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Has anyone figured out how to insert a widget or a shortcode that displays the House Rules for each particular property? 

VRBO now allows you to set different cancellation policies for different times of the year.  When I called them they said I needed to set that up through my PMS.  I do not see that kind of flexibility on OwnerRez when I go to create a new cancellation policy. Settings-Rules-Cancellation Policies.  Has anyone set this up or know how to?

Thanks

Brent

I recently had a guest raise an issue during their stay regarding a hot tub that wasn't clean when they arrived. Specifically, the hot tub was cleaned the day before they arrived, but my technician missed some of the grime that can form near the waterline. Very frustrating. The guest let me know it was still dirty at 4pm the day after they arrived. I immediately had it cleaned the next morning at 7:38am. I asked the guest "how does it look?" I received no response from the guest, and instead the guest decided to file an issue with Airbnb support.

Airbnb support allowed them to cut their stay short and depart early without consulting me, the host. They said I violated the "cleanliness" guidelines for hosts. They decided to refund the guests 30% for the two nights they already stayed plus 100% of the remaining 3 nights left in their booking. This amounted to a difference in payout of $868.

Given that I have a signed agreement with them, just using the standard OwnerRez agreement, it seems I have grounds to hold them accountable for the monies owed, regardless of Airbnb's lateral decision making, correct? I do have a card on file for these guests. At the very least, I could charge them an "Early Departure fee", no? They haven't written a review and if I were to assess them for any charges, it would surely be after the 14 day review period is over so they don't take their frustrations out on me.

Interested to hear community thoughts on this one.

Thanks!

Aaron

Does anyone have experiences to share about RentByHost.com? I’m being courted to list with them for their intro offer of $199/year, no additional fees. I’m not inclined to consider this as there’s no indication that guests in my area are using the listing service, but thought I’d throw the question up here in case anyone has insight. 

I have been a user of Lynx for four years now.  I have started transitioning my properties to a model where Lynx is not needed.  I went to cancel the first property earlier this week and was informed that they would not be issuing a refund.  They make you pay for the year upfront and I had just renewed the service three months ago in June.  It is for this reason that I now formally withdraw my prior recommendations of Lynx and now recommend that you do not use their platform.

Ryan

If so, would you care to share your website for inspiration!?

Hi there we just got a booking for 3 nights during Christmas break when we have a min of 5 nights set up from Dec 20th 2024 to Jan 4th 2025 anyone know why this might of happened?

Ken,

These are zero revenue cancellations and I don't want them showing up on the owner statements, hence my question.  I have found out how to do it now.

Gale

In many cases, they should flow through to owner statements - for example, if the guest cancelled at the last minute and wasn't entitled to a full refund, the revenue would presumably still appear on the owner statement.

In other cases, the cause is that the cancelled booking was not correctly adjusted to update the Charges to whatever is appropriate (maybe $0, maybe half) per your cancellation policy, so the booking financial data is wrong and therefore showing incorrectly.

If you have specific examples of bookings that are not handled properly, please write in to the Helpdesk with an explanation of what is wrong, and we can analyze why that is and what needs to be changed to correct it.

How do I get cancelled reservations to not flow through to owner statements?

Yes, completely dead. We have a few properties around Phoenix/Scottsdale, been a rough year. We have been doing this since 2004, way before ab&b was on anyones radar.  To many properties out there, people getting desperate, dropping prices, and still you see the vacancy on the calendars. Just have to ride it out and have reserve money to pay the bills.  Everybody was high on vacation rentals, now the high has worn off. 

If you have a property on VRBO, but instant booking is not on, it will not be ported over to Expedia from VRBO.

Instant Booking on VRBO is a mandatory requirement for any VRBO property to appear on other Expedia sites.

Yes. Around July 1st of 2023 was like a light switch. Bookings just started drying up everywhere.

Search AirBnBust online and you will see lots of news articles about it. Inflation and high interest rates are driving guests away from travel right now.

There isn't any native functionality to do that built into OwnerRez.  I'm not sure, but, perhaps it might be possible using Zapier?

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/zapier 

Good morning 

wanted to see if I can creat a trigger to a specific word of it got texted or email to us

how can I do that?

thanks  

Unfortunately, at present there's no way to do that - editing the Hosted Website does require full admin access.

Unfortunately, no, none of the channels support the capability of changing between request-to-book and instant-book based on the season.

I hired someone to design my website, how can I only give them access to only the hosted website where they can re design

Thanks

I want to set up a season (Nov-Feb) where it becomes request to book on both Airbnb and Booking.com.

I have looked and request to book is available to me on Booking.com and Airbnb I'm just not sure if it can be turned on/off in seasons?

Anyone have any ideas or a workaround?

