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Last night there were multiple emails sent out on scheduled emails I had disabled (but in the past they hadn't sent out). Maybe a quick phone call to talk this through?

What is your #? Maybe I can call you to work.

Damon

Couple of questions...

Are you talking about disabling SCHEDULED templates? Or the REGULAR email templates?

I'm a bit confused on which you don't want sent.

When you disable SCHEDULED templates, they are not sent for any future-created bookings and you have the option of removing them from any already-created bookings. So disabling SCHEDULED templates definitely makes sure that nothing is sent.

I love your system...it really enables us to run a professional business so you are welcome.

I'm really looking for a way to experiment with templates but no always send them out, and also use as a marketing tool. It is really close. I am concerned about the disable option as when I disable I don't want the particular email to be sent and I don't want to delete the template. Make sense?

Hi Ed & Alyce,

I will discuss this with the dev team and see where we are on this. Can you tell me how many rate periods you have throughout the year? It sounds like you have quite a few?

-Michelle

Hi Damon,

First, thank you for all your continued questions and feedback. We really learn a lot by users like you. You might be surprised how often we reference users by name, and their various questions, in our company meetings.

When you disable the email template, that makes the system not create new scheduled emails based on that template in the future. It does not stop the current ones from going out UNLESS you select the "remove from current bookings" option that shows during confirmation. If you don't select that, all the existing scheduled emails based on that template will still go out.

Disabling the template basically means that the system will do what it normally does in that scenario. So if it's a scheduled template, nothing new will be created. If it's a regular template, the system will use the default system message.

There are a lot more options and rules coming to this area of the system. We're planning on refactoring quite a bit of this to be event driven. So at X Event in the system (booking create, booking paid in full, etc), you can define a number of settings: send system default, send x template, send nothing. Likewise with scheduled ones. Also new types of alerts like SMS.

You can certainly create a scheduled email template that sends emails 21 days after departure. However, when you newly create the template, it will only create scheduled emails for FUTURE bookings and skip over any ones that are past. The reason we've restricted this is because you don't want hundreds (or even thousands) of old bookings getting slammed with a newly created template that you didn't intend for everyone in the past to get.

It sounds like you're looking for a marketing tool to send newsletter type content out. I don't think any of our scheduled sending stuff fits that bill at the moment. I suppose if we allowed you to take a template and do a one-time in-place send to all bookings (or a filtered list of them), that would meet your need. Something to think about.

Hope this helps,

-Michelle

I just noticed that I have a few emails disabled yet they show they will deliver when I go into individual bookings (I'd expect them to show "disabled").

Also, I want to send a follow-up email to everyone 21 days after their stay thanking them for their visit and reminding them of upcoming events in the town where my VR is located. I just came up with this idea and wanted to apply it to all historical bookings. Any simple way to do this besides manually setting it up?

Damon

Good evening. Have not fully transitioned to OR as yet due to the below issue. For me to manually recalculate e erythema there is a change in rates for a specific time period would be too much work. I've seen a lot of upgrades over the past few months, so I'm curious if this issue has been addressed and resolved.

Thanks

Makes sense. Thanks for the clarification

Hi Damon,

This is something we've debated in the past and decided not to support (at least for the time being).

The problem is that we (OwnerRez) can create liability issues for ourselves because we released the hold before the owner had a chance to inspect the property and make a decision. Even if 9 times out of 10, the release is fine, that one time when the owner needed to keep some of the money but we auto-released it too fast, we'd put ourselves in hot water.

In the future, it's possible that we could create a system of rules so that some are auto-released and some aren't. For instance, you could set a rule so that any booking with a group size of 2 or less is auto-released 3 days after departure, but bigger groups require manual. Something like that.

Hope this helps,

-Michelle

Is it possible to release the security deposit? Manually releasing becomes quite cumbersome.

Damon

Glad it worked! One caution - be careful to use as small/compressed images as possible that you're inserting into your templates. If you put big massive high rez images on Imgur and then link to those, every single email will take awhile to load for your guests. A lot of times, you can shrink the **file size** (not the viewable size) of the image by using different compression programs.

That worked great. Thanks for the tip, it got me started!

What's kinda cool is once you embed one picture you can then use the WYSIWG editor to move them around, etc. so you don't need to be an expert in HTML to do this!

Damon

@Diarmuid: You'd have to have some kind of shared login to the same account for all your clients to share, which I'm sure would be out of the question for you. We've designed "shared account" ideas in the past but they never finished development due to higher-priority items. Do you have more clients asking you to do their own bookings, or more that send them to you for processing? ~Sam

Hi Michelle,

I have another twist to this I would like to ask you about.

Most of our property owners like to do their own bookings. This means that I would be entering the bookings they send me to help me with my scheduling and keeping track of cleaning costs and commission.

Then some clients ask me to do all the bookings also.

How would this work within your system?

Thanks,

Diarmuid

Perfect. I will try this!

I've been slow in responding to Claudia about this one (sorry, Claudia!) but I am getting around to it eventually.

Here are some quick steps for those of you that want to attempt it on your own:

1) Take whatever image you want to use and upload to a image hosting service. Basically, that means a web service or website that will upload your original image file and give you a public URL where it can be seen. imgur.com is probably the best. It's free, featureful and easy to use.

2) As an example, here's an image of an old cabin that I just uploaded to imgur.com:

https://i.imgur.com/6fj1jnl.jpg

After upload, they give you some tools that will show you the URL to use. You want to use the "direct link" option so that the URL goes directly to the image and not an intermediary page.

