When it comes to luck, you make your own.
Bruce Springsteen
On this day in 1949, Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen, aka Bruce Springsteen, was born and he included the quote above in the lyrics of his 1992 song, Lucky Town. And while most people would consider Bruce to be a pretty lucky guy, we suspect that he has worked pretty hard to get where he is today too.
We know that all of you OwnerRez users are hard workers (and hopefully have a little bit of luck 🍀) too. Consider listening to Bruce's tune linked above while you review our product update summarizing the September 15th release with 6 updates and the September 23rd update with 4 updates.
Enhancements & Tweaks
Channel Partnership with Golightly
We are happy to announce our partnership with Golightly as a new first-class channel partner!
Golightly is a private club for women, requiring all members to be female. All bookings must be made by a vetted female member, but she can travel with whomever she wishes. If a property manager lists their properties with their wife or has a female property manager/owner who is happy to be the accountable member, she can list the properties under her Golightly profile. Their mission is to build the largest community of women who love to travel and provide them with a safe space to host, book accommodations, network, and support other women within the community.
Read more about Golightly in our Integration with Golightly blog post.
Deposits Enhancements
OwnerRez has been working on the concept of tracking deposits for quite some time. In the summer of 2022, we launched the first release and then immediately followed it up with several more enhancements. This update includes many enhancements that can only be described as "extras" or "This is great--now let's add...".
We have added the following updates to the Deposits feature.
- Adjusted and enhanced the deposit fee handling
- Created separate tabs for Transactions and Fees (in that order).
- Show booking, property, transaction (description) and amount.
- Added "Total Transactions" and "Total Fees" on the top of the deposit summary.
- Optimized deposits queries
- Added property dropdown filter.
- Added payment method dropdown filter.
- Similar to guest conversations, display the most recent 50 deposits with a "Load older transactions" button.
All of these deposit tweaks and enhancements were made in preparation for our Deposits feature. Want to know more? Read our Hello Deposits! blog post.
Lynnbrook Group Updates
As an independent software product for vacation rentals, it's not our job to dictate what specific payment processor or method you use. We integrate with a variety of payment methods of which Lynnbrook Group is one but we made a couple of updates listed below.
- Lynnbrook Group deposits are now automated.
- Any OwnerRez user that wants to apply to Lynnbrook Group as a payment processor can follow the instructions in the Lynnbrook Group support article.
Retire Legacy Stripe Payment Methods
Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, is quoted as saying "change is the only constant in life." This applies to payment processors too. We have retired legacy Stripe payment methods in order to integrate Stripe's most current API.
Learn more at our Stripe support article.
v2 API Booking Field Additions
If you use our API, you'll be excited to know that we've added additional booking field information to our v2 API, which now includes amounts paid, refunded, owed, host fees and cleaning dates, to our API. To be clear, that's the OwnerRez API that we host for our many partners who build integrations and apps for OwnerRez, not the channel APIs we connect to for our channel management feature. If you are a developer and want to learn more about our API, including v2, see our API documentation.
Bug Fixes
Add Cleaning Date to Update Booking API Call. We implemented a patch on the bookings API call for cleaning dates only. Additionally, in order to more smoothly allow for editing on the API, we split apart both the edit and view models instead of using the same model everywhere.
OwnerRez is always interested in integrations that developers want to build with the OwnerRez API that we host for our many partners. To be clear, these are not the channel APIs we connect to for our channel management feature for OwnerRez users. If you are a developer and want to learn more about our API, including v2, see our API documentation.
Booking.com Adjustments. A last-minute booking in the evening can cause a payment to be attempted early. OwnerRez was interpreting the payment logic and virtual credit card (VCC) to both be Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) because that's what most of their dates are, but it's actually supposed to be in the property timezone. We have now fixed both of these bugs by making the following adjustments.
- Adjust the booking.com payment logic to use the property timezone.
- When doing booking.com automatic refunds, don't refund VCCs. Instead, alert the OwnerRez user if we don't have enough non-VCC to cover the refund.
- Don't report booking.com VCCs as bad cards to the guest.
- Call out booking.com VCC processing errors in alert to users.
Custom Field PDF Files Not Opening Correctly. Some Custom Field files, not an image files, but PDF files were opening up as raw XML files which are difficult to decipher. We fixed Custom Field files to accept and generate proper PDF files.
Damage Protection Cannot be Added for Individual Bookings. Damage Protection is important to vacation rental owners and property managers alike as we want to protect our investment against accidental damage a guest might do while at your property. Under Damage Protection settings, users may choose to not apply or opt out of Damage Protection for certain channels.
While not recommended, perhaps the OwnerRez user has opted out of damage protection for one or more channels because the user feels the damage protection from a channel or some other source is adequate.
Sometimes OwnerRez users may have some secret spidey sense about specific guests and want to attempt to add Damage Protection to that guest's booking. Unfortunately, the terms of our Damage Protection program do not allow you to purchase our Damage Protection coverage for bookings that are already covered some other way, and the channels' coverage does technically meet this requirement.
When users that previously chose to not apply or opted out of Damage Protection for certain channels attempt to add Damage Protection to an individual booking, a new warning label will appear as shown below.
Learn more about this topic by reading our Damage Protection support article.
Don't Skip Channel Bridge Transactions for Not Deposited. In the September 12th Update we skipped Channel Bridge transactions for bookings that have deposited payments, but that leads to problems when new payments are added after legitimately deposited payments. This could lead to potential payments that should have been added before but were not during Channel Bridge transactions. We have made some improvements that include the following:
- Only skip deletes of transactions that have been deposited, and notify the user if this happens. Users can still add new transactions even if others on the booking have been deposited.
- Update host fees, but skip updates/deletes of fees that are deposited, and notify the user if this happens.