General Help and Questions

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Yes, but I meant you could have guests send emails directly to your @inquiryspot email address if you wanted to.

So you could actually put:

"Please send inquiries to 12345@@inquiryspot.com"

on your website and have guests send their own emails to it.

But yes the form plugin thing isn't ready yet.

There are some owners that have their own website form send an email. Here are some examples:

http://cardigancabins.com/shenandoah-stars
http://www.massanuttensprings.com/contact-us.html
http://www.natapoclodge.com/leavenworth-vacation-rental-reservations/

In those examples, the owner has their own custom form that prepares an email and sends it to @inquiryspot.com. There are a number of services online that will help you easily create your own forms. I believe Wufoo (http://wufoo.com/tour) does that.

Hope this helps,

-Michelle

Michelle,

This is assuming you already have a form type inquiry request form already developed? I don't have anything like that so that's why I was requesting if there was any way to get the potential renter to fill out the inquiry form on your system and submit from there. If I understood correctly, you said it is on the Dev road map?

Thanks, Silvia

No form yet but this is a highly requested feature, and for good reason. It will be coming soon.

In the meantime, you can always send email inquiries from your website to the @inquiryspot.com email address provided for each of your properties. Any emails that are sent there will show up in the system, and you'll be able to turn the email into an inquiry with a little wizard screen we provide.

-Michelle

I have a website but have currently no way to have the renter communicate with me unless they send me an email to vacationpa@aol.com. Is there a way for them to fill out a form that owner rez would understand or better yet do you have a link so they can go and fill out a request for a quote?

Sorry if this was discussed before.

Thanks, Silvia

Sent a letter to Tim and he said to forward an email to him, which I will be receiving from them shortly, stating charges.

I will let you know the outcome.

Claudia

Hmm, no idea. Seems like a very odd little amount to be on there. Please email merchant-services@ownerreservations.com about that.

-Michelle

Hi Michelle,

I just got my first auto payment to sage and the fee does not seem to be a flat 2.95%. A total of $3344.57 went into the Sage Payment system. At the start of this month I was charge $101.79. I could have calculated wrong, but 2.95% of $3344.57 is $98.66.

Or have I done the calculations incorrectly? I did 3344.57 x .0295 = 98.66. If this is correct, where is the extra charge for $3.13 coming from? Is there an extra fee somewhere?

Thanks,
Claudia

You're correct. Currently, second payments for non-credit card bookings (check, cash) are not displayed. If you recall, we just recently added check payments to the process. Before that, everything was credit card across the board. This is very high on our To Do list though.

-Michelle

Hi Claudia,

I'm sorry to hear that you're still having problems. We have many users with HomeAway listings and you're the only one I've heard report this.

The only thing I can suggest at this point is:

a) Email me your HA login credentials offline, and I'll try logging into your account and seeing if I can spot what's wrong. If you do this, change your password to something else before sending me your credentials and then change it back after.

b) Contact HomeAway support and ask them why that is happening. Their support dept. is usually pretty good though you may not hear anything for a day or two.

-Michelle

I just received another inquiry from HA, however, when I went to verify it was for the wrong property. I went back into HA and found out that it had the wrong email address for that property under CONTACTS. I then changed that and looked to see if the other property had the incorrect OWNERREZ email address. It had the one I just entered for the other property.

It seems when I change the CONTACT info for the property in SC, I also change it to be the same for the property in PA. Thus, I just changed it completely and entered my primary email address and will deal with it later.

Why can't I enter the OwnerRez email for the SC property and then enter the OwnerRez email for the PA, to be different? Do you know?

Claudia

Hi Michelle,

You have the charge that gets charged, whenever however many days we decide, for the balance due. Does an email go out for the balance due, via check?

When I go back to look at where it might say the due date I can't seem to find it. Usually, don't you have all the information on when it was paid and when the payments are due? Nowhere on the guests info do I see when the balance is due. I had to go into the archives and look at my rental agreement. Am I missing something?

Claudia

OK. I will add them to my address book and hope that it will stop going in the Spam Folder.

Claudia

I'm sorry to hear that our alerts are landing in your spam folder. We've done a lot of work to make sure our emails don't do that, but unfortunately the email service providers (Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, etc) have their own policies.

Usually, you can configure your email settings to "white-list" certain email addresses.

In Gmail, any email address in your Contacts automatically is white-listed.

Also in Gmail, you can create a filter for messages that come from a certain email address to "never send to spam".

In AOL, you can white-list an email address by adding it to your AOL address book.

In Yahoo, you have set up a filter.

The email addresses you want to white-list are:

alerts@ownerreservations.com
bookings@ownerreservations.com
quotes@ownerreservations.com
inquiries@ownerreservations.com

-Michelle

How can I stop OwnerRez emails going into my Spam Folder? I have it on medium for control. When I set it to Low, it still goes into Spam.

Claudia

No idea, but if you email me your HomeAway login credentials offline, I'll login and look at it for you. That's the best I can do.

For other listing sites that don't allow two emails, you can set up a forward (in Gmail for instance) to send a copy of all inquiry email to OwnerRez. If you do that, make sure the filter only looks for inquiry email from the listing site. Do not forward all email or you'll be inundated with "unrecognized email" alerts from our system.

-Michelle

Hi Michelle,

I finally got an inquiry from HomeAway and it still only came in via OwnerRez. I did not get the original inquiry sent to me via HomeAway. What am I doing wrong?

