerRez, separately from email. See our Vrbo Messaging support article for more information.
After booking, pre-API connected properties should import booking information via the Calendar Import tool that automatically imports the basics of the booking into OwnerRez through the listing site's iCal feed. Note that these sites generally provide very little information about the booking in the calendar feed (often not even the name or email address); this information can be obtained using Channel Bridge.
API connected properties can skip the Calendar Import process because your integration automatically imports booking information into OwnerRez.