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Home phone numbers aren't important as evidenced by the number of threads asking how to remove fields from {BUFIXUP} (much less the number of households that no longer have a home phone number). This form is one of the first things our guests see and it looks antiquated, it should be updated (or better yet, updateable) to reflect how contact channels and communication patterns have changed.

Can you please add ability to modify {BUFIXUP} to the dev request list?

It is not possible to delete required fields.  Not sure why you'd want to do that anyway, a phone number is pretty important.  With channel bookings, you should (almost) always already have that anyway.

The rental agreement signing process does indeed capture all of this information, whatever the listing channels do not provide.  We strongly recommend having all guests sign a rental agreement, particularly listing channel guests, as that is the only way you'll have a legally valid and binding contract between you and the guest that can be enforced in court or by the police if needed.

Hi Ken, is there a way to modify what fields are requested in the contact form? I understand how to create and add customer fields, but how do I delete unnecessary fields like home phone number?

Yes, you can do this. I do this--I have one agreement for Airbnb, another for other channels that process their own charges (e.g. TripAdvisor), and a third for direct bookings and channels where I process the credit card directly (e.g. Vrbo).

The official documentation is here: https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/renter-legal-agreements#multiple-agreements

But it's quite easy. When you create your rental agreement, you can set at the bottom which channels it applies to and add a priority (higher number=higher priority).

So, create an agreement for Airbnb and set it to only apply to the Airbnb channel, and give it a high priority number.

Then, create another agreement for all your other channels and set it to apply to all channels and give it a lower priority number.

The end result will be that your first agreement will be included in the default RA link for any bookings made through Airbnb and then the other one will be applied to everything else. (You could select "Everything But Airbnb" in the second agreement, but the lower priority number accomplishes the same thing.)

FWIW, whatever you have in your Airbnb legal agreement, make sure that is copied and pasted verbatim into your House Rules section of your Airbnb listing, as Airbnb requires you to do so (they will enforce whatever you put in there, though, so that's good!). There's also no (practical) length limit to your House Rules section on Airbnb, so there's no reason to make it simple--my Airbnb RA is almost as long as my regular one (several pages) and only omits the sections specifically referring to payment processing and chargebacks and such.

The rental agreement signing process does indeed capture all of this information, whatever the listing channels do not provide.  We strongly recommend having all guests sign a rental agreement, particularly listing channel guests, as that is the only way you'll have a legally valid and binding contract between you and the guest that can be enforced in court or by the police if needed.

IS there any way to have the rental agreement displayed to the guest change based on the channel it was booked from? I want to use a very simple one for Airbnb, but a more detailed one for direct bookings.  I don't want to have to do this manually after the fact like I'm seeing int he documentation.

Trying to find a way to customize which fields show up after guest clicks link to complete the rental agreement.  Id like the ability to customize any of the guest "contact" fields. Also is there a way to request the guest update their contact fields without sending it through the rental agreement process?  for non direct bookings , i don't require a rental agreement signed but id still like to capture their "REAL" information.

Has anyone done this or found a good way to do this?

The system message is used if you manually go to a Booking > Reviews > and use the Request dropdown button to ask for a review.  It should not be disabled.

But, as you noted, by default OwnerRez does not automatically request reviews from guests, because you may not necessarily want them from all guests.  If you do want to send the request automatically, an email template and trigger is indeed the right way to do it.  Here's an example:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/review-request

This video may also be helpful:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/email-templates-and-triggers 

Hello. I was wondering why I wasn't getting reviews from some very happy guest that booked direct. When I look at the email history, there is no email shown asking for their review -- even though I had it enabled as a system message. I've now made it a trigger. Should I disable the system message with the trigger in place?

Also, I know this previous thread is pretty old, but the link referenced above is no longer available... 

Thanks for your help!

Unfortunately, it is not currently possible to add a second email destination to your account.

However, there are a couple other ways to accomplish what you want:

1. Most email inbox programs have the ability to filter for messages of particular types, and forward them on to another email address.

2. You can configure a new email template and trigger to send data when a booking is created, to whatever email address you want.

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/reminder-to-myself 

Currently we receive an email after a rental has which includes the complete reservation information.

