On this day in 1985, U.S. Postage first-class stamp prices were raised from 20 cents to 22 cents. 🖃 Today the cost of a stamp is 63 cents!! 💸
Thank goodness for email! Sending emails to guests is even faster, easier, and less expensive than good old snail mail. And by using OwnerRez's System Messages, Email Templates, and SMS (text) messaging, you automate and streamline communication with guests across all channels, allowing you to focus on the important things--like growing your business and brand!
And on the topic of automation and streamlining, read on to review the February 15th release with four updates that include an OwnerRez Zapier Integration tweak and Channel Bridge History improvements!
Enhancements & Tweaks
Enhanced Channel Bridge History Now Tracks Review Imports
We're working to lessen your need for Channel Bridge over time, but while it's still around, we're trying to make it more useful. For those who may not yet know, OwnerRez's Channel Bridge is a Chrome browser extension that allows you to log in to your listing site accounts (e.g., Vrbo, Airbnb) to bridge data over to OwnerRez that is stored there, rather than relying solely on the limited export functionality that the listing site offers. With Channel Bridge, you can download your account data and upload it directly into OwnerRez in a few steps.
OwnerRez users work extremely hard to get reviews. And if you're like most users, you ask your guests to post reviews and when they do, you want to use them in other places. It can take a decade (or more!) to build a good list of reviews, and the more you have them, the stronger your reputation (and easier your marketing) gets. You should collect and store all your reviews so that you can use them on your OwnerRez Hosted Website or the Reviews widget.
But we know that our users are busy and can sometimes forget when they last imported reviews from their listing site accounts. And while the OwnerRez Channel Bridge History was tracking and displaying booking import histories, that same history wasn't tracking review imports, only exports.
Wonder no more about when that last review import was completed. Now Channel Bridge History includes review imports, noting the date the previous import was completed and the status of that last Channel Bridge!
There are two new columns also - Account ID and Account Email - which helps users especially with more than one account know which Channel Bridge files went with which channel account.
Learn more about OwnerRez's Channel Bridge by reading the Channel Bridge Overview support article.
Zapier Integration Tweak
OwnerRez offers an abundance of Integrations to assist owners and PMs in operating their vacation rental businesses. One of our most recent integration partners, Zapier, asked us to sort our API List Results by most recent data first. So we now sort in descending order by ID Description. Adding this capability benefits our users using Zapier to make Zaps and doesn't presently hinder any other integrations utilizing our open API, so we went for it.
Want to learn more about integrations or Zapier? Read our Zapier support article and Paul's Zapier Integration Public Beta Now Available! blog post.
Bug Fixes
Allow Selecting of Earlier Years on the Right Side of the Reports' Date Range Picker. We continue to make the date picker better. The Reports' Date Range Picker now allows users to select prior years from the right side of the Date Range Picker. This is especially helpful when a user selects Custom Range before choosing the needed dates.
Improve Deposits Form Number Parsing and Adjustments. We noticed that users saw some anomalies while recording deposits.
- Alerts displaying "An adjustment for the difference of $-0.00 will automatically be created." while recording deposits. These adjustments were due to a rounding error and have been corrected.
- The text "NaN" was displaying (by default) in the Amount field. This bug has been fixed.
- Two-Factor Authentication, Guest Type Templates, and More!
