Happy Hump Day! If you noticed the radio silence last week, that was because we had several people out of town and were beavering away on some internal projects. Over the past two weeks, we released 23 updates, so let's go through them. No new features but lots of tweaks and bug fixes.
Enhancements and Tweaks
You may have noticed (briefly) that the guest conversation thread showed third party alerts - for instance, new booking reminders to housekeepers or owners. While those emails are relevant to the booking, they don't apply to the "conversation" that is had between you and the guest. So we removed those third party alerts from the guest conversation. You can still find all outbound email in the Communication History area.
In the guest conversation, we also changed the action links to open original emails and SMS messages in a new window. This is important for users who want to stay where they are while looking at the original message.
If you use our Property Search/Availability widget, you know that the widget returns properties that are available. However, sometimes properties are not available for other reasons other than pure date blocks. For instance, there might be a lead time or booking window problem with the dates that the traveler requested and some of the properties are not available for that reason. The widget now has a setting you can turn on that will remove properties from the search results where rules prevent the property from being booked.
As we continue to enhance our public website, and modernize the design, we have begun changing fonts, sizes and imagery across many pages to be larger, more readable and clearer on all devices. Continue watching for updates to our public website.
As part of that public website work, we are creating new Tour and Features pages which will be out shortly. For the time being, the old Tours menu has been removed as the content was too stale to be useful. Look for new Tour and Features landing pages soon!
If you use our FloridaRentals.com API integration, you might have noticed that the Listing column on the dashboard didn't link to your actual FloridaRentals.com listing. We updated that so the FloridaRentals.com listing is now clickable right from the dashboard.
Need small font? Our rich-text editors (for email, renter agreements, website content, etc) only allowed 12 pt and bigger, but 11 pt is frequently used, so we added that to all editors.
We tweaked our Tags grid (in the Tags area under Settings) to have more-readable columns.
You may notice some warnings that pop up in the Taxes settings area now when changing tax settings, primarily around Airbnb taxes. We are warning about tax multipliers, so look out for that if you run into one. You'll know it when you see it.
Likewise, we added better handling of permission errors for Vrbo API. Instead of crashing or showing cryptic error messages, we are detecting permission errors and providing readable warnings.
Bug Fixes
Switching trigger templates. When changing a trigger, and selecting a different template (email versus SMS or whatever) it was not clearing off the old template type. This is now fixed.
Rate widget header on small devices. On some devices, such as small phones, the rate widget header was not matching the size of the data, which we make smaller for the device. We updated the rate widget header to match the small-phone size.
Paragraphs on Owner Story. Did you write an entire biography in your property's listing content under the Owner Story field? If so, you probably were disappointed to see that it all ran together and line breaks didn't show. Well, now they do! Write on!
Triggers grid link to channel message. On the Triggers overview grid, we noticed that channel messages were not linking to the correct channel message template, so we fixed that.
SMS Number not available error. Occasionally, our VOIP provider will show phone numbers that actually aren't available because someone else just claimed them. There's a brief lag but if you're lucky enough to win the lottery you might run into it - and some OwnerRez users already have. We fixed this to more-gracefully show when a phone number was grabbed by someone else in between the time you see it and click to claim it.
Queued Airbnb messages. You might have noticed that some guest conversations show old already-sent Airbnb messages as "queued" and it never goes away. Those messages were already sent long ago; this was just a display bug. This is now fixed.
No FloridaRentals approximate option. We removed the Approximate Map Location settings on the API settings for FloridaRentals.com because FloridaRentals.com doesn't actually support that.
Quote RA preview guest info. When previewing the renter agreement on a quote, the guest info was off. It didn't affect the final renter agreement that was signed and archived, but it was confusing regardless. Not any longer!
Template preview drop-down being cut off. Just like it sounds - when previewing any kind of template (email, SMS, etc) the drop-down of bookings that was showing was getting cut off in the header of the window. This is fixed and back like it's supposed to be.
Hosted website menu error. In certain circumstances, hosted website menus could not be changed without running into errors, but this has been fixed.
Rate widget future date calculations. We changed how recurring seasons were calculating end dates when generating dates for the rates widget. It should now be more clear and correct.
SMS trigger time zones. As we continue supporting user time zones throughout the system, we are fixing places where the time zone is not being properly honored, either at the user or property level. We noticed a problem on SMS trigger dates and fixed it.
Empty colors on header lines. On hosted websites, setting an empty background color would cause errors with header lines, but that is now fixed.
