General Help and Questions

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Silvia, I go throught the VRBO review system. It is the same. Why they changed this, I don't know, but it is nowhere near what it used to be.

Claudia

Yes I agree with that as well - since they are not actually paying it, it should be OK for them to do this, I am doing this currently and they seem to be OK with it and would like not to have to refund the check or payment less work on my end.

Silvia

No, I don't like the format for the owners. It doesn't seem to help me in anything that I am doing. I have to always go back and click to see things that I actually need. Plus, filing the emails doesn't do anything - not worth it.

Here is the email we get....

A booking just came in for Claudia's Vacation Home - PA

Here are some of the details...

Guest Name:

Janet Pak



Arrival Date:

Fri Jul 20, 2012



Departure Date:

Sun Jul 22, 2012



Persons:

6 adults and 4 children



Total Amount:

$1,066.57



Reserved By:

Guest



Reserved Where:

Web Form





Get all of the details >>


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Here is the email the customer gets...


You have successfully reserved Claudia's Vacation Home - PA!



Booking Details


Booking #: 252208

Guest Name: Janet Pak


Arriving: 7/20/2012

Adults: 6



Departing: 7/22/2012

Children: 4



Property: Claudia's Vacation Home - PA

Pets: 0




Billing Details




The total charge for this booking is $1,066.57 of which $1,066.57 has been paid. A separate email is sent for each payment that is made, listing the details. Any payments made by credit card will appear on your bank statement as Claudia Vacation Home.

A security deposit of $400.00 is scheduled to be reserved on 7/16/2012.

A digitally-signed copy of the renter agreement will be emailed to you.



Property Location






Address:
448 Maple Court
Tannersville, PA 18372



Open this address in Google Maps | Yahoo Maps | Bing Maps | MapQuest




Congratulations, your dates are confirmed




A few weeks prior to arrival, a Welcome Packet with details on how to enter the townhouse and directions to the townhouse, along with other things you need to know, will be sent out via email.

An Arrival Letter will be sent, a week before your arrival, after the Guest Registration Form is received.


*** RENTERS MUST BE 25 OR ABOVE, unless accompanied by a parent. ***


If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

Thank you,

Claudia
201 750-1215




Pet Policy




Only dogs allowed.

Pets must have all their shots, tick and flea treatments up to date. Pets must be one year or above in age. Three days before arrival, pets must be treatment for flea/tick control. Barking dogs may have fine imposed.

Pets have extra fee. Pet Addendum is required for rentals to any dogs.


***** PET ADDENDUM (if dog is coming), on last page of Terms and Agreement, must be scanned or Faxed to (201) 215-0742, to complete the reservation. *****




Guest Registration



A Guest Registration Form will be sent out asking for every person ENTERING the townhouse, age (if under 25 yr old) and the license plate numbers of the cars coming. The security dept of the development is now requesting this for every rental. ALL GUESTS AND CARS MUST BE REGISTERED. Parking passes may be issued. Please have this information available. If this will be a problem, please let me know now.



House Parties and Age Restriction




* NO HOUSE PARTIES ALLOWED! ONLY TOTAL NUMBER OF PEOPLE SPECIFIED ON ORIGINAL INQUIRY SENT ALLOWED, unless approved beforehand. ** THIS INCLUDES VISITING GUESTS AND CHILDREN!

Any renter not abiding by above will be evicted, along with everyone in their group, as stated in rental agreement, along a $500 charge. A Guest Registration Form will need to be filled out with any guest entering the townhouse, age and license plate numbers, two week prior to arrival.


****** RENTERS MUST BE 25 OR ABOVE, unless accompanied by a parent. ******




PRINT RENTAL AGREEMENT




Please make sure to PRINT THE RENTAL AGREEMENT that was emailed to you, after you completed your booking. There is a lot of information that you will need for your arrival. Plus, things that you may end up being charged for if not completed during your stay.

If you have not received the email, please let me know and I will send it again.



Check-In & Check-Out




Check-In: 3:00 PM Check-Out: 11:00 AM

If you are interested in earlier checkin or later checkout, there will be an added charge of $25/hour, plus taxes. This is providing there is not a renter arriving or departing that same day. Arrangements must be made, at least, one day prior to arrival date or prior to departure time, so that payment can be made and the cleaning staff can be notified.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In my opinion, day and night. I also would have some of the details on my email, to know I let them know these details, when I might end up changing them later.

Since you already have this format for them, why couldn't we get the same email? CC our email.

Most of the starter emails I receive, at this time, I delete them. I have to copy and paste the other format so that I could file those emails. Very frustrating for me, right now. Seems like a lot of extra time is being put in. This is not even my busy season yet. It is going to begin in a few weeks. I am concerned about how I am going to do your software and mine old way.

You have a great product, but some things... there is too much going around the software that I am ending up doing two jobs for an inquiry/booking. It gets confusing.

The response letters is frustrating. I am constantly "clicking for details" to even be able to send it manually.

