Personal website with owner Rez account

I have just signed up for the two week trial on OwnerRez. I have so many questions, but the first one is regarding the premium add on of the professional website. What does this encompass? Is a professional website provided with his cost, can we use tools from OwenerRez to build our own website, or does this just refer to hosting an already existing personal website?

I can answer the 2nd question. You can use all ownerrez widgets in your own website hosted anywhere. I created my website way before ownerrez started offering their own websites and I just used embedded ownerrez widgets. Widgets are included in base cost.
You can see my website example using ownerrez widgets smoky-mountains-cabin.com/RVL

Becky, I send you an email with some examples of the two types of website.

Basically, Widgets are a free feature that's included with the base OwnerRez rate. They can't stand alone; they're snippets of code that you can plop into your own website, designed by you and hosted somewhere else, so that it can tie into the OwnerRez system and display calendars, do instant bookings, etc.

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/sites-widgets-overview

The Hosted Website is a full website hosted on our servers that displays your property information that you've entered into OwnerRez. it automatically includes the widgets for calendars, instant booking, etc. The website is able to completely auto-generate from your OR account information and, assuming you've provided everything relevant, you don't even need to make any customizations or changes to it. But you can if you want to.

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/hosted-websites

Good morning Ken and thanks for the info. Can you please clarify what is included in the Channel Management add on? I was of the impression that all of my listing calendars would auto sync through OwnerRez. Am I misunderstanding this? I admit without hesitation that this is new territory for me and I don't yet have a good understsnding of everything.

@Becky - if you are like me and have fewer than 5 units on a site like VRBO, then the Channel Bridge (which is an extension you use in Chrome) is a way to sync all of the booking information from VRBO back into OwnerRez.

It is a manual step, but I don't find it overly complicated, in fact it helps ensure that I do take a look at all bookings around the time they get made. I personally use (and like) the instant booking from VRBO and if I didn't have the added step of using Channel Bridge I would be tempted to just ignore new bookings because I literally wouldn't have to do anything.

In practice, using the Channel Bridge is easy, after it's installed in Chrome you just
a) click on the extension
b) click to download bookings
c) once downloaded you go back to the OwnerRez website and click on Tools/Channel Bridge and click okay a few times

If you skip this step your booking in OwnerRez will still have sync'd some information from VRBO, like arrival and departure dates, but other information like guest email, guest name and I think even charges will be empty in OR.

So in summary when you're talking about auto-sync, OwnerRez let's you automatically sync the most basic information about a booking using their iCal sync. That doesn't require any interaction on your part, and happens within about 30 minutes. But OwnerRez went beyond that and provides you with the Channel Bridge which lets you do a 100% complete import from VRBO to OwnerRez so that you have the most accurate records in OwnerRez possible.

I personally love Channel Bridge, it works reliably and I have all of the records of my guests in one place that I control, not VRBO.

Would Channel Bridge also import phone numbers, personal emails, and CC #s from other booking sites? I recently had an Airbnb booking and the guests did deliberate damage to the home totalling over $4000. Because they placed their booking through Airbnb we did not have access to their CC info and therefore could not charge them for the damage.

names, phone, email , number of people - yes. CC - no.
You can also set up ownerrez to trigger an email to the renter once booking get created on OTA (such as vrbo or airbnb) and is imported to Ownerrez to 1) electronically sign rental agreement (assuming you have one, if not - make one) 2) enter their address-phone-email- 3) further communication, automated welcome emails, door codes etc can be set up to be auto sent to renter via ownerrez.

besides, you cannot charge their cc without explicit authorization even if you happen to know it. You have to ask for it and they have to authorize you to use it for damages.