General Help and Questions

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Ah, got it. That makes sense. Is there a way for people to check availability without interacting with us? Is that what the widget does that integrates with an existing site?

Hi Renee,

We have many users who don't have websites. Our system helps you receive inquiries (from all the major listing sites) and quickly create quotes and respond. You don't need any website to do those things.

However, we do not (yet) offer the ability for people to book directly without any interaction from you. We've discussed this feature many times - we feel that the vast majority of traffic comes from inquiries so there's a much stronger need to handle the inquiry/email traffic first.

Hope this helps,

-Michelle

Is it possible to use this software as a standalone reservation system, or does it need to be integrated with a website?

In the features > integration section, I read "we want to provide a basic 'start from' page for every owner to give their guests in the event they don't have a website." Does this mean there's a URL to direct people to check out availability and book time? I was only able to find the feature to generate javascript embed code.

Thanks!

Hi Damon,

At the moment, no, but that's a great feature suggestion.

-Michelle

Is there a way to cc or bcc other email addresses in the email templates?

Damon

Yes, those are both good ways of sharing information, but they're "read only" shares. I thought you were referring to ways that an assistant could login and create/send quotes and do things inside the application. I'm glad you were able to use the alerts and google sync to help out. We have a lot more plans for both of those things.

I'm surprised you didn't mention google calendar integration or third party notifications. Both do a great job.

Hi Damon,

At the moment, we don't support partial or shared access. You would need to use a shared login that you both can use to access the same account. Some users use an email address such as bookings@ or info@ to login and then share that with their assistants.

There are some people here who have been thinking about setting up that sort of service as a part of OwnerRez - a phone/email assistant who will take care of your inquiries for you. When one comes in, they'll email back and respond with a phone call as well. The thought was that it would be priced per inquiry. Something like $5 per answered inquiry (phone and email together makes up the response as well as the back and forth) and then another $5 if the inquiry turns into a booking. Their responses and the inquiries would be logged in OwnerRez of course, and they'd answer on behalf of you as your guest manager with a phone number that you select.

-Michelle

I'm getting ready to hire a virtual assistant from www.getfriday.com. I want to let them view my calendar and other details.

How do I give them partial access to the system?

Damon

Yes, or any other kind of personal tool or utility that you may want to integrate. Basically, some third party person's 'code' can talk to our 'code' using the internet.

Ok, thanks. This is if you have your own personal website, correct?

Claudia

Hi Claudia,

OData is a API standard that is used to allow applications to login to each other in a secure way and share information. By creating an API, your website can communicate with OwnerRez under the covers so that you have a lot more flexibility with how you use OwnerRez. This is something a software developer would have to work with you to do. It's a longterm goal that we're working towards.

What is this?

Claudia

No specific date yet, but I will make sure to let you know asap.


Thanks,

Devin

That would be great!!! Any idea when it might be available?

Great suggestion! We do have an API we're working on releasing, but it's not ready for primetime.

Would you like an alert him we're ready for beta testers"?

Our dev team is working on rapidly releasing some useful features very shortly.


Thanks,

Devin

We have been busy working on releasing the overhaul to the settings section and we're very close to releasing it -- it should be out in a week or two. Once we get that out, we'll go through a couple of rapid releases to complete the smaller issues that have been backing up, like the security deposit email customizations.

Thanks,

Devin

Do you provide an OData URL/api? I want to connect directly to my data!

Damon

Have there been any updates to this? I would like to include the Flip key, Homeaway or vrbo review link to my property in the security deposit release email. That would solve all of these issues wouldn't it? The client would just see the link in the email, click on it and go directly to the review page to leave their review.

Hi Claudia,

No our system does not automatically recognize this. We will go ahead and refund that amount for you.

In the future if it happens again just send an e-mail to help@ownerreservations.com and let us know the issue.

Thanks,

-Devin

Hi,

I paid for the check acceptance ($5). Now, they are paying via Credit Card, since their check bounced. Does your system recognize that there was a change in payment method and refund the money automatically?

