Feature Requests

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Now we're talking! You should have led with that first!

(Kidding!)

Yep make sense. You need to have a training class for others, BlueMtn. 😉

OTA full integrations come first

I consider that an update - although without a date. ;) Thanks for the reply and hopefully the OTAs will stop messing with things long enough to move forward in other areas.

Ps - If you enable this I will send you a coupon for a huge discount! Let me know when it happens......

I do not need link for VRBO reviews in this particular template. They get the link to post a review on VRBO from VRBO automatically.
Also, the goal of this template is to emphasize booking direct with me next time so that they don't have to pay VRBO fees.

That's probably because VRBO/HA no longer allows non-verified guests to write reviews. They recently closed that off like AIr does. So linking to the reviews page on your VRBO/HA listing will no longer work unless the guest has a verified booking on VRBO.

No updates yet - sorry about that! 😥

We keep having to back-burner stuff like that because of important features that pop up. We just finished a large HomeAway API update for instance which slowed down a bunch of other things. And now we just signed with Airbnb so that will be coming too in the near future, also slowing down some things. There are certain features that we are forced to drop everything and work on based on time tables, industry partners, etc. Rest assured, though, that we are working on a bunch of other things. We just expanded our Door Lock integrations and have more coming out soon. We are also overhauling our email templates and system messages and will have that out soon.

Your template does not have a line for vrbo/ha reviews

Any progress on Coupon Codes? I am grateful for OwnerRez and the response to questions is superb.

The only thing I find lacking of serious import is the ability to offer coupons for marketing purposes. Would love an update on if this is something we can realistically expect and if so when.

You don't use vrbo/ha?

yes. You need to set up an email template that will request guest to write a review ( I get mine triggered 4 days after departure). Insert the field {BUREVIEW} - when guest clicks on it, it will open a form for them to leave a review. You get notification, open a review, look over and tick to make it visible.

Here is my template

Dear {CFIRST},

If you can take a couple of minutes out of your busy day, we'd appreciate it if you would fill an online review of your choice so that other guests can see what to expect. 

Review on our website ( this is {BUREVIEW} link)

Review on Google  ( link to GMB)

Review on TripAdvisor ( link to TA)

Did you book with us direct? If so, great! You got the best price! If you booked via a 3rd party site such as AirBnB, HomeAway/VRBO or TripAdvisor - they mark up the owner's rate anywhere from 7 to 17%! Vacation home owners advertise on all those booking portals, but you can find individual property websites (like ours) and social media pages. By booking direct from owners, you could have saved {BXSVCFEE} on your stay! < this is custom field I have for service fee amount>

Please know that there are real people behind owning, caring for and maintaining vacation properties like ours, so you are not "renting an AirBnB" - you are renting someone's vacation home, 2nd home or future retirement dream home. These mega booking sites do not own vacation homes - folks like us do.

We offer returning guest discount (when booked direct with us, good at any of our cabins) and friends/family referral discount.

Thanks again, and if you have any questions or concerns, or need information, please let us know.

Signed

It is now 2019- is there a guest review or some method of making notes about a particular guest (e.g. they prefer to use our dog gate amenity, birthdays other important dates)?

If you hover over a cell, it will show you the exact change. You can also export to Excel to see all of the details.

PDF is a good idea -- in the meantime, most browsers let you print to PDF. So if you go to a report and print to PDF that should give you what you're looking for on the display with chart.

Inserting reports into owner statements is another good idea, but it might be better done as just giving access to those reports on the portal. We don't let you do that on any report yet, but check out the portal access permissions -- we've recently added an owner dashboard option that shows owner revenue and occupancy YOY as of today. That may give you what you want right off.

when you run a report, there is a radio button "compare to previous".

And since we're on the topic of reports... it sure would be great to be able to export them to .pdf, or some other format that actually displays the report in a way that it can be pasted into an email or some other type of document to share with people. I know I can export the data to excel, and then there's probably a way in there to rebuild the graphs, but that's a lot of work and prone to error.

And let me take a moment to wish out loud...
How about a custom field for reports so I can insert one right into an email template. e.g. PM Owner Statement - display occupancy rate for the month compared to last year.

Is there a way to search the feature requests? Not sure if this has been suggested before...
When I run reports and compare to previous time periods, I like the red/down and green/up arrows that give me a quick view of whether or not I'm doing better or worse. However, I'd like to know 'how much better', without having to do the math. Perhaps the calculation between old and new data points could be displayed beneath or beside the arrow?

Coming very soon! Almost done with dev and out for testing in a week or two, so I'd peg it as early July.

I know cleaning and SMS were delayed....any news on this feature?

I only have people with occasional complaints on other forums that they didn't get their payment from this or that OTA. So just want to stay on top of that, especially in the beginning. I suspect after a few months, it will be a lot smoother than I anticipate. Some of the OTA forums are filled with a lot of venting about how evil they are and how much they hate VR owners. I am trying to be more optimistic :)

Yes, you can run the booking detail report and it'll show you the payment status for each one. You can also filter the booking List or Ribbon view by payment status.

Related to this, a high concern is ensuring that the listing sites who won't work through Lynbrook properly pay for each booking at the correct time. Same goes for managing security deposits.

I'm not really familiar with the reports yet, is there a report I could run on a periodic basis to make sure that past or current bookings were properly paid to date?

Pennsylvania (Poconos) supposedly requires the listing sites to remit the taxes now, but there is a sales tax and hotel tax. I'm not really sure what I'm going to face from each of these for listing sites once taxes are actually supposed to be paid.

Is this for you or for owners? For you, the booking summary report gets close -- you can run one for Owner Amount on the summary field, but it doesn't subtract expenses because the expense charge date may be different than the recorded date.

There is also a new Owner Dashboard option you can grant access to in the Portal area for owners -- that shows revenue and occupancy by month.

Perhaps that owner dashboard should also have a line to show the owner statement booking/expense/total amount? That's really the only source of truth for what an owner actually will see -- but it's only good in arrears because future bookings/expenses won't be on statements yet.

You can do that from the booking side or from the reports (the booking detail or email list report). In all of those places, you would filter/query the list you want and then export to Excel. They all have guest contact information in them. Now that might give you duplicates but you're essentially exporting bookings, but that's the only way to do it if you need to filter/group by property.

Would love to see an operating report for the month and YTD showing an owner revenues minus expenses in a summary format.

Is there a way to export a contact list by property?

OK - I was also commenting on whether the guests should have my signature before they even signed and/or fulfilled the other requirements such as timely payments.

For direct bookings, the guest will sign the agreement during the reservation process. If you want to turn that off you can, and then not give them the rental agreement to sign until they have completed everything else. Same thing for channel bookings, give them the signing link as the last step once you've got everything else completed from them.

Hmm. For my long term rentals, I don't present them with a signed agreement until they are paid, all requirements met, and they signed. Technically now, they have my signature even if they are deficient in some way.

Or am I missing something here? I want their signature as part of the process with payments made, all required guest signatures collected, govt ID presented, etc. I don't want them to have my signature first...?

Yep, it is a tradeoff between price and convenience for sure. There's a lot of time savings with being able to log in from anywhere and share with multiple users, so you've got to factor that into the equation. And a lot of people use QBO just because its the de facto standard -- nobody every got fired for buying IBM and all that. I'd bet they have a bulk discount for several companies at once, maybe something through their Accountant program.

There are others like https://www.waveapps.com/ and https://www.xero.com/us/ that some folks use, with different features compared to QBO. I've used both of those for smaller companies and they worked great.