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I suspect my market is similar to @BlueMtnCabins'. Our market is pretty much 40% retirees, 40% families, and 20% other (some younger couples or younger/middle-aged groups of friends). So most of our guests could probably figure it out, but a lot of older people just don't have the capacity to adapt to change as quickly and figure out things like streaming apps on TVs, even ones that fairly decently mimic traditional cable (like YouTube TV and AT&T TV NOW). My grandfather is always complaining to me about his high cable bill but I just can't recommend streaming to him because he and my grandmother could barely figure out how to handle it when they switched from the built-in TV tuner to having to use a cable box, and so navigating menus and apps on a smart TV (even one with a good interface like Apple TV) would be next to impossible. And a lot of our guests are the same age as my grandparents, ha.

And data caps are a consideration even on cable. I'd have to upgrade the plans at my properties to a higher tier to support unlimited bandwidth. Even as it is, with guests signing in to their Netflix accounts on our smart TVs, we use about 200-300GB of data in heavy months (the cap is 350GB). That 4K Netflix streaming really eats through bandwidth (on my gigabit fiber at home, I've hit over 1TB of data per month sometimes--I *may* spend a little too much of my life bingeing Netflix, LOL).

For reference, Netflix 4K uses (ballpark) 5-10GB per hour, and streaming TV services like YouTube TV and AT&T TV NOW use maybe 2-3GB per hour. So 6 hours of TV per day (on one TV set) uses 12-18 GB per day and (let's round it to 15GB) in a month with 25 occupied nights, that alone is 375GB--over my 350GB cap, so I'd have to pay ~$20 more for a higher Internet tier, which removes a chunk of the savings switching away from traditional cable. And that doesn't even include Netflix usage or streaming on multiple TVs in the property. (That's a worst-case scenario, though; of course, not every guest will watch that much TV, especially on a vacation in an area with attractions to visit, but you can see it doesn't really take a ton of usage for bandwidth limits to become exhausted, especially when parents put Nickelodeon on for hours on end to entertain their kids in one room while they watch a Netflix movie in the other room.)

As always, though, this question is highly dependent on market/demographics/guest expectations/local Internet services/technology available. One additional thing to be aware of is that online streaming platforms don't always have all of the local affiliates. In my area, it seems that our local CBS affiliate gets into a pricing spat with AT&T TV NOW (my mom has it) and drops off for a month at a time until they come to terms. I think that's becoming less of an issue as time goes on, but it's still something to be aware of.

let us know how it goes. In my location streaming is not possible altogether (satellite internet) and I would not do it anyhow. In my market people expect cable/satellite channels, sports etc. i looked at Hulu live and it did not seem any cheaper than Dish anyway maybe by a few bucks. I have form 4 to 8 TVs per property. I have been in IT for over 23 years but do not ask me to figure out Rokus and fire sticks etc on my vacation. I just want to turn TV on and see my familiar channels. And I know many of my renters feel the same way. I have Roku in my summer home, and I do not use ANY of the channels that come with it. Instead it signs into my Spectrum cable programming and that is what I use.

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 feel your pain. We have some HughesNet properties as well. The latest "gen 5" HughesNet is actually pretty solid, or at least much better than in the old days where satellite was terrible. It still works even after you hit yours caps (you get like 1-3mbps) and the latency is decent. I also haven't switched over to streaming on those properties. I doubt the HughesNet system would work well with it. I'm hoping that 5G will fix the bandwidth problem in rural areas in the next 3-4 years. It certainly has the potential to.

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.

Yep, found similar challenge of trying to quantify. I did the negative adjustment so I could still see the original figures in the charges tab. I can also run reports including/not including cancel just to see what occurred. I also had the fun of working in the AirBNB cancel payout. I didn't have many and it was not impossible to show.. HOPEFULLY - most of this is behind us.

I have to have Hughes net (as far as I know) at a few properties that I am at right now. It looks like the plans go up to 50GB, but for each TV using Netflix, you would use 1-3GB/Hour. I typically have folks 20 days in the summer, so that would not be as good. But, I surely hate ATT. :)

That's why I use YouTube TV as the main "live TV" app and point that out on the signage in the house. It has nearly 100 channels including cable news channels like CNN and Fox News as well as most all sports and premiums (AMC). I used Sling before but Youtube TV beats the crap out of it. Better UI too.

Chris - I'll add a comment, because I have similar thoughts. I recently started adding some smaller tv's to my personal residence in addition to 3 large tv's all driven by a cable service and Tivo boxes. The smaller tv's are corner mounted 32" close to a computer workstation in an office and in a bathroom.

I didn't want big physical dvr equipment like a tivo player, but when I called our local Spectrum the support guy (who was pretty awesome) said I ought to try their roku app. So far I'm using it for about a week and it seems workable.

