General Help and Questions

Sort by

• Newest Reply
• Newest Topic

I responded to this (sort of) over here:

https://www.ownerrez.com/forums/general-help/vrbo-walled-garden-is-up#59325

Summary:

* If you're going to use VRBO and Air (which pretty much everyone does) you will have to get used to accepting Book Now requests and using their message thread.

* We are working on tools to work WITH the message thread and Book Now stuff that they send.

* It is more important than ever to export your records out as the walled gardens put up their high walls

Yes, VRBO is going full-Airbnb. There are still some users getting email addresses in their inquiries. Other users can copy/paste the guest's email address out of the VRBO control panel into the OwnerRez inquiry. But in general, it should be assumed that sooner or later, VRBO will be like Airbnb end to end. You will have to respond in their message thread (either by email or in the control panel) and no guest email address will be provided until after the booking is made.

Now, what does that mean for OR...?

We have seen this coming for a long time. There is now more of a need than ever to use a 3rd party independent management system for your bookings because the listing sites will never provide you the tools to properly market and care for your records, especially across multiple listing sites. As the walled gardens go up, and the walls on the existing ones gets higher, it is extremely important to export that data out and make sure you are centralizing your records AWAY from the walled gardens. Expedia, as a corporation, has zero incentive to provide rich management/marketing tools for you (the owner). They have EVERY incentive to NOT build those things and lock you away from your customers as much as possible.

That being said, how are bookings managed if the listing site locks down the up front lead/inquiry? Couple of things...

You should assume that you will need to respond through VRBO message thread (if not now, then soon). We are working on an inquiry/email overhaul that will work WITH this message thread. You'll respond through OR and your messages to the guest will go back through VRBO, using the proxy email they provide, to update the VRBO message thread and get to the user. It will be plain text only (since that's all VRBO and Airbnb support) and links and emails won't work since they would just get stripped out anyway. But you'll be able to capture the message thread in OwnerRez so that your records stay centralized.

If you still have access to the guests' email address when they make an inquiry (even if you have to login to VRBO to copy/paste it out) you should still use that. Talk to guests directly as possible as much as you can. To get around the response rate counter, just send a "Hi, I've sent you an email directly. Please give that a look" which tells VRBO that you responded.

After a booking/payment occurs (on VRBO or Airbnb) that information will get exported back to OwnerRez automatically, via calendar import and through email parsing. We'll capture that VRBO/Airbnb email and "clean up" the booking record with more information as it comes in.

To help with post-booking/payment "clean up", we'll be adding forms that the guest will be directed to get things like:

* Their real/full email address
* All phone numbers
* Their POC name and guest list
* Sign the renter agreement in OR
* Credit card for security hold
* Other rules/things to agree to

This clean up process will be dynamic so that the guest is automatically asked for it after booking (you don't have to send an email) and will be based on the things you want to collect if you want to.

We have been hard at work for awhile on a number of these things, or the things under the covers that are needed to support what is coming.

Also keep building your own personal marketing channels! Your own website, your FB page - it is important to use those tools as much as possible. In the near future, we may have some diabolical tools to liberate guests who are visiting listing sites. ;-) Have a place where they can land! Have a website ready where guests can book when they figure out that they don't have to pay service fees!

Hmm...does this mean that with VRBO an OwnerRez quote will no longer work (e.g. all bookings will need to go through VRBO)?

Hmm....does an OwnerRez quote go through their walled garden email address?

Right now there is an option to check to auto send quote in response to inquiry. On certain sites, like AirBNB and now VRBO, the quote link will not go through. Is there a way to send auto response to all sites but send quote only when inquiry originated on certain sites? ex: i want to send generic response to all inquiries no matter where they originate, but send quote only to inquiries originated from non-dark-veil sites like my own site, widget, or TA.
Sites like AirBNB would only get generic response without quote.
overall would be good to have auto responses text differ by site too.
TIA

Starting this month, pre-booking conversations will be facilitated through our secure messaging system. You and the traveler will be able to see each other's contact details after a booking is confirmed.
https://community.homeaway.com/docs/DOC-4592

Can you send me the OwnerRez property id and the Airbnb iCal link? I'll have a look.

Air has a bad habit of including rules like arrival days or days in advance in their calendar feeds as blocked off time.

I synch the OwnerRez calendar with AirBnB. On Memorial day I had an opening but my calendar in AirBnB showed "Memorial Day" as blocked. It turns out that Memorial Day from OwnerRez was passed through iCal as blocked to the AirBnB calendar. My AirBnB to OwnerRez synch then showed "Memorial Day" as blocked on my OwnerRez calendar. Not sure if this makes sense, but I think this is what happened.

That should work, but VRBO are always changing their formats.

