Feature Requests

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Is there a way to add on packages such as bed and breakfast, romance packages, health packages, massages, etc?

I would like it if we could book multiple properties under a single quote, or have multiple properties at the same "location" governed by the same set of rules. For instance we have 8 separate vacation villas that are all a part of the same "compound" right by the beach, and the entire property has the same booking rules, etc, though pricing is different for each villa. Also, it would be cool if we could rent out the entire property as a virtual 9th unit, that would automatically book out all 8 units for the 9th as a kind of package.

I think that at least rudimentary CRM would be awesome, the ability to track lead sources, see the income from each source, track what customer preferences are, have profiles on different customers, etc, would be awesome.

If not, nutshell CRM is a great CRM to integrate with.

Maybe I'm missing this because I assumed it would be there already... but is there a website booking engine? Even better would be similar to checkfront, with wordpress, drupal, and joomla plugins.

Integrate with Mailchimp so that autoresponders can be started based on different criteria. Track leads and lead sources, and income from those individual lead sources.

I wanted to add to this - there should be custom fields that can be dropped into any of these messages, so the emails can be personalized, such as {name}, {date of stay}, {unit rented}, etc.

Another great request, AnaRita.

We do have a 'notes' feature that is going to be in development soon. This will allow you to record that kind of information.

-Michelle

For every booking, I need to register some extra info:
- check-in hour
- bed arrangement
- guest's mobile number (if they are bringing one)
This info is then passed to a 3rd party, the housekeeper. Right now, I write this information on a google calendar that I share with the housekeeper (I also include the balance value, as it is collected at check-in). It would be nice to have somewhere to take note of it in ownerreservations.

Hi Ana Rita,

Wow! What a great idea. I just talked to a developer about this and he said this is exactly the kind of integration we want to work on. He had never seen that Gmail plugin before.

One of the reasons we're going to be focusing on CRM features later this year is exactly for things like this. We want to be able to integrate with Google contacts, Postini and other systems so that you can see your OwnerRez guests in those places.

Imagine having your OwnerRez synced to your Google contacts so that when a guest calls your cell phone, their name/info shows up in the caller id. There are *lots* of practical applications to this.

I've added this to the dev roadmap.

Have a great day,

Michelle

A Rapportive (http://rapportive.com/) rapplet for Gmail with arrival/departure dates, number of guests, and charges.
Shopify has a nice rapplet example for customer orders: http://apps.shopify.com/portable-for-shopify
Official Raplet API documentation: http://code.rapportive.com/raplet-docs/
Thank you,
Ana Rita

Just a note to offer my help with the portuguese (European) translation when you're ready.
Kind regards,
Ana Rita

Hi Paul,

Currently, there is no way to automatically distribute and accept coupon codes through the current quoting system. We do have that listed on the development roadmap, but it hasn't been implemented yet.

When generating quotes, you would need to manually add a line item with a negative amount for the guest.

Michelle

I've just started and I'm new to this but haven't seen anything for coupon code entry for offering discounts on renatls.

We want to have a property listing that caters for all including our friends and family. We want to be able to offer our family a discounted stay but keep it on the books so to speak. Is there a way to configure a discount code to give to family members so that they can make their arrangements online as normal and apply a discount on the regular rates?

The generated quote would state code and renters name for confirmation prior to going out to renter of course.

Is this a reasonable way to deal with this or am i out to lunch? Let me know if there is abetter way to deal with this?

Regards
Paul

Hi Ana,

Thanks for your kind words. Our developers have worked VERY hard to make the UI as fast, simple and clean as possible. We have a long way to go - our dev roadmap has more than 300 items on it.

Every single thing you mentioned is already on our roadmap, particularly the language and currency options.

You can already accept check or cash payments manually in the system right now (as you may already know). You could also create bookings manually and then accept the deposit as check or cash manually.

In a few weeks, we will be beginning work on an overhaul that allows owners to be check or cash ONLY. In other words, you won't have to have a merchant account to use the system. You can have guests accept quotes and send checks or cash instead. Security deposits and scheduled payments will be reminder emails instead of auto-credit-card transactions.

