You get inquiries from many different places. Listing sites like Vrbo and Booking.com send you emails. Airbnb makes bookings on your behalf. Your own website may have a "Contact Us" form that visitors can use.
All of these places send you leads, and you end up pulling your hair out jumping back and forth between all the locations.
In a nutshell, that's what OwnerRez takes care of. We provide a centralized location to manage all of those things and make them easy (even fun!).
The way that happens is by directing all of your inquiry traffic (those listing site emails, listing site bookings, website forms) to flow directly into OwnerRez. That's the foundation of how everything works because our payment/booking/reporting/marketing tools need inquiries in order to create quotes and bookings.
There are three primary things you need to do to make sure all of your inquiry traffic flows into OwnerRez.
1) Forward your inquiries from regional listings websites
Using our inquiry instructions page, change your listings on websites so that inquiry emails are sent to us on your behalf. This will make your inquiry emails appear inside OwnerRez where you can prepare quotes quickly or even have auto-responders reply to the guest without you lifting a finger.
2) Hook up your personal website to OwnerRez
Most property managers and owners have their own website which is a great way of controlling and marketing your own business. If you have a contact form on your website, you need to change it so that the information forwards into OwnerRez. You can also add widgets to your website to show visitors your availability. Let's go through each briefly:
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Change your "Contact Us" form to send emails to OwnerRez
If your website currently sends you an email, change the body of the email to match our parsing format which our custom email parsing support document explains how to do. Then send the email to OwnerRez using the email addresses found on our inquiry instructions page.
- Add our Inquiry and Book Now widget to your website
Instead of using the Contact Us form to send out emails (or in addition to it), you can also embed our widgets directly into your website. This gives your website visitors a set of controls to select the dates they want, fill in party size and send inquiries directly into the system without you having to play with email formats or worry about spam filters. In addition, you can turn on the "Book Now" option, and the widget becomes even more powerful, allowing the guest to see a quote and accept/finalize it without you even needing to be involved.
There are numerous settings and rules that can be configured, so if you're worried about using the widget, just ask us and we'll tell you how it works. We have settings to make sure that guests can't book directly from your website unless the quote and booking constraints are exactly what you want.
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Add calendars to your website
It's extremely important that your website shows which of your properties is available and that the information is always up-to-date. We have several different calendar widgets that make this easy. Our calendars update in real-time, so there is zero lag time between booking changes and what visitors see on your website. You can show a ribbon view of multiple properties side by side or a single view for one property at a time.
3) Connect to the major national listing sites
The well-known listing sites like Vrbo, Airbnb, and Booking.com do not simply refer inquiries like most regional listing sites do - they want to handle all guest interactions, and generally payments as well, within their own site. OwnerRez has various methods of integrating their functions into one place as much as possible. Read more about this process.