Thanks

Well, it looks like this must have been a very limited outage - I see there have been no responses to this post, nor have we seen any similar reports in our support tickets.  Unless more evidence comes in, I think we can write this off as a one-off.

If you are still having problems with Booking.com functionality, please write in to the Helpdesk with specifics so we can investigate further and get things fixed.

Hi all,

We've been having issues with some of our guests who use booking.com getting messages or notifications via the booking.com messages.   We just received the following from booking.com regarding this and I thought I would share it with you in case you are experiencing similar challenges.

Due to the recent maintenance and upgrade of the booking system, it may happen that you send messages to customers on the extranet, but the customers cannot receive them.

Therefore, when it comes to check-in instructions or other matters that require contact with customers, you can directly communicate with customers on the phone in the short term, or contact us. We will provide you with the customer's email address so that you can contact them directly through email. This avoids a delay in message reception.

Hi Paul - Thanks for the info.  Please do schedule some 1:1 time and we'll get you updated.

In regards to vendors outside of where you'd like to see them, we see that you had La Jolla Surf in your store and we provided an Oceanside surf company. Our vendors work within a 20-mile radius, so if you’re still seeing the La Jolla vendors, we recommend turning them off if you’re concerned your guests will find that too far. We’d love to do whatever we can to help you start selling. And please feel free to use any service that works best for you!

I have submitted my local vendor list several times. The last time was about 6 months ago. I also talked to the owner of the largest fishing fleet in Oceanside and gave you all his contact info twice as well as the local electric Bike rental company. I spent a lot of time making appointments and doing this work for you with no response from your vendor team except that they were very busy and would get to it when they could. Let me know if anything is going to change or we are just going to give up and send the link for undercover tourists to all our guests instead of Host.co. They have all the local theme parks and car rental companies. Are all of your sales pretty much owner-provided services like early check in late checkout and things that the host puts in the unit? What are your $ sales in San Diego and Hawaii on Tourist Activities? 

Hi Paul! I work with The Host Co and we'd love to help increase your sales and get your stores cooking! We have seen about a half million in amenities sales this year and want to make sure that we're steering you to the best success. We do see sales in San Diego and I'd be happy to get your near-by vendors updated. Reach out directly at annie@thehost.co or book some time with me here: https://calendly.com/annie-thehostco/15min?back=1&month=2024-05

It looks like our support team reached out to you most recently on April 23rd with updates and advice, but I'll also alert them at support@thehost.co regarding their response time and alert our vendors@thehost.co team again. 

Thanks so much for posting, and I'd love to reply in this thread when we see your stores take off!

Annie

I have had Host.co linked to all my properties for about a year. 

I have 3 Properties in Waikiki and 3 on the Beach in San Diego. So far we have had Zero Bookings for anything. Surfing Lessons, Luau's, Electric Bike Rentals etc.

These are all big sellers in both locations but a big Zero Bookings on Host.co  Is anyone else seeing the same thing?

We have called them many times with little to no response about problems with the Vendor list and giving them the names and numbers of appropriate LOCAL vendors. So far they have listed none of them.

They are trying to sell Surf lessons on the Beach in La Jolla to our guests in Oceanside. There are 5 surf lesson companies on the beach in front of our property yet they send them on a 20-mile drive down the coast. This will get you a bad review for sure. 

Has anyone had any good experiences with this company? We are not interested in selling Early check-ins or Late check-out we give these to our guests for free if available and we don't want to prepare stuff waiting in the rooms to sell our guests. We want to get a % of the huge amount of tourist activities Booked in our Area Like trips to Lego Land, Disneyland, Fishing Trips, Wine Tours, etc.  Why is this Company a Zero Sales at the Year Mark??

Is there another company doing something similar we can use?

Thanks     Paul

We have 2 properties in two different parts of our state...two different seasons , two different target market groups both using Pricelabs since for the past 3 years.  Starting November 2023, both properties have declined in lock step. All channels are down.  Has anyone else experienced this decline when comparing 2023. Not sure if it's a macro economic issue, an SEO issue, competition or even something else.  We placed them Google Vacation Rentals Oct/Nov 2023, and I've had this lingering feeling that that may be a contributing factor.  Am I crazy?  Thoughts?

Thank you Ken

Thank you Ryan

Hi Jan,

It appears that the containers for the widgets are not stacking properly when loaded in mobile view. You'll need to edit the mobile layout so that they are stacked on top of one another instead of pushed into the same space.

From what I can tell, it looks like you're using Showit as your site editor? If so, there should be an image of a phone in the bottom left of the page when editing your site that will let you readjust elements for mobile. You may also want to look into "Mobile Layout Assistance" which is a feature they offer to automatically readjust the layout.

Did you ever find anything for a template?