Our biggest frustration is that we cannot move as fast as we would like to.

Thanks for your patience,

Michelle

I've now tried a dozen different vacation rental softwares and OwnerReservations is at the top of my list (simple and fast UI, close to perfect workflow). This is what I miss for it to work for me:
- Multi-currency (I use Euros)
- Multilingual emails, quotes and booking forms (french, spanish and portuguese)
- Alternative payment methods for deposit and balance (money transfer, cash on arrival)
- Security deposit in cash on arrival
Thank you,
Ana Rita

Hi Angie,

Thanks for your questions.

Yes, but we don't have those reports in the system right now. So far, we've been concentrating on the core payment/security deposit system and all the emails, agreements, etc surrounding that.

We do very much care about analytics (without it, what would be the point of storing data?) but haven't been able to prepare those reports yet.

Other than tax and year-end reports, these are the kinds of questions we'd like to be able to answer with simple, beautiful screens:

https://www.ownerrez.com/features/reporting

This is another very high priority to us. We have been asked about this quite a bit and have spent time researching the steps to take to support this.

Question - do you use the Quickbooks desktop version or the online version? We're planning on supporting the online version first since it's easier to integrate with.

Yes, you are - without question - our target customer. Our target customer has 1 - 5 properties and needs automated tools to make the inquiry/quote process easier, track data and have a solid payment/security deposit process that is easy and intuitive.

We're getting ready to release inquiry management that will intercept emails from VRBO, HomeAway, FlipKey and others and automatically parse out data from them, track the listing sites, and make answering much easier.

Our pricing, once released, will probably be $10 per booking. That is more or less the figure that we've settled on for those that use their own payment processing gateway. As always, those that use our merchant processing, will pay $0 for the software.

Hopes this helps,

Michelle

Will this software ultimately allow for year end or season end reports? I haven't gone live with this yet so maybe they come after you have something to report.

While I like your software so far, I can see myself moving toward something that exports to Quickbooks or another accounting software.

I am shopping vacation software packages and I wandered into your site. I am probably the sort of small business owner that you are trying to serve.

I have five vacation/executive rentals in the Phoenix area. I grew pretty quick so the reservations, booking inquiries etc are overwhelming. I am trying to get a tax system together while I am simultaneously trying to run my places.

This is not my full time job; because I am out of town 2-3 nights each week
I value the web based idea. Without being able to export to an accounting program I would probably be interested in a simple pay per booking.

Thanks,
IsabellaHouseRentals

I guess my only advice would be to not go nuts on features. There's something to be said for the 37Signals method of developing software - embracing constraints, simplicity, and less features.

Pawel, you're absolutely correct, and that is something we have discussed internally. After the inquiry management is flushed out, we are planning on refactoring our "Guest" model so that contact records are more cleanly represented. Inquiries, quotes and then bookings will all be tied to a central contact record so that you can see who is doing what, see who has inquiried or booked multiple times (and not just because you see the same email address show up twice) and use those contact records for more interesting things. For instance, be able to keep your Outlook or Gmail contacts in sync.

One thing that's lacking in the current CRM market is software catering to the vacation rentals industry. Since your plan is to integrate email inquiries into your product, you will essentially serve as a repository where users can store information about customers. Making that information searchable, allowing users to upload / connect via IMAP/POP to upload historical data, and perhaps at some point organizing that information by customer, would all be helpful additions.

Hi Pawel,

Thanks for trying out our software. Some answers...

That processing fee input is completely manual and it's something that you, the owner, wants to charge the guest to cover your own merchant processing fees.

We integrate with different gateways. Whether you use our merchant account or your own (through Authorize.Net or PayPal Pro) every merchant account has fees, which usually end up being around 3% of the transaction by the time you add up the "discount rate", the AVS fees, per transaction fees and "special card" fees.

So if you want to pass that fee through to the guest on their booking charges, you can specify it here and it will automatically be added to their invoice when the line items are initially generated. All quote and booking charges can be manually overwritten of course. These are just the line items that you may want to appear by default so you don't have to manually add them every time you generate a quote.

