There is nothing permanent except change.
Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, believed in constant change. With our November 15th release with 17 updates, OwnerRez made some big changes, including a restructuring of the My Account area and the addition of Team Alerts. Not because we believe in constant change, but because we believe in continual improvement for our users. This is one of our largest releases this year, so hold on!
New Features
My Account Restructure and Menu Changes
Since the introduction of Team Access in 2022, users have been able to access multiple accounts with Staff access (and, before that time, Portal access). Before this change, the My Account menu/area had many things in it, some pertaining to the user logged in and some to the account. For users with access to multiple accounts, in-app navigation could be somewhat confusing (contextually speaking).
Additionally, OwnerRez made some of these changes to accommodate limited screen real estate on mobile devices in preparation for future and more extensive design updates.
Here is what it looked like before this update:
They have been separated into their own menus to differentiate between account-level and profile-level items. These changes should help users instantly recognize what account they are accessing and see their profile items simultaneously.
The Settings menu has been moved under the Account menu as part of these changes. Also, Team Access Staff members can no longer access the Account Billing menu option (Billing will not be an option in their Account menu).
Now, the top menu for that same account looks like this:
The Account menu looks like this for account owners (if an Account doesn't use a Business name under Account Theming, the Account menu will say Account instead of the business name). Switch Accounts is available for users that have access to multiple accounts/portals.
The Profile menu (or My Profile menu) is now streamlined:
Some of the other items from the old My Account area/menu were moved to a new area under Settings called Advanced Tools. Team Access Staff Members do not have access to the Advanced Tools area.
The remaining items were moved/merged into the "?" drop-down in the top menu bar.
One we wanted to point out that was changed a bit was "OwnerRez Status." It was renamed "Service Status." It also now features a live status icon - if you see green with a checkmark, "all systems are go." If there is an incident, it will be yellow or red. Pretty cool!
Read the My Account Restructuring support article to learn more about the full changes.
Alerts (f.k.a. System Alerts) for Team Access Staff
My Alerts, formerly known as System Alerts, are alerts the system emails to you, the user. As a reminder, Guests do not receive these email alerts. My Alerts is now in the Profile menu (cross-linked from its old home in Settings for now).
On the My Alerts page, users can still do the following:
- Disable Alerts button to turn off all Alerts (not recommended)
- Change All button to de-select or select which Alerts to enable/disable.
- Use the Action menu
- Turn Off individual Alerts
- Preview individual Alerts
Change My Alerts still operates the same way it did before, where you can turn on or off multiple alerts at once.
Now that you know where to go to get to My Alerts and see the same functionality is still present, the biggest news to share around this change is that Staff (set up under Team Access) can receive Alerts! (If you don't have Staff, feel free to scroll down to the next blog section)
As part of the My Account Restructure, the Team Access area has moved to Settings > Advanced Tools > Team Access.
Account users can "allow" Staff Team member Alerts at the time of invitation.
Or modify existing Staff Team members to "allow" them to receive Alerts by editing that Staff member's team access permissions.
Account users can now turn on Staff Team member alerts for individual Staff Team members but cannot customize which alerts are sent; only Staff Team members themselves can customize their Alerts.
NOTE: If the user is a Portal user, and they are only a Portal user, they will not have Alerts in their Profile menu, as Alerts do not pertain to them as a Portal user.
Lastly, users with access to multiple accounts now select which account they want to use when adjusting the My Alerts settings. Below, My Alerts defaults to the account you own or the first account you had access to. To switch to another account, click/tap the drop-down and select the other account - in this example, Acme Vacations.
Learn more by reading the Alerts section of the My Account Restructuring support article, or stay tuned to the Alerts article that is currently under construction.
Enhancements & Tweaks
Announcements (f.k.a. Dismissed Alerts)
Announcements (formerly known as Dismissed Alerts) are an efficient way to communicate OwnerRez news and information. You're probably quite familiar by now, but if not, this is where they appear in-app:
Announcements were moved out of the old My Account menu to the "?" menu.
Before, "Dismissed Alerts" only showed those alerts a user dismissed themselves. That led to users not always knowing about everything that was announced if they didn't happen to log in while it was posted. So while moving it to a different menu, and renaming it, we made the area more helpful!
The Announcements enhancements include the following:
- Announcements are displayed in reverse chronological order, with the newest announcements at the top.
