Price comparison widget

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Either as a standalone or as part of the quote widget, I think it would be great for owners to be able to show how much guests are saving by using our websites to book. If the quote widget could pull rates from AirBnB, VRBO, etc and display them next to our rate that would be awesome. I don't know how hard it would be if we provided our matching VRBO property # for you guys to pull that rate info. I've seen other sites do it so it must be possible, just outside my level of expertise.

This is a FANTASTIC idea!!!

The Book Now/Inquiry widget already shows a quote in real time, so this would be basically be some kind of dynamic discount showing like:

"Money saved by booking direct: $35.18"

Which would be based on the average 3-5% guest service fee? Or a general % you provide?

It is a good idea.

Well, there are a couple of ways to do it as I see it... one would be more dynamic and involve "scraping" or "pulling" an actual quote from AirBnB or VRBO. Not sure how that would work from your end but I have seen other sites do it. Presumably we would have to enter our VRBO and AirBnB listing #'s in our owner accounts and then using that number you could generate a quote from those sites using the dates/guests provided? Again, not sure how that would work on the back end.

Trying to use a set % or fee amount and just tack that on can be tough.
AirBnB currently seems to hit my guests with 12.9% in fees plus I mark my rates up 3% to cover CC fees. So that could work
BUT... VRBO tends to have no rhyme or reason to their fees so that makes it a little harder outside of my peak season when guests always hit their $499 max fee.

Here's one site that is doing it...You can see as the page loads that they are dynamically getting the prices on the fly.
https://www.hawaiichee.com/listings/10600?check_in=2019-03-23&check_out=2019-03-30&adults=2&children=2
https://help.hawaiichee.com/general/how-does-best-price-work

vrbo has dynamic fee so basically the fee can change at any time

I just generated a quote through OR for Spring Break after a request through FB. I created the quote both in OR and VRBO so I could provide the savings in the email to the potential guest. (And peace of mind that I had my rates the same in OR as VRBO.) It confirmed the day rates being the same and I was able to confirm for these guests that they would save over $300 by booking direct. They booked within 30 min of getting the quote.

This is such a good idea and seems like something ORez could easily build, especially for customers using the channel management option since Orez is already pulling pricing info from ABB & VRBO. Could also be done by calculating the service fees charged by those two sites since they're algorithms anyway. If limited to owners using the rate push feature there would be no scraping required as well.

Does Orez monitor these forums?

7BlackDuck - the OR team is super responsive, but this forum isn't exactly the correct place for feature requests. They have a separate forum for that. Of course, sometimes good ideas come up in this forum, so it's not a rule or anything, just pointing out that the feature request forum exists and putting specific ideas like this one makes it easier for them to not overlook anything.

That said, the OR team, just like any software team, has a backlog of probably 1,000 great ideas that they are constantly evaluating before they start on making any updates. Just because an idea is a good one doesn't mean it will get worked on anytime soon.

For sure they monitor these forums - in fact I've gotten emails from Chris yesterday and today about a possible bug I reported yesterday (a weekend) and they made a release of a new code version yesterday (Saturday). So you can be confident they are seeing anything that gets posted!

Yes, that'd be a "Competitive Price Analyzer" widget. We've got that on the To-Do list. Don't have an ETA for it though, sorry!

A similar feature has been requested recently:

https://www.ownerrez.com/forums/requests/rate-check-feature-direct-booking-cost-comparison

I think it would be very useful to see the comparison of rates on various sites, so that guests have an assurance that they are getting the best rates and we can also use to ensure that our direct website rates are rightly priced.

It's almost 4 years since this feature was requested. Any ETA on when this could be made available.

[Another topic was closed as a duplicate of this topic (https://www.ownerrez.com/forums/requests/rate-check-feature-direct-booking-cost-comparison)]

Respectfully, as you note, it has been 4 years since this was requested, and in all that time it only got 8 upvotes.  So it wouldn't be viewed as a high priority I'm afraid.

Hi Ken,You make a fair point, thanks.  I agree this isn't top priority, just nice to have.

hichee.com provides comparison

I am hoping to setup directbookingtools on my site I'm also seriously looking at purchasing directbookingtools which will show how much cheaper it is to book direct. This should encourage people to stay on my website instead of looking at what Airbnb has. This year so far we had 75% direct bookings in July/Aug57% direct bookings overallBut I want to ensure they stay on my site and I think this will definitely help.

But they just responded saying:OwnerRez availability/price quote widget on your website is an external script that OwnerRez provides and it is placed inside of an iFrame on the property pages, so the dates and total price quotes that a website visitor is seeing on those property pages, are hidden from any third party scripts - thus the inability at this moment for us to be able to grab that information with our script and utilize this info to grab the corresponding total quotes from the OTAs.
We are planning to re-open our dialog with OwnerRez in the near future to see if they would be willing to make some minor additions to their code so we can actually synergize our efforts to help companies like yours using OwnerRez websites/widgets to increase their direct bookings. Julianne will surely reach out to you once this happens.

Ideally it would be nice if OwnerRez could do this in a widget but in the time being Can we please please please at least get these "minor additions to their code"  that way myself and others could use a service like directbookingtools. It would make a huge difference for those "price shoppers" especially since many of us operate in countries in the beginnings of a recession, and where there is lots and lots of choice on Airbnb. If they've hit my website, I want them to stay on my website and book now. 

I received the same response from the Direct Booking Tools team. Here are some screenshots of how valuable this can be for guests wondering if they're getting the best deal. I found these recently and thought it would be a powerful comparison tool to show guests the cost savings associated with booking directly on our websites.

Hey Chandler reach out to DirectBookingRequests they are working on a solution.

We have to have a meeting with them to discuss. This will take a little time to implement if the meeting goes well. We will put you on our “first contact” list when this gets resolved! We appreciate your excitement, support and patience.

And OwnerRez has been helpful YEYY

Hi,

I wanted to jump in on this discussion to just mention that OwnerRez does also have an Open API. This means that third party apps are free to build an integration at any time they can check pricing (potentially even store the prices on their side), and then use that to create a clean comparison widget against Airbnb/Vrbo.

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/api-overview

This would be typically be up to the apps discretion of course. In any case thanks for the wonderful ideas everyone!

~Caleb

[Another topic was closed as a duplicate of this topic (Display Airbnb, VRBO prices vs my Direct Booking Price)]

Booking direct tools tested their API connection and can't get it to work with their software currently. Does anyone know of something similar?