General Help and Questions

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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.

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?

That the reminders ARE triggered when booking is made off of "manual" quote. i can exclude listing sites in a trigger condition (ex: I do not want to send payment reminders to AirBNb or VRBO imported bookings so those are excluded in the trigger set up). . But when a booking was made via ownerrez in response to a quote that i created manually (say I had someone on the phone), the quote is created with "blank" in the Listing site name, and the trigger does not work to send a reminder because it works only on the list of sites that i specifically 'included" in the trigger conditions.

My trigger condition example:

37 days before booking arrives
AND
Listing site = Tripadvisor, <my own site>, Flipkey, Vacationhomerentals

result: Trigger does NOT send a payment reminder for a booking that was booked based on my manual quote (because , I am guessing, "manual quote' is not in the list of trigger conditions).

what i think it should be:
37 days before booking arrives
AND
{ Listing site = [list of sites, as above] OR [booking was created as response to manual quote sent via ownerrez]}

I need to produce a quick report showing how much rent I made each month less listing fees. I cannot seem to find a report that even shows the listing fees?

Ahh, good call, that should work. What would the ideal situation be on reminders?

Are the built in payment reminders not flexible enough for what you're doing?

Solved by creating a "side" called 'Direct book" and I have to mark every direct booking as 'Direct book' ; set up "Direct book" site to be included in list of triggers. It is a workaround , but should work

I have set up and email reminder to be sent 7 days prior to balance due date so that it gives the renter an opportunity to pay by a different means if they so desire.
the set up for triggering allows o select which booking sites the email applies to. I have selected the oens that I book directly 9Tripadvisor, my ownr sites etc).

However, I just realized that email does not trigger if a quote was manually created ; example: someone called me yesterday; I asked their email; created a quote; they booked and paid deposit using that quote; but now in email set up the payment reminder email says trigger does not apply.

Is there any way around it? Thanks

I can try but most likely they will never select it....

There isn't currently a way to do an automatically applied surcharge/discount based on payment method. We've had several requests and thought about how to implement it, but the problem is the checkout flow right now. The guest doesn't choose a payment method until the end, after the amount has been finalized and renter agreement signed, so it would seem weird to jump an additional fee on them at that point.

What you can do is to create an add-on that the guest can select on the first page, next to travel insurance. Here's an article on how to set that up: https://www.ownerrez.com/blog/add-ons-are-here--also-known-as-optional-surcharges

Add-ons are only surcharges right now, so you could do (say) a 3% credit card fee which the guest would select on checkout. There's no validation on that, though, so theoretically a guest could not select the fee and then use a credit card later. But you can always add the charge to the booking later -- at least this way it is shown to the guest and they've got the option to pick it.

Will that work?

is there any way to add a percentage based CC fee (or percentage based discount - either will work) based on whether traveler selected "pay by credit card" or "pay by check"?
CC fees are legal in my state.
I would like to be able to add an optional line item :pay by check/bank transferdiscount" that travelers can select (like it used to be for travel insurance) and if they select it, it can deduct a percentage based amount from total.
this would be applied rent and cleaning fee only (not to deposit) amounts.

or conversely, add a percentage based amount if they choose CC payment.

or is there any other way to set up quotes to achieve the same? or I have to add manual item to quotes?
TIA

Great to hear!

Let me know once it's released and we'll add inquiry parsing for it and put it on our Regional Site List here: https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/regional-listing-sites

We may soon have new regional site Smoky Mountains by owners similar to ECBYO. This was posted in "smoky mountains vacation rental cabins owners" group on FB.

We just rolled out an update that lets you pick a booking in the template preview for both emails and legal agreements.

Hopefully that should make this less confusing!

1. define range of dates ex: June 29 - - july & as a 'season'
define minimum stay for that season - ex: 3 nights
Set "night" rate for that "season' to be whatever you need it to be.

Another way is define "surcharge" and set it to be conditioned for your "season" and minimum number of days. I use method above

I'm trying to figure out an easy way to increase the prices for the 4th of July week, was hoping to use the holiday feature. Any recommendations would be appreciated!

It is troubling to hear examples of AirBnB guests mistreating or even trashing the renal properties. Why - I think one of the reasons is they have no skin in the game (no deposit), and many have the entitled 'tudes. In many cases AirBnB makes owner to jump through hoops to prove damages and are less than helpful. I know it is against the Airbnb policy to request damage deposit outside of AirBnB, but my cabins are nearer and dearer to my heart than guest centric AirBNB policies. Anyone knows of any method to collect a deposit or place a security deposit hold on a cards for AirBNB rentals?

What are you looking to do exactly, add a surcharge for every day in that week? Or trigger the holiday surcharge even if somebody stays on Tuesday?

Right now we've got holiday observation rules around the weekend, but not for midweek. We're working on formulating something more specific for midweek, but it needs to be well defined.

How do I get my 4th of July week to add the Holiday surcharge for each day when the 4th of July is midweek?

Speedy! Thanks so much!!

OK, done!

Yep, I figured. Just wanted to doublecheck before doing a major delete. :-D

They are one & the same. I just joined today, so anything in there at all can be deleted. Then I will sync the calendars properly. Thank you!

We don't have a batch delete yet, but I can do that for you in the backend.

Should I remove all bookings or just the ones imported today?

Just signed on today. I "Imported blocked-off time from iCal" for my 12 new listings when I realize now I really wanted to import/sync my iCal calendars. How do I delete the "blocked-off time from iCal" I imported?
Thanks!

Oh, and yes, we have plans to make manual lock code and the cleaning date fields on the booking ;-)

Yep, no problem! We do need to clarify that on the preview -- it's a bit of a stumbling block right now.

You are correct... my fault. I though I also saw it on the queued emails to go out. But I got myself mixed up with a test custom booking field. All works now! Yes now I recall that custom booking fields do not show up on the template preview.

I guess this can one day be avoided if lockcode (for regular manual locks) can cleaning date is part of the standard fields for booking {wink} {wink} LOL

Thanks for your fast response! My bad.

Glenn

Are you seeing this issue in the preview or in actual emails going out? The preview doesn't populate example values for custom booking field codes because there's no booking to reference in that context, only the property.

If you want to test a real one, go to a booking and use Email this Guest, then switch to the template. That way you'll have the context of the booking and the fields will be populated.

I did that on a couple templates and it looks to be working. Do you see one that's broken?

Yea, now looking at all my booking templates, anywhere there is a custom *booking* field, it now does not render the field, rather it just shows the field code. It still brings in custom property fields fine. I hope that this can get fixed quickly as I have a booking field where I manually assign a lock code per booking to guests. Now the email that goes out to guests says, 'the code to get into the house is: {BXLCKCODE1}' rather than 'the code to get into the house is 1234'

Hi, something is wrong. I am creating a new custom email template, but it no longer reads one of my custom fields.
ie. Created a new custom booking field called {BXCLNDATE} for cleaning dates. In my template, all my other custom fields come in, but this one keeps showing as {BXCLNDATE}. I tried removing it and adding it again, but I cannot seem to get it to work on a booking template.

That sounds perfect. I had a WIX website previously and had the ability to enter dates and then see what properties were available. it worked well.

I have created the ribbon calendar and have placed it in my website for now.

I appreciate your help.