Hi everyone, quick little Monday update...
You can now create bookings and quotes to your heart's content without an email address.
We've always required the email address because a lot of the power of OwnerRez is in the automation and communication that occurs between you and your guests - triggers, payment follow-up etc.
With the increase in calendar syncing, the email address quickly became a hard gating item to creating bookings. So we tweaked a bunch of things so that you create bookings or quotes without entering an email address. This also allowed us to import bookings from HomeAway/VRBO as full bookings and not blocked-off time.
That being said, the quote acceptance and Book Now widget still do require the guest to enter an email address, and email addresses are required any time a credit card payment is processed. That doesn't gum up the booking process though since you can record payments other ways.
And of course, if you want to send email to the guest from OwnerRez (triggers? receipts?) you have to enter an email address when sending the email. To make that part easier, we've added a little "Save email address" checkbox on the email editor so that when you get an email address, it's that much easier to save for the future.
Additionally, we are working on a lot of updates to further ease the transition between imported bookings, from listing sites, and OwnerRez. We hope to bring in additional name, contact info, party size and charges from the emails that are sent to you by the listing site.
