Internationalizing your guest experience can enhance your short-term rental business by attracting global travelers and providing personalized, multilingual services for cross-cultural interactions. In OwnerRez, you can easily configure your guest-facing culture (e.g., time zones, date formats, country, language, currency). This Culture setting will help those needing their country setting to not default to the United States.
Users should note that these settings change currency and date display for guests only. No currency or time zone conversion of the underlying data is done. Guest culture settings do not affect the displays and settings you see inside your OwnerRez account. To update your display preferences, use the My Preferences page.
This does not change the currency you have configured for your OwnerRez account. To change your settling currency, contact your payment processor.
Guest Culture
OwnerRez initially defaulted it based on certain factors from your existing account, but you can easily make changes. You can change your guest-facing default currency and date format settings to display your preferred language, currency, and date format settings by navigating to Settings > Branding & Legal > Guest Culture.
Informational text is displayed to guide users at the top, and the Currency Example is clearly displayed on the Guest Culture Settings page.
When you click on Change, you'll note that you can configure your default currency and language options.
Changes made to your Guest Culture are reflected on guest-facing forms that display your selected guest language, currency, time zone, and guest inputs.
Remember that your Guest Culture changes are guest-facing only. Users should note that their account preferences remain the same.
Finally, if a Team Access user upgrades their account to a regular OwnerRez user and hasn't yet configured their language within their Culture settings, the default language will be determined by their Country.
Per Property Culture
Per property culture is currently in beta. If enabled, all guest-facing elements (emails, widgets, hosted websites, etc.) will honor the property culture, and currency will be tracked on bookings. Reports, rates, and owner statements will continue to display the account culture!
Do you own a property where your guests primarily speak a non-English language? By checking the Per Property Culture? checkbox, you can then configure individual properties to override your account culture.
Then, you can navigate to the specific Property > Change > General Info > and from the Culture dropdown menu select the desired Culture and Currency.
If you check the Per Property Culture? checkbox, you'll have to configure any specific Property Cultures that differ from your account culture to your desired culture.
Widget Culture and Translation
Are your international guests non-English speakers? You can also make changes to your hosted website widgets to be displayed in languages other than English.
See the How Can I Make Culture and Translations Changes to My Widget? section of the Widgets Common Issues & Questions support article.