- Users can filter Announcement History by Category, with Partnerships and Product Updates being the default selection. You might be a user who cares to know about past incidents or webinars you may have missed. You can now change the filter to show those to review.
Check out the OwnerRez Announcements support article to learn more.
Schlage Door Lock Updates
We received numerous comments and requests following the release of Schlage Door Locks Powered by OwnerRez on October 25th. Thank you for your valuable feedback. OwnerRez considered your input and made improvements to the Schlage Door Lock integration already to include the following.
- Expired codes are deleted from the lock after expiration (taking into account any grace period configuration). There is a service that runs once an hour that will delete them off the lock. So it could happen right after expiration or up to an hour later, depending on the service's next run.
- The door code length is now editable for locks with the latest supported Schlage firmware.
- The access code name now displays guest names instead of the OwnerRez Booking ID (ORB########) in the Schlage Home app.
Learn more by reading the Schlage support article.
Bug Fixes
Check Published Date Before Unpublishing Airbnb Listing. An Airbnb-connected property was delisted after failing three availability checks due to an OwnerRez user rapidly unpublishing and republishing the property. OR has resolved this issue and has optimized the listing status check process to prevent future unpublishing issues.
Default Phone Field to User's Country. As a followup to the October 4th Upgraded International Phone Number Input release, the system was always defaulting to United States, so we changed to detect country based on the browser being used. If the culture settings are different than the guest's, it will at least default to the user's culture settings instead of always United States.
Fix Additional Guest Phone Numbers Not Getting Saved on Quote Accept. Following the October 4th Upgraded International Phone Number Input release, additional guest phone numbers collected were not appropriately saved during the quote acceptance process when the guest selected a check or custom payment method. OR corrected this bug, and additional guest phone numbers collected during the quote acceptance process will be saved correctly when the guest selects a check or custom payment method.
Fix Check-in/out Time Formatting. Errors were caused due to formatting overrides of check-in and check-out times for non-US regions. We resolved the issue by fixing the non-US formatting overrides for check-in and check-out times and also now hide ":00" if the time format used contains AM/PM (or the culture equivalent) in field codes and a couple of other spots.
Fix Lynnbrook Deposits Import Handling of Chargeback "Reversals" (e.g., When the Host Wins a Chargeback Dispute). When the host successfully "wins" a chargeback, Lynnbrook adds an adjustment labeled "+Chargeback Reversal." However, OR incorrectly added these adjustments as a negative number, which is the opposite of what it should have been when the money was returned. We have fixed this bug, and any future "+Chargeback Reversal" will be correctly added with the fee insertion to include a description of: "Lynnbrook Group Fee ({adjustment description})."
Owner Statement Column Expense Attachments Count Should Not be Summable. It was discovered that the expense attachment counts listed in the Owner Statements Expense Attachments Count column were erroneously summable. We corrected this glitch, and expense attachment counts listed in the Owner Statements Expense Attachments Count column data type are now recognized as a text format.
Optimize Email List Report. Following the November 1st Email List Report Enhancements release that added Tags to the Email List Report, we noticed that the report was running slowly on larger data loads. It was solved by optimizing the Email List Report to handle those large data loads more effectively.
Remove Defunct Identifier Mapping for vacationrentals.com. OwnerRez has removed the identifier mapping configuration for the now-defunct vacationrentals.com.
Theme Selection on SMS Templates is Ignored. An account user with two phone numbers linked to their account set up a secondary account theme not associated with any properties and then created an SMS template with a trigger; found that when the SMS messages were sent, they came from the wrong phone number due to the SMS template set theme being ignored. OR resolved this bug, and the SMS template themes set will be sent from the correct SMS phone number.
Google Vacation Rentals: Private Beta
- Channel Showing No Properties Label for Certain Users. Users with multiple active Google Vacation Rentals (GVR) properties had no properties listed in their GVR API integration. We fixed this glitch, and now the properties list will correctly display all active Google Vacation Rentals (GVR) properties.
- Multiple Properties Without Property Link Page, Only Single Property Exposed Landing Page Fails. Users who created a specific GVR Booking/Inquiry widget and selected it as their GVR landing page experienced GVR landing page failures. OR solved this issue to now select the Hosted Website Book Now page as the GVR landing page for single properties and the Hosted Website property template as the GVR landing page for multiple properties.
