Are you celebrating National White Wine Day 🥂 or International Beer Day 🍻 today?
Root beer and non-alcoholic white wines count too! Raise a toast to this full-bodied product update with rich details about our August 2nd release with 13 updates, where you can savor reading about the Google Vacation Rentals limited beta worthy of both beer and wine!🎉
Coming Soon!
Google Vacation Rentals (Limited Beta)
Patience is a virtue, and soon OwnerRez users shall be rewarded! Yes, indeed, our number one channel feature request, Google Vacation Rentals, is coming.
Rather than leaving our eager users in suspense, know that OwnerRez is diligently working on this private beta integration by actively testing it in production on Google Vacation Rentals with some of our employees' properties.
Be assured that we're hustling to reach the "limited beta" phase, but at OwnerRez, we never settle for half-baked solutions and want to be sure that we get this integration right for our excited users.
At the moment, the Google Vacation Rentals private beta is not available to any OwnerRez users, and regrettably, the waitlist for our Limited Beta is already filled.
Enhancements & Tweaks
Direct Booking Listing Site Tracking Added
Ever wonder how a guest found and booked your hosted website? OwnerRez has some first-class channels, bnbfinder and Nofie among them, that send guests directly to your hosted website instead of generating inquiries or booking from the channel.
Previously, it might have appeared that inquiries or bookings in OwnerRez were direct bookings because they weren't attributing credit to those first-class channels. However, OwnerRez has added parameters to URLs for those listing channels that automatically add the listing site information so that users will know where the guest found your property listing.
How does it work? Each time a guest is sent to your hosted website to book from one of these listing sites OR appends the name of the listing site into the hosted website direct booking URL.
And users will see the listing site displayed in OwnerRez on the individual inquiry or booking.
The best part? OwnerRez users don't have to do a thing! No setup or setting changes are required. This is automatic for inquiries for these listing sites.
Learn more by reading our Channel Management Overview support article.
Merchant of Record (MOR) Transaction Type Updated
Like Airbnb, some of our API-connected listing channels function as the Merchant of Record (MOR), handling credit card transactions and then disbursing payments to owners/PMs for bookings.
In some cases, the payment type for those channels was set as "Bank Transfer," which was confusing. We have changed all transactions from API-connected listing channels that function as the MOR to be labeled as "credit card (processed elsewhere)" for clarification on future transactions.
Learn more by reading the Payment Processing Overview support article.
Bug Fixes
Apply Footer to Guides. OwnerRez has applied our standard website footer to the Guides index page and each Guide's page.
Don't Delete All File Field Values When One File is Deleted. When guests deleted one of the custom field files they uploaded on quote acceptance/booking checkout, all files displayed for the host (OR user) were shown as struck through/inaccessible because there was no longer a current field value. This bug has been resolved so custom files submitted (or deleted) during the booking process will behave as expected.
Don't Error When Viewing a Review That Has No Property. In the July 21st release, OR enabled all eligible direct-booking reviews to automatically sync to other participating first-class listing channels (currently: HomeToGo, Houfy, and FloridaRentals) but missed the booking validation check, which caused errors. We have corrected this bug by adding a booking validation check to determine that the review has a valid booking attached.
Don't Treat Any Pets Allowed as No Pets Allowed for Vrbo and Hosted Websites. OwnerRez removed pets as an amenity allowing users to set pet policies in their property rules instead. However, we realized that this process did not include checking for "any pets allowed" which resulted in "no pets allowed" being pushed to Vrbo and hosted websites. For clarification, this change did not affect other channels like Airbnb; the regression was only for Vrbo and hosted websites only. This bug has been resolved, and any property pet rules will be properly passed to Vrbo and hosted websites.
Fix Issue With Vrbo Listing Import Failing on Importing Description. When some users attempted to import a property with their Vrbo listing, the import failed if they had checked the "What to Import: Description" checkbox. This bug was fixed, and users can now successfully import a property with their Vrbo listing if the "What to Import: Description" checkbox is selected.
Handle Case for Vrbo BUS Where Guest is Missing Name. Vrbo always passes guest names with the expectation that all bookings will continue to have names associated. However, if a user deleted the guest's first and/or last name in OwnerRez, the Vrbo booking update service would error. Now if this happens, it will always be rendered as "?" and/or "Guest" so the name fields are never null in the feed sent to Vrbo.
Include Blocked Message Detail in SMS Blocked Error. When SMS premium feature users sent messages to an unsubscribed phone number (i.e., the number had replied "Stop"), they received an error without an error description. We fixed this, and users will now receive the following error message, "ERROR - 21610, Attempt to send to unsubscribed recipient".
Skip Vrbo CB Transactions With No Ref ID and No Payment Fee -- They Look to Be Dupes. Some Vrbo Channel Bridge (CB) transactions included no Ref ID or Payment Fees. These Vrbo transactions appear duplicated and will be skipped during the Vrbo CB process.
Tooltip Verbiage Incorrect on Cancellation Refunds Radio Button. When users selected a partial refund on a booking that had a tax that did not apply to cancellations, the refund radio button tooltip stated "credit card" even if payments on the booking were made by other methods. The refund radio button tooltip label has been corrected, and partial refunds with non-credit card payments will display the tooltip, "Automatic refund cannot be processed" as the only automatic refund method OR supports is for credit card refunds.
Tweak Wording for Pets and Nofie. We noticed that the word "modal" was on the in-app Nofie instructions, and we changed that word to "window," as modal is not a common term. Also, while completing the removal of pets as an amenity, we noticed the word "amount allowed" in the language displayed on the property rules pet restrictions section. We changed those words to "number allowed" for clarification.
