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I noticed that on new booking renter just was sent email with travel insurance link. I have it as 'optional", and always had, but is sending an email something new? i have never noticed it before. Thanks

Interesting thing just came up. Our guests that auto booked on VRBO didn't receive our emails because VRBO isn't passing email addresses through iCal. Wondering if there is a way to send an email to us the owners that reminds us that emails won't go out because there is no email address so we can go in and add it? Alternately, a way to simply filter (or a report) that showed all guests without a valid email so we could easily add them?

Damon

I do not want yet another wifi enabled device ( thermostats are wifi already) - we are in the mountains, wifi is over satellite, we have limited data and experience outages. i want something simple, to control existing set up, not another hub.

No, unfortunately

Is there any way to tie a motion detector to your thermostat systems? Then if there was no motion detected for say 12 hours, it would trigger the thermostats to a setting. Check out MicasaVerde.com. They have home controllers that solve some of those issues. There's no integration with OR though but perhaps you could get someone to do the integration using their API.

I understand this is not the highest priority, i just thought that you guys being as technologically attuned as you are, may have come across some sort of a solution for your own VRs. I am building 3rd VR that will have THREE Honeywell 9000s, bringing the total number of thermostats I have to control:

1) 2 - VR#1 ( two independent HVAC units) - Honeywell 9000 thermostats
2) 2 - VR#2 (one HVAC unit, zoned) - Bryant Evolution Connex thermostats
3) 3 - VR#3 ( two HVAc units, one is zoned) - Honeywell 9000 thermostats - not built yet
4) 1 - own home - Honeywell 9000

That is 8 thermostats to control! ( currently 5)
So #1, 3 and 4 can fortunately be on same app.
But really looking forward to calendar integration, as now hubby is the one who has to remember to set the thermostats up or down between guests.

I was looking for iCal import on their site. I don't think they have it, but if they did it would be very cool -- you could do a setting where it was 78 degrees during events and 75 degrees the rest of the time. Zapier.com is another similar site, but it also doesn't look like they have anything triggering on iCal. They do have an event start trigger on Google Calendar, but not one on event end :-/

Oho... It looks like both IFTTT and Zapier have email triggering, for example: https://parser.zapier.com/. If you created triggers in OwnerRez to send out emails on day of arrival and day of departure, you might be able to tie your thermostat=78 to arrival and thermostat=75 to departure. It might be a bit more complex to figure out the timing as we send out the daily triggers at 3am. You'd also have to consider the case where you get an arrival and departure email the same day.

We have considered adding Zapier/IFTTT connection to OwnerRez which would make all of this simple, and I'm sure we'll get to that at some point. Right now, we're knee deep in 3 other things -- payments overhaul, walled garden site handling (including listing site criteria on renter agreements, separate checkout, etc), and channel integration for airbnb, booking.com etc. Once we've got all _those_ out of the way... :-D

@BlueMtnCabins: It would probably have to go the other way. The booking software (like OwnerRez) would have to push events to the devices (thermostats). The thermostat companies probably have APIs or bridge software where we could web-hook events to them. So OwnerRez would basically tell the thermostat "go to 78 degrees" around the time the guest checks out. There are a couple different patterns.

https://ifttt.com/honeywell_total_connect_comfort has some applets(?) for Honeywell Total connect Comfort (which is what i have) but I do not see one that allows to use reservations calendar and follow something like this:

if checkout day, at 10AM ET and system = cool, set temp = 78F
If checkin day, at 2:30PM and system = cool, set temp = 75F

Does anyone know if there is any application that integrates calendar and wifi thermostats. meaning if I have a 3 night gap and property is not occupied, I want to set temps higher (or lower) to save on utilities.
I have 2 (soon will be 4) Honewell 9000 series wifi thermostats and also Bryant Evolution Connex (2 thermostats) also wifi.
I imagine such app would use my existing log in to those respective apps or portals and change settings based on occupancy. Anyone aware of such app?

Thanks Chris. That fixed it! Take the rest of Sunday off!

Looks like FK changed their inquiry email format slightly, but just enough to throw off our parser.

We've now released a hotfix that addresses the issue.

Can you send through another test inquiry?

I see the test inquiries in your account and we're looking into the issue.