What if you try a new link with all of the options checked?

I've created a custom iCal link with guest info and property location for export to VRBO. On their calendar it still just shows "untitled event" as if I had used the default iCal link. Do you know if VRBO is blocking the details?

Screen shot of my custom iCal link --> http://i.imgur.com/h4BXQsJ.jpg

OK, that's some good info to have -- particularly the idea on outputting into the iCal export.

We are starting the planning on this, so I'll keep you posted as we get into development.

By default, all email will use your account email as the reply to.

If you want, you could go into the email template settings and change the FROM to use a different email. Are you looking to have a different FROM email per property? You can accomplish that using custom fields with a different value set for each property.

Normally, though, I find that the single reply to is better so folks don't get confused if they are inquiring for multiple properties etc.

If you have your own domain name with email configured, we can actually set up to send email directly from that address -- let me know and I can walk you through the setup steps for that.

Hi,

I have two properties.

How do I set two emails that will have a 2 different "From" so the guests know that I am responding with my business email.

Is that possible? Or we only have one email account that we use to respond to the guest regardless of what property it is.

It would be nice if we could input and track cleaning dates easily. To me the most important dates for a reservation are the arrival date, the departure date, and the cleaning date. Often the departure and cleaning date are the same, but occasionally my cleaners cannot schedule due to long weekends, volume, etc. Hence they may not be able to clean for one or two days after a reservation. I can certainly create blocks to ensure that my properties are not rented before cleaning can come in, but it is hard to track the cleaning dates in the system. Yes I can create a custom field (and I have done that) but it would be so much easier if it was a standard and important date like arrivals and departures. Also I rely on the calendar and the ics output a lot to ensure all is aligned. If the cleaning could show up on the calendar (not as a blocked day, but just information) and could be output in an ics file with a start and finish time defined, then it would be immensely helpful to ensure that I do not book a subsequent booking before cleaning can be done.

Glenn

What are you looking for exactly? A way to add a cleaning date that shows on the calendar but doesn't block off the days? Between reservations or during?

Is there any easy way to add a cleaning date to the dates section of a reservation and have it show up on the calendar? I cannot always get cleaning scheduled on the departure date for a guest and this is now becoming a bigger issue for me to keep track of cleaning. I love OwnerRez and have been using it for years, but I fear that I am going to have to look for another solution soon that tracks reservations *and* cleaning dates associated with the reservations as I am spending too much time with manual calendars and then ensuring that my cleaning blocks are in place.

DISREGARD ABOVE - I found the setting

There are two options you can do for this.

First off, you can alter the settings on any given booking or quote. The Payments tab on the booking shows what is scheduled, and you can add or remove scheduled payments there. In this case, you could have removed the scheduled payment or change the date on it. Or go to the Rules tab to control the schedule for the second payment.

If you want to turn off automatic payments entirely for future quotes/bookings, you can do this in the Rules section of the property. Set the collection to "Do Not Collect" vs. "Collect Automatically" and make sure that the email reminder is enabled.



That will send the guest a notification email with a payment link vs. charging their card automatically.

I have a 2 payment system set up. 200 at booking then balance due 60 days prior to arrival.

I had a guest who needed some extra time to pay and I agreed. Last night, her card was charged "automatically" and over drew her acct.

I'd rather have guests authorize each payment VS automatic charges to their accounts.

Am I missing a setting?

Thx in advance

Multiple accounts with less permissions is on the roadmap for later this year.

Currently, though, it's just the one admin level account per user.

Can you describe a bit more about your situation? How many properties do you have, and are they all owned by the same owner or is it more of a property management situation? How are you looking to split up the permissions? I may be able to suggest some workarounds.

Hi! I have a question.
I was wondering if there was an option in this software to have a general administrator that can manipulate all, but also other people from the same company or business that can login and just change some specific things (for example, just be able to edit the information of only one property).
Thanks!

Oh, very sorry... I just noticed that the field code list for Form Messages does not include booking field codes, only account and property level ones. We do actually have booking field codes for Form Messages working in **development**, but that was never released. So you would not (currently) be able to show the guest the adult/child numbers yet. You could, however, at least draw their attention to the fact that they need to check them. Like "MAKE SURE ADULT/CHILD COUNTS ARE RIGHT" which are available in the renter agreement. We will have that updated live in the near future so that booking field codes are inserted in Form Messages.

Go Settings > Form Messages > create. Then select page (of the quote acceptance) you want to work on. It will pre-fill the editor with the normal/default system message. From there, edit it and insert a message with the field codes you want to draw their attention to. Use bold/colors etc, to make them stand out. See here:

Thanks Michelle for a prompt reply. Where/how do i edit form header to warn renter to populate number of people vorrectly? Thanks!