Template Fields for Agreement, info guest needs to ADD

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In my town, the guest has to provide all of the names of guests as well as the ages of anyone under 25. I had a field for that in my original booking agreement, but don't seem to see how to add that to the one I am customizing for this site. Also, my Pet addendum has several spots for them to initial and I'm not sure where I can put those fields. My only other option is to send an additional email asking for guests names, but I'd rather not do that.

figured it out, with the field thing--it isn't IN my agreement but on the form that they fill out.

Hi Richter Vacation, can you describe in more detail how you were able to add a field to request more information from the guest? Was it in the rental agreement itself or on a separate form/email template?

Valerie - if you're on Facebook you might want to join the Unofficial OwnerRez Support Group page. We've chatted about this because it's not really clear. That's also just a great support page.

Basically, start with Settings. - Messaging - Custom Field Definitions.

For example, I want to know the name and phone number for someone other than the primary renter. So I have 2 Custom Field Definitions. The first one has the following fields:

Type: Booking (so this field will be part of your booking process)
Name: Emergency Contact Name (the guest will see this "field name" beside the blank field)
Merge Code: BX EMERGNAME

Display: Yes, required entry (which means this will show up in the form sent to the guest to complete as part of the rental agreement signing)
Order: 6 (this is totally up to you - once you know all the fields you want toe guest to complete, you should assign numbers in a logical order)
Description: Please enter the name of someone OTHER THAN THE PRIMARY GUEST that we may contact in the event of an emergency. (basically, this is the place where you tell the guest what you want them to enter in the field)

Then just decide which properties this info will apply to an whether you want the field to be active (which you do!)

SAVE THIS CUSTOM FIELD!!!

Then I set up another field where the enter this person's phone number. All the same process as above.

THEN: Go to Settings - Branding & Legal - Legal Agreements.

Open the legal agreement you will be using.

Scroll to where you want the guest info to show up in your agreement. This might be a place in a critical section where you've asked them to initial that they understand certain terms. Or, in my example, I have a bunch of info, entered by the guest, that I include at the end of my rental agreement which ends up looking like this:

Reservation Number:  {BIDRAW}
Guest's Primary Email:  {CEMAIL}
Guest's Primary Phone:  {CPHONE}
Guest's Home Address:  {CADDRPRIMES}
Number of Adults in Party:  {BNADULT}   Number of Children in Party:  {BNCHILD}
Make and Model of Primary Vehicle to Be Used at Property:  {BXCAR}
Name and Phone Number of Emergency Contact:  {BXEMERGNAME}   {BXEMERGPHONE}

You insert the guest's response by picking "Insert Field" from the options at the top of the "Body" of your agreement.

Hope that helps. You'll get there! And when it's done you'll love it. Just test the #%&$ out of it. Hahahaaa!

Thank you Lydia, I'll check out that Facebook group.

I had no idea we could add customized information to the rental agreement! This is wonderful, thank you very much for taking the time to send these instructions. I'm definitely going to give it a try!

Yes, you've all figured out the right way to do this: Create a custom field for "Guest List", that's tagged as required. It will be presented to the guest as part of the booking process, or as part of the rental-agreement-signing process for channel guests.

Then, include that same custom field in your rental agreement, underneath a statement something like:

"I understand that the following specific people, and no others, may be permitted into the Property. Admission of anyone else into the Property constitutes violation of this Agreement, and may subject me to immediate eviction without refund as well as additional penalty charges:"

{custom field code here}

Lydia has shared some specific information where we can add fields to our rental agreement to "personalize" it with guest or booking specific information.

What I still don't understand is how do we add a section in the RA where the guest would be required to enter their initials?

I created a custom field for initials like Rich suggested: {BXCANCEL} and put it in our rental agreement after the cancellation policy.

Then I sent the rental agreement to myself on a test booking. But it just shows up on the rental agreement as BXCANCEL and there was no where for the guest to click to "add" their initials.

I am obviously not understanding the correct way to do this. Do I need to somehow capture the guest's initials elsewhere and this macro will fill them in? I don't know how much good that will do, if the guest does not have to actually take a step to click to add their initials.

Valerie,

In my setup I have a custom field named BXALLGUESTS, and when I inspect it in OR it has all of these settings/checkboxes.

Type Booking
Name All Guests
Code BXALLGUESTS
Rich Text? Yes
Show During Quote Acceptance? Show, required entry

Maybe this will help you, I think the important part might be the 'Show, required entry' setting.

There is currently no ability to force guests to enter their initials when e-signing an OwnerRez rental agreement. This is kind of meaningless - they are electronically signing the entire document. It's not separate pages, like when you sign a physical contract, where theoretically someone could switch out a page later - it's all one big document that's signed in one piece, and is impossible to change in any way later without being noticeable.

