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Possible error in rental charge calculation, embeding calendar

Jon C
Mar 17, 2013 11:44 PM
Joined Jan, 2013 24 posts

Hello,
I've been working on converting my bookings to this site. One of my bookings included rate charges that I don't think calculated correctly, but it could be that I didn't set things up properly.

Example:

All dates in August have a rate of $120 a night for 5+ night rentals, $120/night for less than that.
However, one week in August has specific dates set to $150/night for each night, due to a major festival that occurs that week.

When entering a rental date range which includes a combination of days in August that are in the $150/night week plus other nights, which should be booked at $120/night, the system returned a booking fee of $150 night for EVERY night in the booking.

This was an easy fix, as I just modified the charges to make sure they were correct. But I'd like to find out if I made an error in my property rate table.

The booking # that I had to fix was: # 254334

In addition - I'm trying to embed the rental calendar on a Google Site page, but cannot find a way to do so. Any ideas?

Michelle J
Mar 18, 2013 7:46 AM
OR Team Member Joined Jan, 2011 582 posts

Hi Jon,

What you saw was a result of the booking occurring across two different rate periods. At the moment, the rate engine calculates rent line items based on the first rate period the booking occurs within.

It's been a dilemma whether we should break that up or not. There are advantages and disadvantages to breaking up rate period charges. For instance, a lot of owners have weekly rates so the guest is supposed to get a discount for 7 days. However, if the booking fell across two different rate periods, the charges would cut up the booking into two different groups of nights and no discount for 7 days would occur. Which method is more correct? It depends on the owner and how they feel.

I assume you've followed the normal embed HTML instructions that Google Sites mentions here:

http://support.google.com/sites/answer/2500646?hl=en

If you've done that, and it's still failing, it may be getting blocked. For instance, Google Sites may be blocking our code do to security issues. I will check with a developer and see what we can find.

Chris Hynes
Mar 18, 2013 10:55 AM
OR Team Member Joined Oct, 2012 1400 posts

Chris here, one of the programmers on the OwnerRez team.

I had a look at the Google Sites documentation, and it appears that they don't support the common features we use to make the calendar widget embeddable. According to https://support.google.com/sites/answer/90540?hl=en:

"Google Sites does not allow the use of JavaScript, iFrames or CSS tags"

Those unsupported technologies are all foundational web features that we use in the calendar.

The HTML Box Michelle refers to looks to be Google's way of trying to work around their limitations, but it still doesn't seem to support enough functionality to be able to embed the calendar.

Jon C
Mar 18, 2013 10:57 AM
Joined Jan, 2013 24 posts

Hi - Thanks for the quick reply.

What you could do in terms of the rates, is set priorities for the rate tables so that some can override others. In our case, I would want the individually set dates to override anything else which might be setup, because they are unique/special dates.

I guess the other way to do this is to setup the rate table to exclude these special dates (creating > 1 rate tables for the "normal" parts of the year).

But since everything can be manually overridden, there are workarounds.

And yep I believe the issue with HTML is related to security or restrictions around what javascript libraries can be used in an HTML box.

2+36 - 84: failed to load external url widget.js

"https://secure.ownerrez.com/widget.js"

Jon C
Mar 18, 2013 11:00 AM
Joined Jan, 2013 24 posts

Thanks Chris - and yep agreed... so the other way I can potentially do this is to setup a google calendar sync, then just embed the google calendar on my site.

However, I tried this last night, and OwnerReservations seems to populate all calendar entries with booking # and the name of the renter, which I do NOT want on a public calendar...this seems to be more for the owner/manager to sync up.

So another way to do is is to just link to the property and not deal with embedding anything.

Chris Hynes
Mar 18, 2013 1:40 PM
OR Team Member Joined Oct, 2012 1400 posts

The calendar details are populated by OwnerRez so you have full control over what you want to do, but you can manage who sees the detail through the sharing settings in Google Calendar.

If you go into the calendar settings in Google Calendar, you'll see a sharing settings section. There, you'll want to check the "Make this calendar public" box (so everybody can see the dates), but also select "See only free/busy (hide details)" so the booking details don't come up.

If you set it up that way, people will only see "Busy" for the bookings, not the details.

Make sure to log out of your Google account before checking whether the details show up -- if you're logged in, Google will see that you have permissions and show everything rather than using the public permissions.

Jon C
Mar 18, 2013 3:56 PM
Joined Jan, 2013 24 posts

You are absolutely correct Chris forgot about that setting in Google Calendar. That'll fix the problem for us with sync'ing with our Google Calendar for our web site.