"VRBO" vs "Homeway"...what just changed???

Just got a booking last night via VRBO API and low and behold there was no tax charged... I know my setting had been correct because just 2 days ago we got another VRBO booking and the tax was included... I hadn't touched any setting since then.

Now I'm also noticing none of the verbiage I see anywhere on OR has "Homeaway" like it used to, it's all now just "VRBO", including in the places where we select "apply to booking sites" ... I suspect this recent change had something to do with the tax debacle I'm experiencing also.

Did OR just make some changes and not make it abundantly obvious and clear to owners... or did they announce the change and I just missed it?

Yes, this weekend we rolled out an update that merges all of the Vrbo/HomeAway family of channels into one Vrbo channel. We'll have more details about that in the changelog tomorrow.

I looked into your settings and I see what happened here -- before the update, you had criteria on the taxes for "everything but Vrbo". Since Vrbo and HomeAway were separate, that wouldn't exclude for HomeAway bookings previously. After the update, that criteria started applying to all bookings through the Vrbo API channel, since they're all now treated as Vrbo.

Looks like you've already fixed this in your settings by removing those "everything but Vrbo" criteria. I double checked the taxes feeding to Vrbo and they are included in the feed currently.

Copy thanks Chris, that makes sense. As a suggestion for the future, maybe give us all a heads up next time a change like that is coming so we can prevents such issues... I spent the better half of my morning trying to figure this out and fixing the problem it created, not to mention temporarily deactivating my VRBO listings in the interim.

Thanks for the feedback! We always do try to give a heads up well in advance when we make a change that could affect your rates or rules. In this case, unfortunately, we didn't factor in that case where there was an exclusion for Vrbo and not HomeAway, so we didn't get the issue into our notification queue.

I apologize again for the mixup here.