3rd Party Alerts and AirBnB Calendar Import

Do third party alerts go out when a booking is imported from an iCal calendar (e.g. AirBnB)? The reason I ask is I use 3rd Party alerts to trigger programming of my Z-Wave Locks so I need them to fire on importing calendars and these calendars synching bookings.

Ahh, good point. Right now only the owner notifications can be sent.

I'll work on a hotfix to add the third party alerts as well.

I set this up a few days ago and got our first booking with AirBnB last night! It synched flawlessly. Thanks, this is a huge time and stress saver!!!

Question: Is there anyway to automatically request the person that booked to put their real contact information into the OwnerRez system after they've booked? This makes it easier to communicate and develop a long term relationship with our customers.

Any thoughts/advice is appreciated.

Damon

Not automatically but you could do Booking > Send Email and prepare a template to send them every time. Here's one that I've seen some users send out. VERY effective and the Airbnb person almost always responds:

(create a template with this)
-----------------------------------
Subject: Contact info and renter agreement for {PDISPNAME}

Body:

Hi {CFIRST},

I have entered your Airbnb booking into our main booking system. Thanks again for booking {PDISPNAME}!

I was wondering - could I have a real email address for you? The current email address I have for you looks like this:

{CEMAILPRIME}

That's what Airbnb provides to us, but it's difficult to send you the information we need to send using that (parts get stripped out). If you could give me a real email address (Gmail, Yahoo, etc) I would greatly appreciate it.

I already have your phone number of {CPHONEPR}, so that's great!

Also, could you take a second to click on the following link. This will open a renter agreement that we ask all guests to sign before coming out to {PDISPNAME}. Since it's a mountainous area, we like to make sure guests know the rules - some extra liability warnings that Airbnb doesn't cover in their general agreement.

{BULEASE}

This needs to be done as soon as possible. Please let me know if you have any questions.

-{MYFIRST}

Guest Support
{MYCO}

-----------------------------------

You'll want to tailor that to your own liking, but it works well. The BGEMAILPRIME field fills in the Airbnb proxy email address that our system scooped out of the iCal field.

You may want style it so that hyperlinks and bold font show up, like this:

(click this to open a big version)

Thanks, this is helpful

I am configuring AirBNB for the first time. I noticed that I can export and import calendars with them. Should I set up both import and export? Will this cause duplicate bookings in both systems?

Thanks,

Yes, you should set up both import and export. No, it will not cause duplicates. If there are any conflicts our system will email you about the problem. Otherwise, the import/export will keep Airbnb and OR up to date when you get something on the other side.

How do I set up AirBNB to send an instant book to OwnerRes? I have it setup so blocked dates on ownerres block the AirBNB calendar but not the other way?

Thanks,

Claudia

You can do that through the calendar import, available in each property. It's not quite "instant", fyi, but we regularly update throughout the day. You can also use the Update Now button to update immediately if need be.

Here's an article that walks you through the setup: https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/calendar-import