3) Now that you have your image publicly hosted, you'll want to use that in your OwnerRez emails. Here is a sample chunk of HTML that you can insert into your emails:

<img src="https://i.imgur.com/6fj1jnl.jpg" style="width:250px;" />

The 'src' attribute is where you put your image URL. Put the image URL inside the quotes exactly as you see above.

4) Use the 'style' attribute to change the image in other ways such as varying the width, height or border. For instance, here I'm adding a 5 pixel red border around the image:

<img src="https://i.imgur.com/6fj1jnl.jpg" style="width:250px;border:solid 5px red;" />

You can see how the above HTML looks by going to this URL in your browser:

http://fiddle.jshell.net/Fn5tV/show

JSFiddle is a great online tool you can use to play with HTML and see how it looks. Go to http://jsfiddle.net and put your HTML in the appropriate frame, then click the Run button to see how it looks.

5) After you have configured the HTML to look exactly as you want, copy that into your OwnerRez email template using the HTML editor button. Do NOT copy it directly into the message body. You must click the 'HTML' button on the editor toolbar and insert it there. You will have to determine where in the existing HTML is the correct place to put it. Make sure that your new image HTML does not break existing HTML that is already there. If you don't understand where to put it, to get your image to show up in the correct spot, feel free to ask us for help.

Hi Diarmuid,

I just sent you the Excel file, with some instructions, in an email. Let me know if you have any questions about that.

Yes, those bookings will be free. Additionally, anything you enter within the trial period (30 days from sign up) is free.

At the moment, we only support the PayPal gateways. They are called PayPal Payments Pro and PayPal PayFlow. We don't support regular PayPal where the user is taken to PayPal's website to enter/select their payment information. We do plan on supporting that in the near future.

The "$" notation is hard-coded throughout the system. Unfortunately, there is no way to disable or hide that. I will let you know what we decide here as this develops further.

-Michelle

Hi Michelle,

Thank you for the reply.

The excel sheet is a good idea. I take it that I can copy and paste my sheet to it and then import it so it would save me a lot of back and forth entering. Please send it to me.

I read in another thread that you don't charge for existing bookings, is that correct?

We already use paypal to receive payments and also bank transfers. Only these two options. As we are living in Switzerland and working within Chf we only take payments in Chf. However we have guests from all over the world so they need the ability to convert.

Even if we could leave the $ sign out of the correspondence and we could mention Chf ourselves in normal script somewhere, then that could work.... Maybe?

So yes to paypal.

thanks

Diarmuid

Hi Beyulapartments,

Yes, it's unfortunate and something we'd like to change. In the other topic, I asked you a few questions about your currency. It would be wonderful if you could let me know those things so we can plan accordingly.

-Michelle

Hi Beyulapartments,

At the moment, we don't have any way of importing rates and old bookings from HomeAway. You'd need to manually enter them into your system. We do offer an Excel import for new customers. If you're interested, I'll send you the Excel template to you (this is for importing bookings).

At the moment, we only support USD currency. We've discussed (many many times) adding non-USD currencies, but there are several obstacles that we have to overcome to make that work seamlessly.

Could you tell me what all you'd like supported with CHF? Some questions...

Are you looking to support multiple/mixed currencies for your guests, or just CHF for everyone?

Do you have a payment gateway (for credit card payments) that you work with already that supports CHF?

PayPal supports CHF. Are you fine using that if we required it in order to support CHF?

-Michelle

I'd like to learn how to do this through HTML. Since we have a 4-plex, I'd like to have each quote show specific pictures of the property, and now that you have custom fields, this is very easy to do in the quote!

Can you send me a small snippet of HTML code I could use with a few random pictures and a description of where I'd store my pictures so I could just replace your pictures with mine?

Thanks!

Hi,

When setting up a new property is it possible to import the info of rates and availability from pre-existing homeaway advert?

Secondly we only work in Swiss francs, CHF, is there any sign of this being supported soon?

Thanks,

d.

That is a real shame. Your product looks good but zero flexibility for currencies kills it.

That would be perfect!

By the way, if it helps, we have been working on an "auto responder" feature for awhile that is very high on the release schedule. Auto Responders will basically answer your inquiries for you, with a generated quote, in the event that an inquiry meets certain rules. Don't know if that's what you're referring to.

-Michelle

Hi Damon,

Can you be more specific about this? I don't believe we've ever had this request before. You're saying when YOU (the owner) are away for a few days and you have no back-up answering emails or phone calls, you want the system to have a general/high level "Away" mode?

-Michelle

Hi Damon,

Currently, we do not have field codes for those items. However, I know that those and others are on the list to add. I believe there were some issues with how to represent them in the event security deposits were turned off.

-Michelle

I am setting up an automated email and wanted to include the security deposit amount, date of hold, and date of release as fields, but couldn't find them. Please advise.

Damon

Any way to set an out of office message from the system to auto respond while we are on vacation?

Damon

Here-to-fore, the OwnerRez calendar, in printed form, wasn't suitable as a "quick availability" desk side reference tool. Now the "bars" have distinctive color bars with appropriate schedule "move in/move out" breaks that now show all bookings on a single monthly printout. You can carry this around with you for those telephone availability inquires you get when you're "out & about"!

We'll get clear of Homeaway yet!