40 years ago today, the American sitcom television series, Cheers premiered. 🍻
As an OwnerRez regular, be sure to belly on up (yep--we said it!) and enjoy this product update reviewing the September 26th release with 5 updates and September 30th release with 6 updates with all kinds of refreshing brews, including Hosted Website Redirect Imports and Channel Bridge Updates. Cheers!
Enhancements & Tweaks
Add Excel Import for OwnerRez Hosted Website Redirects
Guests are starting to catch onto the fact that listing channels are charging guests exorbitant fees to book on their website and they are starting to look for vacation rentals that they can book directly with owners or property managers. If you are starting to think about creating your own direct book website, OwnerRez is the easy answer. Hosted Websites are available as part of your OwnerRez account for as little as $15 a month and users can enable an OwnerRez Hosted Website in their account at any time.
Already have a website but are considering a move to an OwnerRez Hosted Website? Transitioning websites can be painful but OwnerRez assists users to make that changeover as painless as possible. Part of a website transition is redirects. What is a redirect? A redirect is a way to send both users and search engines to a different URL from the one they originally requested.
Assisting OwnerRez users with their redirects is advantageous for site transitions and maximizing search engine optimization (SEO) or the "Google juice". One tool that we offer is the Import hosted website redirects from Excel tool. To navigate to this, go to Tools > From Excel > Import Hosted Website Redirects as shown below.
Learn more by reading our OwnerRez Hosted Website support article.
Channel Bridge Updates
The OwnerRez Channel Bridge is a Chrome browser extension that allows you to log in to your listing site accounts and unlock the data stored there, rather than relying on the limited export functionality that the listing site offers. With Channel Bridge, you'll be able to download your data and upload it directly into OwnerRez in one smooth operation.
We update our property management system (PMS) more frequently than our competitors. And of course, those updates include our channel bridge tool. We have revised the channel bridge tool to now include the following.
- Reviews
In the past, if you were distributing direct booking reviews to Vrbo, and then you imported booking reviews through the channel bridge, there was a possibility that this process could create duplicate reviews. Now when importing a Vrbo review, we have included a check to see if there's an active non-Vrbo review on the same booking. We've added a skip check on the channel bridge that will not import a VRBO review if there's a direct booking review with the same review body. If there is a duplicate review body, that Vrbo review will be hidden. - Transactions
Did you know that if you import bookings first from a normal host account and then import bookings again from a co-host account, the cohost account will delete the transactions? The channel bridge now detects co-hosted listings during channel bridge imports and skips transactions so they aren't deleted.
To learn more, see our Channel Bridge support article.
Option to Exclude Credit Card Fees From Owner Expenses
OwnerRez recognizes that property managers own their businesses and wish to remain autonomous. This applies to commission fees as well as how owner expenses are applied. We want to assist property managers to flexibly determine how to apply owner expenses and have now added the option to exclude credit card fees from owner expenses.
To make changes to owner expenses, navigate to Property Management > Owners > Select Owner > Change > Settings as shown below.
Learn more about our Property Management premium feature in the Property Management Overview support article.
Bug Fixes
Add Link to Custom Field File. Do you prefer that downloaded files open in a new window? We do too! We realized that Custom Field Files were just downloading. What a hassle! Now the Custom Field File links and opens in a new tab.
Want to learn more? Check out our Custom Field Codes support article.
Fix Booking Fee Transaction That was Incorrectly Required. Due to the recent Deposits work on Booking Fees, we must have inadvertently marked transaction fields as required. This was asking users to complete the Transaction field while trying to record a fee for a booking. We have revised this field as not required when ad hoc fee additions.
Fix Issue for Quote Signing Custom Fields. There was a bug where the rental agreement preview was showing a previous value if the agreement referenced a field but the field wasn't matched to the property. That's now fixed.
Fixed Issue With PSiGate. When OwnerRez users that use PSiGate: Payment Gateway Services & Online Payment as their payment processor attempted to refund guests, the order id wasn't correctly being looked up for refunds. We've released a hotfix that has solved the issue.
Google Sheets Time Format Parsing for Excel Imports. OwnerRez has updated the parse methods that contain date and time format information for OwnerRez Excel Imports to include 24-hour time format settings. This only applies to users that use the Google Sheets application.
Make Property Listing Photo Caption Maximum Length Consistent at 256 Characters. Occasionally, when a property photo was added, saved, and subsequently edited, the maximum caption character link was limited to 192 characters. We've made sure that now all photo captions allow for a consistent 256 characters.
Order Airbnb Messages Sending by Queue Order. We tracked down an issue where Airbnb messages weren't always being sent in the order they were queued. We've added an additional level of sorting that will solve this issue.
Remove Owner's Property Commission Settings. The Owner's Property Commission Settings in the Property Management Owner section are no longer available. Owner commission settings for existing properties can now be updated in the Owner Configuration section for properties.