Thanks,
Claudia

Hi,
Thank you--good info. So if I want to accept PayPal payments directly, I would have to process these manually for my rentals...but if we accept normal credit cards I don't know how much of an issue this will be.

Hi Jon,

We work with two payment providers -- Sage Payments and Securenet. We prefer our customers use Securenet as that's a better deal for them, but it requires at least a three month transaction history on a different account to underwrite it, so its not suited for new users.

There are two varieties of PayPal -- the PayPal account people set up at paypal.com and pay through, and a standard merchant account that only supports credit cards (called PayPal PayFlow Pro).

Currently, we only support the PayFlow Pro merchant account, not the normal paypal.com account. We'll be adding paypal.com support eventually, but we haven't scheduled it for development yet.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Devin

If we choose to open a merchant account through OwnerReservations I don't see who the back-end account is actually created through... can you provide the name of the provider?

If we choose to open a merchant account through your provider, but we also want to offer PayPal payments, do we just pay for booking fees done through PayPal vs. your provider?

You are absolutely correct Chris forgot about that setting in Google Calendar. That'll fix the problem for us with sync'ing with our Google Calendar for our web site.

The calendar details are populated by OwnerRez so you have full control over what you want to do, but you can manage who sees the detail through the sharing settings in Google Calendar.

If you go into the calendar settings in Google Calendar, you'll see a sharing settings section. There, you'll want to check the "Make this calendar public" box (so everybody can see the dates), but also select "See only free/busy (hide details)" so the booking details don't come up.

If you set it up that way, people will only see "Busy" for the bookings, not the details.

Make sure to log out of your Google account before checking whether the details show up -- if you're logged in, Google will see that you have permissions and show everything rather than using the public permissions.

Thanks Chris - and yep agreed... so the other way I can potentially do this is to setup a google calendar sync, then just embed the google calendar on my site.

However, I tried this last night, and OwnerReservations seems to populate all calendar entries with booking # and the name of the renter, which I do NOT want on a public calendar...this seems to be more for the owner/manager to sync up.

So another way to do is is to just link to the property and not deal with embedding anything.

Hi - Thanks for the quick reply.

What you could do in terms of the rates, is set priorities for the rate tables so that some can override others. In our case, I would want the individually set dates to override anything else which might be setup, because they are unique/special dates.

I guess the other way to do this is to setup the rate table to exclude these special dates (creating > 1 rate tables for the "normal" parts of the year).

But since everything can be manually overridden, there are workarounds.

And yep I believe the issue with HTML is related to security or restrictions around what javascript libraries can be used in an HTML box.

2+36 - 84: failed to load external url widget.js

"https://app.ownerrez.com/widget.js"

Chris here, one of the programmers on the OwnerRez team.

I had a look at the Google Sites documentation, and it appears that they don't support the common features we use to make the calendar widget embeddable. According to https://support.google.com/sites/answer/90540?hl=en:

"Google Sites does not allow the use of JavaScript, iFrames or CSS tags"

Those unsupported technologies are all foundational web features that we use in the calendar.

The HTML Box Michelle refers to looks to be Google's way of trying to work around their limitations, but it still doesn't seem to support enough functionality to be able to embed the calendar.

Hi Jon,

What you saw was a result of the booking occurring across two different rate periods. At the moment, the rate engine calculates rent line items based on the first rate period the booking occurs within.

It's been a dilemma whether we should break that up or not. There are advantages and disadvantages to breaking up rate period charges. For instance, a lot of owners have weekly rates so the guest is supposed to get a discount for 7 days. However, if the booking fell across two different rate periods, the charges would cut up the booking into two different groups of nights and no discount for 7 days would occur. Which method is more correct? It depends on the owner and how they feel.

I assume you've followed the normal embed HTML instructions that Google Sites mentions here:

http://support.google.com/sites/answer/2500646?hl=en

If you've done that, and it's still failing, it may be getting blocked. For instance, Google Sites may be blocking our code do to security issues. I will check with a developer and see what we can find.