I would like to add a second email destination to our account.

Is that possible and how can we go about doing this.

Thanking you in advance for your response. 
Jill Bavetta, 352-552-4273

No, that's considered to be essential.  However, it's rare that it's empty at that stage in the process - most listing channels provide it with a booking, and, it's required for all credit card payments anyway.

Is there a way to not ask for a guest's physical address in the Renter Agreement tempate?

Thanks,

-Mimi

I'm a real estate Broker in California, as well as an STR manager/owner.  I keep my Brokerage website separate from my vacation rental site.  There are two main reasons for this, both around SEO.  If you have STRs and sales it will "confuse" the search engines as to what you are and what your site's focus is.  This will get even more confusing, especially for the consumer, if you have long-term rentals on there as well.

The second reason is, your site's "avatar" (aka who you're trying to get as a visitor).  The person who is shopping for a traditional rental or to purchase a home is much different than the person looking for a two-night stay somewhere.  When designing your site, they need to attract the right customer and your content needs to reflect that.  Even if you had a subdomain like "purchase.mysite.com" it could still be dicey.  The guidance I've read is to have these be unique sites and leave subdomains for specific silos of information, like "calif.aaa.com"

Evolve does have a sales page buried on their site, but when you click on the listing for the property it takes you to the rental page.  In my view, that is not a good way to do it as it is confusing.

How I would do it is list the rental on your sales site with a link to the rental page/site in case people are interested in buying it as a rental.  I'd also link from the STR site to the sales site with a generic "some of our rentals are up for sale, click here to see a listing" type of link.  You don't want to list directly from the STR property page as that could hurt rentals (who wants to rent a place that may be sold out from under them).

Kind of like an old-school guestbook?  No, we don't have that feature, but there are a great many plugins that do similar things, and most likely can be dropped onto your website.

Hi, our website is https://www.beehivevacationhomes.com and we just want to add a webform where people can leave comments, feature requests or guest lists or some kind of registration to promotional offers. We wanted to put it here in this part of the website: 

I tried to put a form but can't figure out the "correct way" to do it. Is there an ownerrez feature to add a weform that blends into the website theme itself?

if not, any suggestion where I can get to put web forms that blend into the website? How did you do it? Please advise. 

I'd like to add my vote for this - it's critical when more than one person is responding to inquiries.  If a response comes from a potential guest to an email address monitored by multiple people, it's hard to monitor/know WHO has already responded.  

What you're talking about is part of what is commonly referred to as a "unified inbox."  At present, OwnerRez does not offer this, because it would require us to provide full email services - inbox, interface, client, etc.  It is generally easier for clients to have email services provided by some other company that specializes in doing this, such as Google Workspace or most domain registrars.

We are investigating ways of adding this capability, or at least moving in this direction, and you will see additional features in this regard over time.

Hello everyone,

I am trying to utilize the Email Template feature to automate how I respond to customer inquiries. This feature works well but I was wondering if there was a way to capture the customer response in OR as well as via email? 

For example, the email template goes to the customer with the "From" address being an OR generated email address with the inquiryspot.com domain. However, the reply-to address is {MYEMAIL}. So when the customer responds to my email template, it goes to my email address and the communication is not captured on OR. This makes it more difficult to use since I would like to be able to view all communications in one place (ideally in OR). 

Does anyone know of a way to change the reply-to address to an OR address so that the response is captured in OR and forwarded to my email? 

Thanks,
Mai

Hello all! My name is Fabian and I'm a host from Miami!

Last year I was managing around 20 rentals and honestly wasn't having a good time, so I decided to restructure my business and trim the properties that were not bringing enough revenue while also advising my current owners to sell their one bedrooms to buy two bedrooms instead which yield higher returns in my market.

I have now a few units under contract and will land around 12 nice vacation rentals, 10 being 2 or more bedrooms.

I have also been selling a lot of real estate, and honestly I am trying to solidify that aspect of my business; so I am thinking of redesigning my currently OwnerRez-Hosted website which can't be very customized and instead make bookings a part of my site in a "bookings" tab.