We are in the process of changing these Surcharge options (processing fee, cleaning fee, etc) so that you can call them anything you want instead of having a list of a specific few. So you'll have a grid where you "Add Surcharge" and then select the description and rate (flat amount or percentage) and the order it should appear on the invoice.

Again, to be clear, the Surcharge options on the property allow you to add extra charge line items to the guest's quote so that you can recoup processing fees or cleaning fees that you pay. This is completely up to you.

No, we don't cover your merchant processing fees. That sentence means exactly what it says: **our software** is free. When you create a merchant account with us, you have to agree to pay the standard merchant account fees that all merchant accounts charge.

That being said, our merchant account - provided and underwritten by Cornerstone Payments - is very competitive. The per month fee is $30 and the MC, Visa and Discover transaction rate is 2.25% + $0.30 per transaction. There is no extra gateway fee, setup fee or annual fee of any kind. Cornerstone also offers a match policy on the transaction rate so that if you find better deals elsewhere, they'll match it.

The reason we say that **our software** is free if you use our merchant account is because we make money off of our partnership with Cornerstone Payments. In 2011 we will be removing the "beta" rubric and pushing our software to the public in full. When that happens, the price for our software will be a certain amount per month or per booking. However, those that use our merchant account will have their software fee fully discounted to $0. We believe that this pricing structure is a real win/win for both us and the user.

Hi,

New to your site, and have yet to process a booking, but have a couple questions. The processing fee appears to be a manual input in the Surcharges section. Is this fee then set by the owner? Or, does the payment processing company you guys use set the fee?

Also, a clarification of this statement: "We support several processing options. Our software is completely free if you select the first one." Does this mean you cover any payment processing charges if Option 1 is selected?

Thank you

I don't know how to synch up my google calendar. I tried copy/pasting the URL but it didn't work.

Hi David,

Public calendar views are high on the list. One of the reasons we haven't released it yet is because we have some concerns over the multiple ways in which they are needed by different owners. The goal is to have full views as well as embeddable ones for your website.

It would be nice to have a multi-month calender view as well as the one month provided in the bookings section.

David

Hi David,

Actually no - that idea isn't on the roadmap. It's definitely an interesting idea which I'll submit. To make that more abstract, it should be multiple emails that can be sent at certain intervals with custom bodies.

What do we have, currently, is the ability to change the booking confirmation email that goes out so that you can add custom paragraphs onto the end.

For instance, a lot of owners put custom paragraphs for things like:

- Informal directions (if the standard address and mapping sites on the confirmation email might be wrong)

- Check-in and Check-out policy

- House access code for the lockbox

- Specific reminders about the area (fishing licenses, etc)

You can find the custom paragraph stuff in your property area under the Email Settings tab.

This is probably on your road map already :)

It would be great to be able to generate a welcome letter (using the same method as the rental contract) that is auto sent to the renter 4-5 days ahead of the rental period (user specified), containing information about their upcoming stay.

-David

Hi Gotomike,

We use the 'running total' invoicing method to calculate all fees. There's no special formula or secret way that the fees are added on, it's just based on a running total of what comes before it, excluding taxes.

For instance, if you had the following items on your invoice:

Rent $500
Cleaning Fee $50
Processing Fee 3% (would be $16.50)

The Processing Fee is calculated on all of the line items that came before it, excluding any tax line items. In the above example, that means that the 3% is calculated against $550.

When we do our surcharge overhaul, one of the features we are planning to add is an option per surcharge for:

* Calculate on all preceding rent line items
* Calculate on all preceding surcharge line items
* Calculate on all preceding tax line items

And you can pick any combination of the three.

Does this make sense?

One thing that confuses my renters and myself is what the payment processing fee of 3% is calculated on. Is it based on the net rental alone (daly or weekly rates), the rental plus cleaning, or the rental plus cleaning plus deposit?

It's planned, but it hasn't been worked on yet.

To give you some context, we have almost 300 ideas on the development roadmap.

We're thinking about using something like UserVoice (http://uservoice.com) to show all submitted ideas and let users vote them up/down.