On Monday, I started a "Midsummer Updates" series to highlight the raft of changes that were released over the past 6 weeks. Today we'll cover the 16 updates that went out on the week of July 12th which is mostly bug fixes and small tweaks.
Enhancements & Tweaks
No new features this week, so let's jump right into enhancements!
Do you use FloridaRentals.com as a channel? If so, you can now see your listing numbers live on the FloridaRentals.com channel dashboard page with a link to open the listing on FloridaRentals.com directly. It looks just like our other channels:
This follows our pattern with larger channels like Vrbo and Airbnb, and we're working to bring the same capabilities to all of our first class channel integrations.
Does your property offer free parking? I'm guessing the answer is yes - most properties do. We already had parking options that you could select (under the property > Rooms & Accommodations) but we spent some time clarify the parking options and expanding them. The parking accommodations options were not clear and sometimes led to wrong displays on the channels. We had a "Paid Parking On Premises" option, but we added new "Free Parking On Premises" option. For existing properties, we set the free parking option automatically if "Free Parking" was select because that's what it means now, and then we changed our channel code to send that to Airbnb if the user chooses "Free Parking On Premises". That way you can select both "Free Parking" and "Street Parking" at the same time.
If you're a PM that uses our owner statement system, you can now add an "In Period" pro-rated column to your statements for Prededucted Expenses. A few months back, we added the ability to show "In Period" columns for all the financial amounts on the booking which allow you to only show the owner a pro-rated amount of gross, taxes, commission, etc that matches how long the booking was in that statement period. For some reason, we didn't add an "In Period" column for Prededucted Expenses, so this release fixed that.
A common support question we get is "why isn't my token working?" when it comes to using the WordPress Plugin. Our common answer is: "You're using the wrong email address". 🤦 In our never-ending quest to stamp out common support issues, we decided to add some clarity to the WordPress Plugin page. We now display the account email address on both the token generation page and the page that shows the token later on. We label it as "Username" to match what it is called in WordPress.
Last little tweak for this release... We noticed that when door codes are manually re-generated, if the code already exists, it wasn't clear to the user what was happening. We clarified the process with a confirmation window if the door code was already generated.
Bug Fixes
Handle VR Calendar Sync iCals. This wasn't really our error per se, but we added a fix for it anyway. We noticed that some of our users use VR Calendar Sync to manage their calendar import/export fees (iCals). VR Calendar Sync does not follow the proper iCal spec in terms of how lines are supposed to fold and wrap which caused OwnerRez to not be able to pick up certain events or certain fields on those events. Since a bunch of users were using it, we decided to create a fix for it. We now detect if the iCal is coming from VR Calendar Sync and correct their format so that we can use the iCal information. Incidentally, this also affected Vacation Rental Desk iCals as well.
Fix LQA by putting it in a standalone page. Our Listing Quality Analyzer tool used to have scrolling issues. We're not sure how, when or why, but it was a common support issue and something we noticed ourselves from time to time. We couldn't figure out how to fix it, but we decided to remove it from the pop-up window and just make it always open in its own standalone page.
Pre-select more seasons on seasonal rate editor. In the previous update, we optimized the seasonal rate editor to have a maximum limit of properties and seasons that could be selected at any period of time, but some users pointed out how that limits entry. We've increased the seasonal rate editor limit to a maximum of 70 seasons at one time. We've also corrected the sort so it always selects the first 70 seasons by default.
Clarify booking.com cancellation policy. Previously, we used the policy with the channel first/last payment overrides for both the payment schedule and the cancellation policy. But that wasn't quite right, though - payment schedule should be separate. So we fixed this. Specifically, we changed the cancellation policy to use the straight policy without first/last payment overrides and we show the cancellation policy text on the booking's "Channel" tab in addition to the number we already show. We left the Booking.com "Payment Schedule" section as it was with the overrides.
Capitalization is important. Ever tried to edit a property address to fix only the capitalization? If you have, you may have noticed that your changes didn't stick! That's fixed now.
Less confusing preferences for portal users. The preferences page for portal users was displaying options for how guests should see charges in quotes and widgets... but those options actually don't do anything for portal users because that may only be controlled at the account level. So we hid those options.
Is the booking actually early or late? Previously, we were showing an early/late indicator on bookings (the little red bar on the left or right side of the ribbon strip) if the time was set for check-in/check-out even if it was set to the same as the property. The user might have set a different check-in/check-out time than "standard" but in reality the actual time was the same. We fixed this to not show early/late red bar on calendar ribbon if the time is set but the same as the property rule
Hotel ID? Room Number? 🥴 We now limit the length of the hotel ID entered when connecting booking.com listings to OwnerRez.
Render new-lines in rich text custom field responses on rental agreement preview. If you've got custom fields marked as rich text that you request the guest to fill in, and you've got a rental agreement that displays those custom fields, you may have noticed that the responses from your guests were all one line on the rental agreement preview... or maybe you didn't! Either way, it's fixed now.
Charges snapshot blowing up. We noticed a bug where clicking to get a snapshot of charges from an owner statement would sometimes crash. If you're curious, this was caused by our caching system not knowing what to do if charges weren't cached when the user went to view the snapshot. This is now fixed.
Help tips should be helpful. The owner amount help tip on the statement column header was confusing. Previously, it said that the owner's amount was the "Net - PM - DP" but that is only true some of the time. If you've ever used "pre-deducted" expenses, you may be aware that the Pre-Deducted column also factors into it. To make it 100% accurate, we changed the help tip to now provide the precise formula for Owner amount.