Also, Vacation Rentals doesn't seem to allow two emails. Do you if this is incorrect?n I only get it via OwnerRez.

Claudia

Well, we could always put that in our email template, without having it as a separate link, I guess.

Claudia

Yes, that is high on the list as well. Not only pictures, but a link back to the listing site.

-Michelle

OK.

Also, can you add the capability to add pictures in the body of the email sent to the guest, whether it is the initial response letter or, moving forward, followup letters. Guest do forget which inquiry property we are are each referring to. I also like to add a few pictures, throughout my email reiterating what I am speaking of.

Claudia

Hi Pawel,

There's a monthly fee of $30, an annual PCI fee of $25, a per transaction fee of $.30 (I believe) and then a bunch of other fees for things like business cards, debit cards, international charges, "rate 2" and "rate 3", etc. MasterCard and Visa "brand usage" is in there too.

It was actually quite astounding to me to see how many interchange fees there are for "normal" merchant accounts.

The only OwnerRez customers that like the 2.25% deal are the ones that do more than $20k per month in processing. It's worth it at that point since the volume is higher.

-Michelle

Yes, the previously-booked people, that you had to enter manually, are a different story. You have to get their credit card info (by phone or email offline) and then use it to schedule the second payment and security deposit.

I was talking about new bookings, moving forward.

-Michelle

Hi Michelle,

When I go in there and go to "Add Contact", I already have another contact with my personal email address. I just hit SAVE and we will see if both OwnerRez gets it and my personal email. However, it was there already and I was not getting the inquiry in my personal email.

I will let you know if it makes a difference that I hit SAVE under the old contact with my personal email.

As for the quote, I quess I was thinking about the previously booked one, before I came on to OwnerRez. Those are entered manually, but they would have to give me their credit card info for me to enter it into the OwnerRez system. They are not done automatically. Correct?

Claudia

Hi Michelle,

Can you tell me what the fees related to the 2.25% rate deal are?

Thanks, Pawel

A number of things are incorrect about what you just said...

First, you CAN tell HomeAway to send inquiries to more than one email address. Go into your listing on HomeAway, click the Contacts tab and use the dropdown to select "Add New Contact". Then put in your email address. They'll send the inquiries to you and OwnerRez both.

Second, you don't have to have inquiries come into the system in order to create quotes. You can create quotes manually at any time. Hover over the Quotes menu in OwnerRez and click Create New Quote. Then, you can send that quote to the guest, either by sending them the payment form link in your own email or using the quote email form, so they can accept/finalize their booking.

Does that make sense?

-Michelle

Hi Michelle,

Thank you for the update. Can I ask you to include downloads of any pictures we want to include in the body of our email?

I do try to do what you suggested. It is very hard, in some case. For example, when an email comes from HomeAway, since HA only allows you one email address, it doesn't come to my normal email, so that I could answer it from there. I have to go into OwnerRez and try to get the email, then I have to work around trying to send them the quote or not available email. I could take the email out of the HA but then if they do book, then they can't send the payment via OwnerRez. And the scheduled payments won't take place because I entered it manually. Or, am I missing something? I am trying to have it go through the OwnerRez and keep the automatic payment system do it's job. As far as I understand, that can't happen if I create the quote/inquiry myself. Thus, it has to come in through OwnerRez. At least, for now. If I was able to do that, then I can manage it the way you suggest and just have it go through my main email address and then create it myself...for now.

Claudia

Hi Claudia,

As with all updates, we are tackling small items first and then expanding. This approach allows us to evaluate what we're doing right or wrong quickly without spending 6 months to a year working on a massive feature that may not be needed.

First, we'll be working on small email changes under the covers. We're going to be storing email so that you can see what's been sent. We'll also be adding a simple set of mail merge fields, or "tags" as you call them, so the standard message bodies that are there now can be saved with something different. After that, we'll be setting up a template structure so that you can craft multiple bodies for each type of email form. After that, we'll be expanding to HTML messages (or "rich text") so that you can have your own font and colors and such.

Of course, this could change as we move through the process based on the success or failure of the updates.

You may want to use OwnerRez in parallel with your own email program. In other words, respond to inquiries as you normally would, inside your own Gmail or Hotmail email program, and then use OwnerRez to generate quotes and accept payments. So you talk to the guest and get them to the point where they want to book. At that point, create a manual quote in OwnerRez and send them the link (either copy/paste the payment link into your email or use the quote email form at that point). We have a number of users that do this because they want to maintain their own email style.

-Michelle

"After that, THE VERY NEXT sprint is all email related. Major major email changes coming.

- Michelle"

Hi Michelle,

Can you give me some examples of the changes in email you are working on? I am really struggling here with the way it is now.

Also, I know you can't give me a date, but can you give me a ballpark as to the date you would LIKE to implement the above sprint?

Thanks,
Claudia

I agree with everything David just said. You guys are great!

Claudia

Thanks for the (as always) super quick response. In the interim I will take it out of the contract as it is causing confusion (which I already did). Please let me know when the display issue is fixed.

I am always amazed at the super fast responses to issues and how the product continues to develop and make owning a vacation rental easier!

Keep up the awesome work!

David

Dave, I was going to come back with this. I thought that might be what you were looking at. That's a display issue with the quote - which we've flagged to fix ASAP - but the actual final PDF that's being generated has the right dates in it. So if you were to go ahead and finish accepting that quote, turning it into a booking, you'd see that the final PDF has the right dates in it. Thanks for bringing this to our attention. ~Sam