The reason I am frustrated, at this time, is that yesterday I have been away from my computer for a few hours. When I got back I had two bookings and an inquiry. It took me forever to sort through everything and clicking for details to see what happened. I got me thinking that soon I will have one big problem on my hand! When it get busy again, I will not be able to handle all the different clickings for details. I was a little overwhelmed.

Claudia

What about using the HomeAwayConnect guestbook? Someone here just mentioned that. I know that's not as preferable as the real rating system because you want to see the stars and "verified rating" attribute show up. But we might be able to use the guestbook side to insert the reviews that way.

-Michelle

Michelle,

Reviews are plummeting, my sister almost always got reviews from her customers and now she is lucky to get a few. I also used to get some reviews but now it is even harder to get a review through their new process. I am not sure if VRBO changed it's way yet so it may be able to go in that way but I am sure this will change too. I hope they lift the restrictions but no change yet with all the complaints they have gotten. Especially since the reviewer proceeds to write the review and at the end of everything they are asked to login. It has infuriated quite a few people - renter and owner alike.

Silvia

Claudia, can you be more specific about the fields you which the email showed? The payment and booking emails you get (as the owner) should have most of the information on it that the system has.

I know the email is worded "here are some of the details..." at the top, but in truth, most of those emails contain ALL the available fields for the item in question. There aren't any other details to show.

Or do you just not like that it's a different format?

-Michelle

Yes, that's been asked by others that are aware of our future plans. A lot of people want to maintain their own email processes. Email is something that everyone wants/needs different options for.

-Michelle

Hi Silvia,

At the moment, the only way to do that would be for you to manually take care of that BEFORE sending them the payment link. So while corresponding with the guest, you would email them your documents and make them fax them back. THEN send the the payment link from our system.

That would work well except that they would still see the Renter Agreement page during the payment process. We don't have a setting that would turn this off.

-Michelle

That actually sounds nice - fourth option. I am for that. :)

Claudia

The idea is on the dev roadmap, but it has not been designed or scheduled. There are a lot of unknowns surrounding this. As I'm sure you know, guests could be "not interested" for a lot of reasons or even have been interested but had dates change or had some other conflict.

-Michelle

We will be designing it so that you have multiple options with Damage Protection:

* Always reserve Security Deposit no matter what
* Only reserve Security Deposit if Damage Protection is NOT purchased
* Never reserve Security Deposit

It sounds like you'd actually like a fourth option which is to always reserve BUT reserve a smaller amount if Damage Protection is purchased.

-Michelle

Hi Silvia,

You may be right. I'm actually not aware that HomeAway makes reviewers have an account. If that's the case, then you're right that it wouldn't have a high likelihood of success. That being said, HomeAway is not the only site owners want reviews on. We see a lot of FlipKey and VacationHomeRentals listings as well. Both of those sites allow open reviews with email confirmation at most. And there are a good half a dozen other sites as well. If HomeAway makes reviewers have an account, my guess is that reviews will begin to plummet on their site and they'll lift the restriction at some point.

-Michelle

One thing I don't understand is why guests received different emails than we do. Can we receive the same format as they do? For example, when a guests books a reservation, we receive an email that states we have to go into the link to look at the details. Everything seems to be the owner clicking on a link to go to the website. Why? If we wanted to go to the website, we would do that. I am personally, always on the website, so I don't need this link to have me go there to look at the website.

What I need is an email that TELLS me the details on the website, so I can file it, with the details in there. The customer has that email. If I go to the BOOKED and then look at email sent, and then I click on EMAIL Preview for the customer, I have EVERYTHING I need there. Can we have that SAME email that is sent to the customer, sent to us...instead of clicking to see the details?

This happens a lot. Owners clicking to get into website to see details on what transpired. Extra steps to do this.

Thanks,
Claudia

Hi,

when you do have that working could you keep the option to continue to receive the email via your own and the new owner rez email? I tend keep my email open and not the websites so would probably see someone responded faster than waiting to log into owner rez.

thanks, Silvia

Hi Michelle,

I am still not comfortable with having them ONLY accept my T and c online, I have 6 places I want them to sign to be sure they understand my terms and conditions. I would like to interrupt the process and be able to send them a hard copy of the rental agreement - T and
C and then allow them to continue with the online payment once I receive this via fax or scan.

Is something like that possible? I know from my own experience I no longer read the T of S of many websites I join and I am sure this is the same thing. I have no problem putting it out there for future referance and even clicking it but I don't want it to continue to the payment screen until I have the documant in hand. Sometimes people tend to read written documents more than digital, also my rental agrement has different fonts and bold and underlines etc. Would your system be able to handle that? If not today, in the future?

I usually include the number of dogs allowed if any were agreed upon and have them sign that paragraph, so there are no misunderstandings. Same with the maximum number of occupants and that no house parties are to be held with the max allowed in the house including children. sure this may not prevent them from having a party but I did notice many not return my rental agreement and not book with me which is prefectly fine with me.

Thanks, Silvia

Hi Michelle,

I think my sister asked this question already but don;t remember the answer. Do you envision setting up follow up correspondence from Owner Rez in the future? I know for now we need to do it manually but just curious if it's on the drawing board for a future enhancement.