Nevertheless, lots of our clients are asking for this.

Personally I find it infuriating when online companies try to demand my initials typed everywhere in an e-signature doc, and there have actually been situations where I got fed up with my time being wasted and just went with a different vendor that was easier to use. But that should be your choice, and we are likely to add this ability in the future.

Thanks, Ken, you make a good point about the entire e-document being one page instead of separate pages like a paper document.

The only reason why I like the guest to initial the cancellation policy is that they might actually READ it if they are forced to stop at this section to initial it. So many people never bother to take a look at any part of the rental agreement, they just sign it to get it done. This is frustrating, then, when they have to cancel their booking & are surprised/unhappy to learn there may be no refund issued.

I know that the responsibility lies with them to read the document they are signing, but most of them don't.

Having them initial the cancellation policy reinforces that they agree to the policy by the act of signing our rental agreement.

Lydia explained to me this morning how to create a way to call out our cancellation policy and have the guest "initial" that they have read & agreed to it so I'll adopt that process on my rental agreement.

Thanks Lydia!

while I understand your frustration, in some situations we do need separate initials to be entered so that guest would not later state they they "did not know", "did not see", "did not realize", "thought it was OK" or any other cop-out they try to use.
I would not do it on every page but important paragraphs such as one outlining cancellation policy, hot tub addendum, or paragraph(s) outlining repercussions and penalties for specific damage to the property. For example I have whole house sprinkler system in one of my properties, and if triggered due to guests misuse, abuse or malice, water can cause thousands in damage. I would love to have them initial that specific paragraph so they are fully aware that if they are to do it, I would haul their butts to court over it and it is no joke.

Today I realized that creating these specific custom fields to "Initial our cancellation policy" won't work, because we have two cancellation policies: one for Airbnb bookings and one for everything else.

When I created the 2 separate custom fields and "required" them to be presented to the guest, I suppose I thought that the Airbnb one would be linked to the {BUFIXUP} (booking clean up form) sent to Airbnb guests, and the other guests would see the other cancellation policy on the form that they have to fill out when clicking on the link to sign the rental agreement.

Sadly, I discovered that no matter what form the guest is filling out, BOTH cancellation policies were presented for the guest to initial.

Obviously, that isn't going to work.

Sounds like we need the ability to have different rental agreements and the ability to decide which custom fields go with which agreement. Hey OR folks! Is there a work around for this that we can use?

There is already aility to create custom agreements by platform. For example, my airbnb agreement is slightly different from direct agreement. So you define those under different name, and assign order of priority. You also define what site agreement applies to. So when the system decides, it evaluates what site it applies to and tests condition till it find applicable agreement. Mine are in this order:
AiRBNB ( priority 30 - highest)
regular - (priority 20)

so system tests applicability. If the reservation is Airbnb, it will meet condition 1st and that will be used. Else it will go on to use generic one.

Yes, the ability to have different agreements is there. And the ability to insert different custom fields in different agreements is there.

The issue is how do you set up custom fields which are presented to a guest based on their booking platform so that an AirBnB guest does not see the same custom fields during checkout as a VRBO guest? When you set up a custom field is there a place to define the booking source?

Somehow I do not have the issue. here are my custom fields that are used across the board.

Age of Primary Guest (BXAGE) <required>
How did you find us? (BXSRCE) <required, prompts to free form entry where/how they found us>
Initials: "No pets" policy: (BXCXLPOL) <required, must initial>
Initials: 60 Day Cancellation policy. (BXTRVINS) < decription outlines the cancellation policy, they must initial>
Initials: Cabin is on well/septic system. (BXSEPTIC) < decription outlines well/septic, they must initial>
Number of adults (BXNBRADULTS) <required>
Number of kids (BXNBR) <required>

So several fields (like about well/septic or how they found us) are not required to be inserted into the RA template, and they are not. Only fileds that I need are inserted.

This helps?

Lydia - can you walk through this just a little more - I'm quite spun around where you put this coding in (as well as where the additional guest code is beyond emergency) in the process - is it the booking request? When I sent a quote back it includes the RA already so not sure how it would be populated with the info needed

Are you having them print the RA off and initial/scan back - if not, how are you getting initials no the RA?

[Another topic was closed as a duplicate of this topic (https://www.ownerrez.com/forums/requests/guests-names-addressesage)]

You would need to create a separate rental agreement for Airbnb that contains the custom fields that apply to the Airbnb booking and a separate rental agreement for Vrbo/Direct bookings with the custom fields that apply to the Vrbo/Direct booking. You can specify which OTA should apply to the different rental agreements.

You should do this anyway, because your cancellation policy for your Airbnb bookings is most likely not the same as for your Vrbo/Direct bookings and the rental agreement that the guest signs should absolutely have the appropriate cancellation policy included.