Ideally I would like to build something similar to https://www.carswellandassociates.com/

Does anyone have any experience in these types of integrations?

Thank you!

Hi, 

I am trying to change the system default email template. I would like to remove the content like "Visit us online:" till I get the url setup. How can I remove this at system default template level so it get used everywhere.

Thanks 
Kumar

Hi, 

I am trying to change the system default email template. I would like to remove the content like "Visit us online:" till I get the url setup. How can I remove this at system default template level so it get used everywhere.

Thanks 
Kumar

FIGURED IT OUT - NEVER MIND :)

We have several properties and send out a customized inquiry email for each that has information about the property and distances to various popular places in the area. Currently using both Porter and IGMS but trying to test out OR to see if it can be a single solution.

We currently have a specific template for inquiries on each property. I've setup an inquiry template in OR with all of the standard info that is similar and was hoping to use custom fields to merge in the info that is specific to each property. I need 6 different custom descriptions to be inserted into the template but can't figure out how to tell the system which one to use.

Can you assign a custom field to a specific property?

Help - this is hard!

If they want to purchase travel insurance, it needs to be a booking and they'll have to make the travel insurance on a credit card. They can still make the booking payment to you via check.

Convert the block to a booking and you'll be able to send them a travel insurance purchase link from the Insurance tab of the booking. If they end up not sending you the check and going through with the booking for whatever reason, then cancel the booking.

I'd recommend having them wait until they're sure they're going to book before purchasing the insurance policy. Once they purchase the policy they'd have to contact the insurance company to cancel it.

They pretty much can't:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/travel-insurance-common-issues-questions#no-card

I have a guest paying by check. They want to purchase travel insurance too.
*How do I make a template for that guest that has not yet converted to a booking until the check clears?
*Can they purchase the travel insurance now or must they wait until they are officially booked?

Our situation:
I have blocked the dates for a guest. The guest will be signing our DocuSign contract and sending us a check for the downpayment. Once the check is cleared I plan to revert the block to a booking.

Interesting take on the policy. Thanks for posting. How are you keeping track of the responses?

When we first started using OR I went down the road as I had with other software to "brand" our emails and each template had our logo and footer information embedded actually in the template. Then I found Themes (Settings -> Theming). Themes allow you to put something at the top and the bottom of emails, forms, legal agreements and statements. We now "stamp" all of our emails with a centered logo at the top and at the bottom we place the disclaimer text that "This is a transactional email from Pacific View Lodging generated by our property management software called OwnerRez. If you believe you have received this email in error please report this to us: postmaster@pacificviewlodging.com" We started doing the disclaimer a number of years ago.. the CAN SPAM Act required commercial emails to be identified if they were Advertisements and since all of these emails are transactional we wanted to identify them as such and give the recipient a way to contact us. We hoped it would help in keeping us from getting blacklisted. Not sure if it worked but it is a holdover we aren't ready to give up yet.

Here is an example of our Arrival Instructions. We generally send these 2 days prior to guest arrival. We utilize bold, underline, images (pictures of the door locks are included in the email), and custom fields: PXCITY PXCOUNTY PXUNITNUMBER PXWIFINETWORK PX WIFIPASSWORD, Property fields for Directions and Instructions are also used. (We could have use the Internet property tag as well but we prefer to keep them in separate fields so we can send just the password to guests in a text message. The idea here is to try to have just ONE Arrival Instruction template that is customized for each property using the

This looks so much better in an actual email than what you see below.

-----------------
{CFIRST}
This email contains important information you will need for your arrival at {PDISPNAME}.  You may wish to print a hard copy of this or save it for easy retrieval in your email. 