Thanks Silvia

I have a question regarding this topic, I also sell the same damage waiver insurance through the same listing site and though I no longer take as high a security deposit I do still take a 'good care deposit' to cover the things damage won't - such as extra cleaning fees, fines the development might charge and I need to pay since they didn't - though those would be more than $75 usually. I feel the renter still has a vested interest in making sure the rental is left clean and fine free to avoid having their deposit actually processed, I usually send them back the deposit within a week when they buy the insurance else it's 30 days. Is there a way to override your shutting off the security deposit feature or how would I do this?

Michelle that would be great but not sure how that would work for homeaway and vrbo since don't they require the guest to login/register to post the review? That has been our major problem since they have instituted the new review process. Many of our reviews are no longer being completed due to this requirement.

How are the renters going to verify that they wrote that review? Through your system or homeaway's.

Silvia

Hi psiho,

Thanks for the feedback! Your currency and reporting requests are already on the dev roadmap, though not yet scheduled. Your second request - the ability to specify NO second payment - is a new one. I've never heard that before, but I like it! I can definitely see how that would be useful, and I'm going to send that up the ladder.

Please do check back on us. We're working very hard to be the best software in the biz.

-Michelle

My first impression is that this is very promising. Features are very well chosen not to complicate things but still powerful enough to manage apartments. Comming from online softweare development myself I know how hard is to achieve that.

Anyway, here are my showstoppers:
1) Curryncy limited to $ - this must be very high on your list unless you target USA only and that would be a shame for such a small feature. Maybe not complete multilanguage featurelist, only curency label to change (don't know about payment gateways)

2) Second billing due - validation rules do not allow it to be se to 0. here in Croatia it is very common to take 30% advanced payment but remaining 70% is payed in cash on arrival!

3rd important feature I miss is notshow stopper but I need it badly:

3) Reporting - maybe basic reporting or at least full export of data so we can do it in excel. Sometimes I need it for some tax reports (visitors list) or I need it for management decissions (stats on bookings, accepted offers, etc.)

Anyway.. congrats on a very good start and wish you luck in your future business.

Great.

Claudia

No, but we're planning on doing it anyway. The idea is to ask the guest at the bottom of the review "Do you mind if we submit this review to TripAdvisor, HomeAway, etc on your behalf? We won't share any private details". If they say yes, we'll use the public review pages on those website to post our review. The guest will then get confirmation emails from those sites (TripAdvisor, HomeAway, etc) asking if they really posted the review which hopefully they'll confirm. That's the best we can do. We believe it should work well.

-Michelle

That would be great if we can have the link to our reveiw. Any luck with HomeAway or VRBO letting you enter it into their system, once received?

Claudia

We don't send them any survey ourselves at the moment. We include that text - "we MAY send you a survey" - because a lot of owners like to send a review request (from FlipKey, HomeAway, etc) to the guest after the fact. We like to alert the guest that it might be coming so when they get the review request email, they understand why they're getting it.

Here's a forum post about it last year:

https://www.ownerrez.com/forums/general-help/security-deposit-release-email

In addition, we are designing our own review system that will ask the guest to fill out a survey. Our goal is to ask the guest directly for the review, since they're used to seeing our emails, and then be able to update all the listing sites so the review is everywhere.

-Michelle

When you release the hold on the card, you state that a survey is sent. What does the survey say and where do I go to see the response?

Is this like the REVIEW? Where do we enter the link for a reveiw?

Claudia

*Very* strange observation. He's saying that when he clicked to go to the renter agreement page, it crashed. I don't see anything like that on my end. Well, we'll continue to monitor. ~Sam. PS. I looked in the servers logs and it appears that other guests have used Apple/Chrome with no problem.

Hi Sam,

Here was his response...

" On chrome when the finalize button was clicked it seemed to try and go to a new page that it couldn't find and thus showed the 404 error. On firefox when thr button was clicked it opened up a new section within the page that had the contract details. Seems like chrome wasn't able to understand that the click thru opened a new section within the existing window.

This was on a MacBook pro using the latest updates for both browsers.

Sent with Yoyodyne technology. "

Thanks,
Claudia

Sam, I will try to find out a little more information. He did say maybe it was something on his side. Since I don't understand some of these things, I figured I would just copy and paste his statement. I know one little word that is misplaced could make a difference, when it comes to these things.

Claudia

Claudia, as it happens, we have an Apple machine in the office w/ Chrome already loaded. I tested a public quote form from start to finish. Zero problems. It looks perfect and went all the way through smoothly. Please let me know if your guest forwards any screenshots or mentions anything specifically. It might be a problem on their end with an extension or plugin they have installed. ~Sam

On Windows, we test for Chrome, Firefox, IE8+ and Safari. On Apple, we test Safari and Firefox. Chrome on Apple should be (theoretically) identical in rendering behavior as Chrome on Windows. Did your guest provide any more information? I'd love to know what they meant by "doesn't see to work". Rendering issues? Buttons didn't work? ~Sam