Anyone using RedAwning

I just ran across Red Awning looking for who is managing a condo in my building. I have not heard of them and was wondering what kind of reach they have. Apparently in pricing they don't have an annual fee but take 10% of the booking revenue excluding taxes, plus 3% for credit card processing plus do not pay the owner until 15 days before check in so that is a big negative in my book.

I tried few years ago. Not a single inquiry. It is just another one of hose virtual PMs. they list your property on a bunch of channels and their own website. On the channels the add bunch of their own fees to the pint that your rate is lot higher than direct and no one books. Unless something changed since, meh. I really don't see any value in these virtual PMs if you already use ownerrez - there is no value add in their "services".

I really don't see the value in those channel managers. I briefly looked into them when they had a vendor booth at a past HomeAway Partner Summit, because they talked about being able to list me on Booking.com and other distribution channels, which was attractive to me at the time (side note: why I've soured on Booking.com is a topic for another thread, ha). But then I discovered that listing on Booking.com was perfectly easy and reasonable to do on my own (well, their interface is horrid, but that's also a topic for another thread), so I started to realize that there really isn't any value in paying someone else to do what only really takes a few minutes (or even a few hours on your first go-around) on your own.

And OR, especially with API connections, really makes it easy to do it all on your own. Whenever you load a new property into OR, it just takes a short while to write the content and upload and caption the photos, and then once you know what you're doing, it's literally just a few minutes of clicking around to publish those properties on all your API-linked channels (Airbnb, Vrbo, TripAdvisor, etc.). To me, RedAwning and Rentals United and all the other channel managers only subtract value.

Also, every listing from a channel manager I've seen on Airbnb (at least in my area) is extremely poorly written. The headline is completely generic ("2 Bedroom Condo 2.3 Miles From Silver Dollar City"), the photos are bad (the first 5 are all just generic external shots), and the copy in the description is completely generic and uninspiring. And the listings are always very lowly ranked (they appear near the end of the last page of listings) and the dates are often wide open, which tells me that they're not getting booked (the rates seem kind of out of whack, too). No surprise.

Honestly, if you can't spend the tiny amount of effort to publish your own listings on Airbnb and Vrbo, I would far sooner tell you to use Evolve to manage your listing instead of using something like RedAwning--it's about the same price, anyway, but Evolve at least puts some effort into writing decent copy and pricing the properties reasonably competitively.

We explored a couple channel managers and even got close to integrating with them a couple times. In the end, this was our view:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/channel-management-third-party-middle-channel-managers

As it happens, this past week's survey asked about this topic. Some channels on there we're considering (or already working on) adding:

https://www.ownerrez.com/blog/what-channel-api-changes-should-we-make

"Google Hotel Search" and "Google Hotel Ads" are the official names. There's a Hotels API but the specs are built for store-front style hotels that are open to the public and have unit inventory. If you're on B.com, you'll already appear there but then the guest will go through B.com to book which nobody wants. Hopefully, we can pursue it in the near future and get something stood up.