Leaving Hostaway because of their booking fee?

Zapier Use Cases

  • Posted on
  • By

Zapier Use Cases

Ever since the Zapier integration with OwnerRez launched as a public beta in February and became a fully integrated feature in May, many members of the OwnerRez community have been busy creating hundreds of zaps to automate their daily tasks.

What are zaps?

If you’re asking yourself what, exactly, a “zap” is, it is an integration between web applications that allows users to automate tasks between the two. The online platform, Zapier makes this easy by providing a no-code method of connecting a trigger in one web application with an action in another. 

For instance, there is a zap that integrates Facebook and Gmail. The trigger and action are when a new post appears on your Facebook timeline (trigger), an email is automatically sent to your Gmail account (action).

You could do this manually, but it would require constantly monitoring your Facebook feed, then manually selecting each new post and selecting the method to share it, which would be very tedious and time-consuming. This zap automates this for you.

Video Walkthrough

OwnerRez Zaps

While OwnerRez has a multitude of existing built in integrations and functionality, it’s nice to have even more options to automate your workflow with the business web apps you already use and rely on.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways OwnerRez users have leveraged the power of Zapier to create zaps to streamline their workflow.

When a new guest is created in OwnerRez, Create a HubSpot contact.

Many OwnerRez users use HubSpot for marketing, sales, content management, and customer service. This zap will help keep your HubSpot contact list current with your OwnerRez guest list by automatically creating a contact in HubSpot whenever a new guest is created in OwnerRez.

_______________________________________________________

Automatically add OwnerRez guests to Microsoft Outlook contacts.

This one’s for all the Microsoft users out there. This zap will add new OwnerRez guests to your Microsoft Outlook address book automatically.

_______________________________________________________

When OwnerRez guests checkout, send a survey in SurveyMonkey.

Feedback is important for improving your business, and Survey Monkey is the most popular, free, online survey tool out there. This Zap, using the built-in Zapier filters and delay steps, automatically sends a survey via SurveyMonkey to guests at a specified date after their OwnerRez booking has ended.

_______________________________________________________

 

When a new OwnerRez booking is created, create a new message in Slack.

Slack is a very popular communication, collaboration, and productivity tool used by small and large companies alike. If your team uses Slack, you could use this zap to alert your team of new bookings in OwnerRez as soon as that booking is created.

_______________________________________________________

When a new OwnerRez contact is created, Create or update contact in OpenPhone.

OpenPhone is an online workspace that brings your business calls, texts, and contacts into one easy to manage interface, making managing your communications a breeze. You can use this zap to automatically keep your OpenPhone contacts up-to-date by creating or updating contacts in OpenPhone as soon as the contact is created in OwnerRez.

_______________________________________________________

These are just a few of the existing zaps that can streamline your workflow by automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks. Check out these OwnerRez integrations

If you’d like help figuring out ways Zapier can work for you, they have a handy AI Brainstorm bot that will help you identify automation opportunities based on your business needs.

If you want to create your own OwnerRez integrated zap, head over to Zapier to learn the basics and get to zapping!

Please visit our Zapier Integration support document for more information and resources about our integration with Zapier.

8 Comments (add yours)

Ventura County V
Jul 27, 2023 12:51 PM
Joined Mar, 2022 122 posts

I've been enjoying adding guests to my mailing list.  I've been toying with adding them to a google contact as well, so that they show up in my phone if they call/text so I know to answer the phone.  Haven't quite gotten that working yet, more of a zapier/google integration issue, but still working on that.

Alece
Aug 2, 2023 1:55 PM
Joined Jan, 2020 184 posts

I'm finding that with only the 4 trigger options available, it's a challenge to utilize this integration effectively. I built out a multi-step Zap to create/update a contact in OpenPhone when a booking is updated (which became one of your example cases). However any time bookings are updated even with things like tags applied/changed, Vrbo commissions added, etc.), it runs the Zap -- causing us to max out our number of paid Zaps unbelievably fast! If I set it to only run when a booking is created, then I don't yet have access to guest contact information, as that only comes in when they complete the rental agreement.

1. Do you know of a way to limit the scope of the Booking Updated trigger to only include changes to guest contact information and dates of stay? 

2. Are there any plans to more finely tune the trigger options available to make Zapier more useful?

Chris Hynes
Aug 2, 2023 7:08 PM
OR Team Member Joined Oct, 2012 1401 posts

We do have plans to add categories to the booking changed triggers for things like financials changed, calendar changed, contact changed, etc. so you can target things more granularly, but don't have an ETA on the roadmap yet.

What exactly are you linking up in OpenPhone? Are you matching things back to the booking id or just loading contact info? If you're only doing contact updates, you could use contact created/updated like this example: https://zapier.com/apps/hubspot/integrations/ownerrez/1168079/create-hubspot-contacts-whenever-new-guests-are-created-in-ownerrez rather than triggering off all booking changes. The guest/contact should be updated much more rarely than the booking, basically just when contact info changes or a repeat booking comes in etc.

Alece
Aug 10, 2023 11:34 AM
Joined Jan, 2020 184 posts

Glad to hear about those plans.

My current setup allows for booking details to be included in OpenPhone, so that when a guest texts/calls, we can quickly identify which property they're booked at, if they're currently staying or arriving shortly/in future, etc. Having just the guest contact info limits its usefulness and still requires us to open OR and cross-reference the name to see if it's a current or future guest, property, etc. 

Erik C
Dec 27, 2023 8:26 PM
Joined May, 2023 5 posts

This update seems necessary for zapier to have much value at all.  I'm running into the same problem mentioned above.

I'm trying to keep a record of all guests in a google sheet.  I have it set to update whenever the guest is updated.  However, something as simple as a new message from the guest, or message to the guest triggers an update even though no contact information has been updated.

I'm burning through zaps, making the functionality close to worthless for this use case.

Ken T
Jan 2, 2024 5:28 PM
OR Team Member Joined Aug, 2019 1706 posts

Thanks for the above post!  We're taking a look to see what can be done.

Caleb M
Jan 11, 2024 12:11 PM
OR Team Member Joined Mar, 2022 174 posts

Just to further add to what Ken said, our engineers got together and came up with an idea for a fix. However I can't provide an ETA for the fix at this time. Thank you again for bringing this up!

~Caleb

Alece
Jan 11, 2024 1:56 PM
Joined Jan, 2020 184 posts

So grateful to hear a fix is in the works to make this integration more usable!