Leaving Hostaway because of their booking fee?

Security depost change over...

Bruce I
Jul 19, 2017 9:12 AM
Joined Apr, 2017 9 posts

I recently purchased my vacation rental property, and it came with almost a full summer of contracts (yea!). The previous owners simply collected the security deposit and then mailed back the refund. I really want to change over to the credit card method, but I'm not sure how that change over will work. If I change the security deposit rule to include 'Reserve Automatically', what happens to my current bookings who have already paid their security deposit money? And what about bookings that have come in through HomeAway? For now I've got HomeAway collecting the damage deposit...I really want to make the change over, but I'm concerned it will look funky to my current bookings. Any advice?

Chris Hynes
Jul 19, 2017 9:53 AM
OR Team Member Joined Oct, 2012 1401 posts

Change to rules will only affect new quotes and bookings.

If you have your current bookings set up with the secdep as a surcharge that you refund later, you can set the rules to reserve automatically and remove that surcharge from settings. The old bookings will retain the surcharge and you will refund them manually, and the new ones will not have the surcharge and be set to take the reserve automatically.

Bookings that are imported via iCal have their reminders skipped automatically, and we assume you'll be doing payments/secdeps on the other site. You can mark imports to have damage protection applied though, if you want.

In the next few months we'll be adding some additional parsing and a walled garden checkout that will make this process more automatic for the HomeAway ones.