Now to do this in a vacation rental there would have to be clear instructions about how to start the app, and then how to find channels. I'm sure some people would find that daunting, but at the same time saving $100's of dollars monthly might be worth it as an experiment. I imagine app quality might vary based on provider, and of course the Spectrum app is itself dependent on having a cable subscription too. But it may be that in future months there will be more and more comfort on the part of users to 'get to their cable' through an app (like on Roku) and if it's not easy enough today it will surely keep getting updated.

I'm personally continuing to do this experiment at home so I can get more comfort with the approach before I roll it out at vacation rentals.

I've been hesitant to switch away from standard cable because our market sees a high number of retirees and there's a technological barrier to using streaming apps. Not to mention that they all want to watch their Fox News. :P I have to stay on top of the cable company because the bill will go up every year if I don't call them and negotiate a new discounted bundle, but if I do that, fortunately, the bill is nowhere near $200 even for cable+Internet.

@Jacques: I literally just did the same thing, and almost identical to what you said. I had DirecTV, it was also almost 200/month and I also went to Disley+, Hulu and others. In my case, the big thing was having strong enough internet. It's gotta be low latency and a pretty decent pipe with no caps. I'm on a microwave P2P system in the mountains but it works really well so I went for it. It's only been a couple weeks but it was well worth it. I've got 8 TVs in the place (big lodge) and Roku's on each. I use YouTube TV for the live/broadcast channel since I use that at home and love it. Then Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, PBS, ESPN+ and Boomerang. That last one Boomerang is great for kids. Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ are a package for 15/month. As you said, Roku's are great and can do volume all from one remote. The only issue is if guests log out of my accounts on the Roku, but I put up signage to ask them not to do that. The housekeeper knows how to log back in if it happens. Happy to finally switch over and hope I can do other properties soon!

I have 4 cabins on a lake that I rent.

I just dumped DirecTV, which was $200/mo. and am providing Disney+ and Hulu+Live TV instead. With these I'm supposed to be able to have 4 streams of each for the monthly price. And, I was able to reduce all 4 places to 1 remote, so hopefully no more calls about TV support. All the TVs have Roku, and their newer remote can control the TV volume now. I did already have 1 email asking for the login to Hulu, since it got logged out somehow. I don't love that problem.

What's everyone else doing to replace Cable or Satellite TV? How is it working?

-JJ

FYI, there's some related discussion over in this thread:

https://www.ownerrez.com/forums/blog/integration-with-ruebarue

Do you currently use an online guestbook like Touchstay or RueBaRue, etc.? If so, would you recommend it?

Interesting, my family is trying to book a trip to Breckenridge. Rates for a property are $1700 for our stay, then another $1000 in fees/taxes. This is $250 in tax, $130 in fees (insurance), $250 VRBO's fee, $350 cleaning fee. Now - this is all fine, and I explain this to folks all the time, but at the end of the day, I would like to see the platforms do $/Night based on all in figures, expecially when fees are 1/3 of the total cost.

Then.... I look at the properties I work with, and we are even worse. That is becuase we are highly weekend rental in offseason, so the week day rate is low, but weekend rates are much higher. This creates frustration when folks are scrolling without dates.

Anyone thoughts on this?

I did hold the "lost fees" - where basically nobody made any money, we just didn't lose money. Folks were pretty flexible on those considering the policy would not typically allow for a refund, but I was trying to do what in my mind was the right thing. Since folks pretty much have an idea there is a pandemic going on, we are not seeing much for cancellations, more just verification that folks can come out and a rapid increase in bookings.

I use Stripe and have generally been happy with them. I know they won't refund my fee so I have something in my Rental Agreement that a $50 processing fee will be withheld if someone cancels (even if they're entitled to a full refund). Have not had any complaints.

I am curious if anyone tries to collect the credit card processing fee from the guest by withholding from their refund on a canceled booking? My clients have been losing money on all of their Covid-19 cancellations/refunds because the credit card processor does not refund the fees on payment refunds.

I've done a little research to try to figure out if it is even legal to withhold the amount of credit card processing fees from refunds on canceled bookings, but no luck.

Years ago Stripe did, but they stopped offering new accounts with that feature a long time ago, and earlier this year they took it away from those who already had it.

We are not aware of any provider that is currently offering new accounts that refund their fees on refunded amounts. If anyone knows of one, please let us know!

Hopefully someone on the Forum will see this and reach out, but, we do have a fair number of setup videos in the support docs starting here:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/quickbooks-integration-overview

We are seriously considering quickbooks online integration. Wondering if anyone is using it that would be open to answering a few questions on setup? We have twenty properties that would each need to come over. I have setup questions.

Personally, I don't charge anything. If my unit can sleep 6, they can book up to 6. I do all my ROI calculations based on the number of nights I expect to rent the property out and the expected rate for those nights (e.g. for a hypothetical 2-bedroom condo in my market: $85 average for 120 nights of off-peak, $140 average for 100 nights of peak). My costs are figured as rounded-off averages per month (e.g. $150 for electric, $50 for water/sewer, $50 for supplies, etc.).