I saw previous post about # of guest, but there is also an issue that arrival and departure dates are showing missing on the OR inquiry. I tested it a few times and both inquiries (on different properties) are showing on the OR Inquiry missing arrival and departure dates:

This inquiry is MISSING INFO.
This means that there is missing or malformed information such that a quote is not possible. Specifically:

The arrival date has not been specified.
The departure date has not been specified.

Yep, they both use the same format.

The hotfix for this is now released.

Actually one was TA one was FK with same issue but tgey probably use same setup

Thanks for the heads up! Looks like TA finally added adults/children into the email instead of just the guests which they had before.

We'll get our parser updated to handle the new format and a hotfix out shortly.

Noticed my last 2 TA inquiries:
1. was 8 adults and 4 children on TA - showed up as 8 adults and 8 children on OR; created rule violation
2. was 6 adults and 4 children on TA, showed on OR as 6 adults and 6 children, created rule violation

We had an error in the deployment earlier. This is now fixed.

Tripadvisor inquiry, created quote, cannot email. getting
What just happened?

Whatever you just did caused an error. We immediately logged the error and sent emails to the right people.
What do I do now?

Try whatever you were doing one more time. If the error still occurs, please contact us and tell us what happened. Or, even better, use the Feedback menu at the top right of the page to send a suggestion.

This is a good one. I know several people put text on their site asking them to enter that in the comments, but that's sort of brittle. We could put a free text field for that on the widget, but there are already a ton of fields there.

Best idea would be to use a custom field to capture that on checkout: https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/capture-additional-fields-on-checkout-quote-acceptance

Other than knowing which website the given traveler has inquired from or booked, is there a way to add optional question/field to inquiry/quote widget and /or check out form so that owner may know where/how the guest found owners' website? I advertise on craigslist, visitmysmokies etc, have presence on google etc. So when those people finally get to website, I do not know where they found it 9 they could have seen my ad on CL, or saw it on Google, or Visitmysmokies). would be good if I know what site has driven the inquiry. Or is there any other way to know this?

I looked into this and I don't see any support in GA for passing custom values you can see in real time. The only thing you can set is the event label. You can pass custom values for a visitor that are visible on the non-realtime reports, but even that support is limited.

We'll keep this in mind for a future enhancement if GA adds support we can use to show additional values in the real time dashboard. Or maybe we need to build our own real time dashboard ;-)

In both cases I was asked, it was for a debit card, and about 24 hours after they got the 'release email' that they inquired as to why the funds were still on hold.

This is good information to have if it comes up again.

Thanks,
-JJ

Got it thank you so much!

Make the change on the booking Rules, not the property Rules. You'll have to do that for each VRBO booking as it comes in, but that way it'll apply to only that booking, not the rest of the direct bookings etc.

<<Set it to "automatically reserve a security deposit" even though it won't actually be automatic in this case, and fill out the details. Leave "Security Deposit Reminder" set to "do not send an email reminder" because you'll be sending your own 3 days before arrival.>>
If I do that, would it not apply to my direct OR bookings going forward? i do not have sec dep enabled on those because I collect (and then refund) sec dep as non-taxable surcharge. if I enable it, would it not result in having a "double" deposit - one as a "surcharge" and another as CC hold? Thanks

Yep, it's never good to have a third party in charge of the damage deposit. I've seen people doing exactly what you describe with stating the secdep in the house rules and it works well.

Sending the link should work as long as you go into the booking Rules and enable the secdep there. That's probably what's tripping it up right now -- you have the secdep off for the property, so the booking Rules default to that. But you can change that on a booking by booking basis.

Set it to "automatically reserve a security deposit" even though it won't actually be automatic in this case, and fill out the details. Leave "Security Deposit Reminder" set to "do not send an email reminder" because you'll be sending your own 3 days before arrival.

Once you do that, the security deposit link will be enabled for the booking and you can send it to the guest.

Did the security deposit release go through successfully as normal?

Usually it is the same day you release the security deposit, but the actual removal of the hold is up to the originating bank that issue the guest credit card. We've found that banks tend to be worse about releasing holds on debit cards, unfortunately.

Some times if the guest contacts their bank they'll be able to speed up the release process by noticing you've released on your end and dropping it off the account manually.