General Help and Questions

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I am new to this vacation rental "Business" and not knowing if my property will rent more than once a month, or once a season or... at all. I believe that a fee PER RENTAL or transaction is preferable and will not scare potential customers (us the property owners) away.

Hi Greg,

Thanks for the feedback.

On number 2...

We do support multiple rate periods throughout the year. You can set as many as you want. Here's how...

Open your Properties (here's the direct link: https://app.ownerrez.com/properties) and click on the property you want to adjust. Click the Rates menu. Notice the "Rate Overrides" section underneath the Default Rates? You can add as many as you want.

Here's more about it in a blog post: https://www.ownerrez.com/blog/rate-overrides-for-seasons-or-specific-dates

On number 3...

It is not possible to support the HomeAwayConnect calendar system (the calendar that fuels all the HomeAway sites) because HomeAway does not allow 3rd party integration. They have a 'property manager' mode that allows some integration but a) it's very limited and b) it only updates the HomeAway.com website specifically, not the other HomeAway sites (VRBO, VacationRentals, GreatEscapes, etc).

We have spent a fair amount of time talking with their development team, and we foresee adding that integration in the near future. It is one our biggest goals because so many owners use that calendar.

You can find other software vendors that advertise "supports HomeAway calendar" but they do not actually support in the way you would want them too. I have only ever seen one vendor support it such that you can actually keep your listings up to date across all sites, but the method they use goes against the HomeAway official terms of service by emulating a user's account when logging in. Again, that is expressly forbidden by HomeAway.

I clicked into this because I am about to streamline my booking procedure anyway but it's not looking very promising right now.

1) There is no way I would ever pay $35 a month. I probably average 3-4 bookings a month, that is with 2 units (a duplex). In the high season, we have guests stay a month or more. In the off season we have at most 50% occupancy, either way that is not many bookings a month. $5 a booking might be possible if it saved me a bunch of time over my current method of using email and Word.

2)The underlying assumption of your default rates is that rates are constant throughout the year. This is not the case for us. I used to have 9 different rate periods, although I am now simplifying to 7. And each of these periods have different weekly rates, monthly rates, may not allow less than a month during certain rate periods, etc. I am not sure if this could ever be accouted for, but the software would have to be many times more complex.

3) But even disregarding all that, the real deal killer is the apparent necessity to maintain a seperate calendar. If you can't use the homeawayconnect (formerly rentalo) calendar, then the need to update and maintain an additional calendar makes it pointless. I can certainly understand why you couldn't use the homeawayconnect calendar but we dropped all of our rental websites except homeaway, vrbo and vacationrentals.com (all owned by homeaway now) in large part because now we only have to worry about the accuracy of one calendar.

It's a pity because the advantage would be that you could, in theory, type the guest name, period, and rate only once and generate all documents (we use three - holding reservation, rental agreement, and confirmation) error free,

Hi Skikirkwood,

Thanks for pointing this out. You're correct. I've requested that that be fixed in an upcoming hotfix due out later this week.

I can't imagine how we missed a typo of that size after all these months.

Thanks for the feedback,

Sam

Yep, I saw that too and thought the same thing some time back. It's not actually on the quotes page. It's on the "prerequisites" that show when you haven't set up your rates and such.

On this page:

https://app.ownerrez.com/quotes

I think you want "PayPal Pro", not "PayPay Pro"

Hi Freeman611,

There is no price right now. The service is entirely free while we work through the public beta phase.

The eventual price structure will be a flat rate per month or per booking. For instance:

1) $30-40 per month for 1-5 properties, tiering up after that per property.

2) $5 per booking with no monthly rate. So if you have 3 bookings this month, you'd be charged $15 at the end of the month.

Which of those two models do you like better? Or should owners be allowed to pick either model?

Thanks for joining,

Sam

Dose anyone knew how much for this software? I can not find any price on the website.

Thank you!