 
{PDISPNAME}
{PADDRM}
{PADDRUG}
 
Arriving:  {BARR}
Departing: {BDEP} ({BNNGHTS} nights)
{PINSTDIR}
{PINSTCHECKIN}
--------------------
Check-In Time is {BCHECKINTIME}  and Check-Out time is promptly at {BCHECKOUTTIME}  At this time we do not have capability to grant early check-in or late check-out requests.
--------------------
Using the Electronic Door Lock

On the door you will find a lock that looks similar to one of these:

Tap the Yale to illuminate the keypad.
Enter your personal code of: {BDOORCODE}  followed by  ✓ checkmark or asterisk *  key  (The bottom row far left button on the keypad)
You will hear the lock mechanism move followed by 3 tones.   
Once the tones finish you can press down on the door handle and enter the unit. 
The locks will automatically relock after about 30 seconds.
If the code does not work, or the keypad starts "flashing" repeatedly at you please check the time.  Your code will start working on {BARR}  after {BCHECKINTIME}.  If it continues to fail please give us a call at {MYPHONE}.
-------------------------
Here area some important items to highlight about your unit (may not apply to all):
1. The wifi password is {PXWIFIPASS}.   Look for SSID: {PXWIFINET} 

2. The thermostat to turn on the heaters may be on the wall or actually located on the heater themselves.  Turn to the right to increase the temperature and left to lower.   For heaters with a digital thermostat on the unit press the bottom left button until you see temperature and then the up or down arrow to adjust.  (Please DO NOT place anything in front of the heating unit.   They can get VERY hot and can melt plastics and scorch/burn fabric.)

3. Linens/Pillows for the sofa sleepers (if present) are stowed in the coffee tables, drawers in the bed pedestal,  or ottomans in the living area.  You will also find additional pillows and blankets in closets/dresser drawers.

4. If your TV has unique operational instructions they are generally posted on or near the TV.  In particular some LG televisions require you to change to HDMI1 when they are turned on.  This is done by pressing the left top button (TV INPUT) multiple times on the remote until HDMI1 is highlighted.  Please do not reprogram remote controls and if you unplug cables please be sure to plug them back in where you disconnected them.  

5. The pet area has waste disposal bags.   Please pickup after your pets so we can keep the properties pet friendly.

Thank you for choosing {PDISPNAME} - enjoy your stay and if you need anything please do not hesitate to contact us.

{MYCO}
{MYEMAIL}
{MYPHONEI}
{MYURL}

------------

Our counties in Oregon require we inform guests about COVID. Our policy is such that if they can NOT acknowledge the contents of the email that we offer a full refund. We do not require proof and we have not found guests abusing the policy.

We added a number of property specific custom fields mostly with emails in mind. PXCITY PXCOUNTY PXUNITNUMBER PXWIFINETWORK PX WIFIPASSWORD we use CITY and COUNTY in this one. We also use Unordered Lists for each of the items and we do use bolding and underlining.
-----------------
{CFIRST}

Welcome to {PXCITY}, and more specifically, welcome to {PDISPNAME}.

First and foremost we thank you for booking with us.  I'm sure you are probably tired of hearing that we are in unprecedented times, yet here is another communication brought to you compliments of the times we are in.  In an effort to keep individuals safe -  including our staff and our guests - we have been asked by {PXCOUNTY} county to provide some simple guidance to our guests and those who will be travelling with them and staying at our properties.

By completing this reservation and arriving on the property you are acknowledging and confirming:

That no person in your party has recently experienced any cold or flu symptoms.
That no person in your party has experienced a fever within the last 14 days.
That no person in your party has been exposed to or interacted with a person known to have tested positive for COVID-19 within the last 14 days.
That you and the members of your party will follow social distancing and face mask guidelines as directed for the duration of your stay.
You and your party also acknowledge the concerns of residents of {PXCOUNTY} county related to their increased risk of exposure to COVID-19 as tourism is allowed to open, and you and all members of your party will make every effort to be good citizens and respectful neighbors during your stay.   This includes adhering to face mask and social distancing guidelines as well as observing property quiet time hours, and the various parking requirements as outlined in the city and county ordinances.

If you are NOT able to acknowledge and confirm the above, please contact us right away and we will issue you a full refund of any monies collected for your reservation.   Our goal is to provide all of our guests, employees and contractors with a safe and healthy accommodation and work environment.  You are just as much a part of this equation as we are and through our joint efforts we can keep the Oregon Coast open and safe for all citizens to enjoy.

{MYCO}
{MYEMAIL}
{MYPHONEI}
{MYURL}

This notice is being sent to all registered guests per lodging reopening requirements for {PXCOUNTY} county.