To me, my "cost" to support an extra person is effectively a rounding error. It might cost me 50 cents a day for them to shower. The dishwasher might use an extra 15 cents of electricity for adding a few more plates. Maybe I'll have to get another $50 set of sheets at Sam's Club in 5 months instead of 6. The amount is so trivial that I don't really care whether I have 2 people stay or 6 people stay; I'm just happy my place is occupied and I'm earning $330 on a 3-night stay. Maybe I lose $3 of that to the fact there were a couple extra people in the unit--but honestly, I'd rather earn the $330 than give that group an excuse to not book my unit and book someone else's instead because of the extra guest fee.

(One caveat: my housekeeping service charges me a flat fee per cleaning based on the size of the property. If I paid hourly, or by group size, and larger groups cost me more to clean, I would likely have a different view of this topic. It is true that larger groups do tend to make my housekeepers have to work a little longer, but so far they have absorbed the cost and have not indicated anything about raising rates. This arrangement is pretty standard in my market.)

Now, that said, I fully support the idea that you should charge what the market will bear. If the going rate in your area is $15 per person, charge it! No sense giving away free money. Or slightly undercut your competitors and advertise yourself as cheaper for large groups. But if your competitors don't charge for extra guests, I certainly wouldn't charge for extra guests, either. The cost is inconsequential and you don't want to lose business over it.

A lot of times, questions like these really are market-specific. For example, in my case, I haven't seen any widespread adoption of extra guest fees here in my market, so I couldn't get away with it even if I wanted to. And even though I've heard stories from other owners around the country about charging $100 pet fees or $25 per night pet fees, I can only get away with charging a flat $25 one-time charge because that's all everybody else in my market charges. I did try raising the pet fee once to see if I could get any extra revenue, and what I found is that my pet fee revenue dropped, indicating fewer guests with dogs were booking (and actually my overall occupancy rate dipped slightly, too, because the pet-friendly listing really helps me boost off-season bookings). It's thus probably better to study your own competitors rather than ask questions like this here, because we're not in your market. Or experiment and see what happens to occupancy and revenue--just consider probably _not_ making any major negative adjustments during COVID-19, because your numbers will be skewed by the very random data that the virus is introducing into travel patterns, and you also want to do whatever you can to make your property as attractive as possible to guests and stand out above your competitors.

I've had no issues and good customer service with Lynnbrook, but they don't refund the processing fee on a refunded transaction. (However, they also don't charge an extra fee on a refund, which I have seen some other processors do.)

If you're looking for one that will actually refund the fee on the original transaction if you refund it, that's not easy to do--but they do exist. Someone in another thread here on the OR forums recently mentioned specifically that, but I don't recall who it is. I didn't bother to look into it because I think my total loss on processing fees due to COVID cancellations was only around $50. (I'm now up to like 80% of my business through Airbnb, for better or for worse--well, actually clearly for the worse. :P)

Hey Everyone,

I just wondered if you have had a great experience with your credit card processor? I have been using a company that is now charging for refunds and that will impact business. I would love to hear of another great company.

Thanks

Lindsay

There's a good amount of discussion about this in various social media groups. A number of folks suggest you just figure out how often you have extra people and then calculate that into your base rate. Theory being it's easier on you, guests might lie if they know you're going to charge them more and/or they may not choose your place if they see you're adding more fees. But the beauty of this business is we all get to do it the way we want. :)

I charge $35/person/night for extra people. I have not gotten push back from it.

How much are you all charging per guest over X on your properties ? I'm going to experiment a bit. I'm starting with a base rate for 2 people then $ 8/head/night and see how that works covering my extra wear/tear/cleaning/etc....

Thanks Ken, this is definitely a crazy situation! We had added a new line in the negative so we were able to go back in there and see each one to bring out to a spreadsheet and send them that but there were a whole lot of them so that's why we were asking. Appreciate you guys! Stay well!

Alas - you can't. We didn't think of that before this all happened and now it's too late. :-(

You may be able to dig through your old emails and find the notifications that were sent to you when the bookings were made, which generally include the charges. You could collect all that information in an Excel spreadsheet.

You can also get a list of all your cancelled bookings so you know what to look for - go to the main Bookings screen, List view, and Filter by Booking Status - Cancelled.

We're thinking about what we may be able to do to preserve this information for the future, but that's not going to be much help to you right now I'm afraid.

When you manually do a cancellation, rather than removing the charge line, we recommend you instead add a new line, in the negative, for the same amount and charge type. That has the same accounting result - a balance of $0 - but still preserves the original charges.

Hi guys,
So now that we have this crazy situation and have had to cancel a lot of bookings, and remove all the charge line items so as not to have it show up on owner statements. How do we run a report that shows each owner how much lost revenue they have? We've looked under List View with cancellations ticked but the amount shows as $00 because we did back everything out. What's the easiest way to find what we need to give owners what they need for loss of revenue?

Any help appreciated...

Thanks!