It's Hump Day, so time to talk OwnerRez updates! 🐫 This week, we only have a few enhancements and bug fixes (about 9) to talk about, so it should only take a couple minutes to plow through it!
Enhancements and Tweaks
After rolling out Tag Groups last week, we noticed some tweaks that needed to be made. You can now see tags grouped by group name when setting or removing tags and select entire tag groups at once. We also remove tags from mutual blocks to reduce confusion.
The rate table widget also got some updates. If a property has a 7 night minimum rule, we are no longer showing the nightly rate column, and we're always calculating a week rate even if there's no LOS (length of stay) discount. That being said, we noticed after pushing this release that some users still want to show nightly rates, between properties, even if a particular property has a 7 night minimum, so we're going to add settings to the rate table widget to make this explicit. Look for that update to be out in the next few weeks.
The "Use Template" drop-down list on guest conversation threads was being cut off on the right side of the screen, so we are now right-aligning the Use Template drop-down so that it expands towards the left side of the page. Some of you like to use really-descriptive (ie. really long) template names! 🤨
Quick bit of news on HomeToGo... We are close to wrapping up the beta period for HomeToGo users and making this available to everyone. Please note that "Request To Book" mode will not be an option for HomeToGo. Only "Instant Book" will be available up front. However, if there is a large amount of demand for Request To Book, let us know, and we'll try to get that in later.
Bug Fixes
Seasons without arrival/departure days. Believe it or not, you can configure seasons in OwnerRez to not allow arrivals or departures. In other words, the guest has to arrive before the season and depart after. There are good reasons for this. However, our validation logic showed a whacky message like "Winter requires arrival day to be on___" with no day of the week showing. We fixed this. The same validation message now shows "Winter does not allow arrivals".
Identifier Mappings broken links. A recent update made it so that you could not create new settings in the Identifier Mappings area. If you don't know what what I'm talking about, check out this article on Identifier Mappings. If you had existing mappings in place, you could change them, but you couldn't create or set new ones. This is now fixed.
SMS message guest matching. When matching guests to inbound SMS messages, we were sometimes using the wrong guest record. This is because you can have many guest records in OwnerRez for the same physical person. You might have created the same "Joe Blow" guest record five times when Joe booked your cabin 5 times, and all 5 records have the same phone number. By the way, if that's the case, you can find and merge guest records together, so do that from time to time to keep your CRM clean. At any rate, we are now using the last updated or created dates on guest records to find the latest guest and match inbound SMS messages to that conversation instead of the older ones.
No Airbnb guest conversation. There are situations in which an Airbnb booking is made (and pushed to OwnerRez) but no conversation or message thread is included. This is the result of (a) the guest booking without saying anything and (b) Airbnb changing some things in their API without mentioning it to their hapless partners. We fixed this so that a conversation is now started and you can say something to the guest even if no message thread was started on the Airbnb side.
