Well, butter us up and call us leprechauns because we've got some St. Patty's Day shenanigans🍀(er, product updates) brewing! Green is the OwnerRez color, after all!
As you celebrate St. Patrick's Day with a pint (or two) 🍻 of green beer, rest assured that OwnerRez has been jigging harder than a team of Irish step dancers to improve our software. These latest updates will leave you feeling luckier than a four-leaf clover.🍀Even though this March 15th release with 25 updates doesn't seem to be the most exciting, know that upcoming future enhancements will have all of us feeling like we've got the luck of the Irish on our side.
So don't be a wee bit shy, grab your pint 🍺 and let's dive into this grand bit of craic worth more than a pot of gold! 💚
Enhancements & Tweaks
Florida Rentals Reviews Opt-in
Reviews for your properties can benefit your vacation rental business, including increased visibility, improved credibility, valuable feedback, and a powerful marketing tool. Positive reviews from past guests can help build trust with potential guests and increase their confidence in your property.
As I mentioned in the last product update, review syncing is becoming available across more channels. OwnerRez users with properties API-connected with Florida Rentals can now sync their earnestly sought-after OwnerRez reviews with their Florida Rentals listings now that they have wired up the functionality on their end.
Users can Include Reviews by navigating to Settings > API Integrations and achieve either of the following.
- Connect a Channel (in this case, Florida Rentals)
- Change their current Florida Rentals API connection
At the bottom of the page in the Options section, users can choose to Sync my reviews from OwnerRez by selecting the checkbox.
Learn more by reading our Reviews Overview and FloridaRentals.com Setup & Connecting support articles.
Bug Fixes
Add Case to Vrbo Channel Bridge to Treat Booking with a Payment That is a Fee Only With $0 to the Owner as Cancelled Full Refund. A user experienced an edge case where Vrbo was showing a canceled booking with a payment that was only the guest fee to Vrbo. But then the payout amount was $0 to the owner, leading to a checksum violation in Channel Bridge. OwnerRez has added additional checks to avoid this type of Vrbo data feed error violations in the future by treating the booking as canceled and fully refunded, which skips all checksums and zeroes it out, thus bypassing that error.
Add Extra Availability Push for Airbnb and Booking.com Cancellation/Void to Ensure Calendar is Reopened Immediately. The property calendar is blocked for reservation request dates during an Airbnb reservation request process. However, if the reservation request was rejected, the property's calendar didn't automatically open up to allow for other bookings. OwnerRez has modified this process to clear the reservation request now when the reservation request is voided, allowing the property's calendar to open up and display the correct availability immediately.
Alert User When Secdep Couldn't Be Released Because It Was Charged Back. If users experienced a security deposit (secdep) hold chargeback by the cardholder, the OwnerRez system would get stuck spinning and attempt to release it daily. To correct this issue, we have added a counter for the secdep for attempted auto-release counts. After three failed attempts, the user will receive a system alert letting them know we could not refund secdep and that they must address it manually.
Clear Platform Email Address for Old 2019 Airbnb Bookings Where It Was (no email alias available). OwnerRez has removed/cleared all 2019 and older Airbnb platform email addresses that were (no email alias available) from the system. It was determined that since they were not helpful to users, they should be removed.
Create a New Lynnbrook Method if Using a Saved Card From a Different Payment Method. We ran into an issue where a user initially had one Lynnbrook Group gateway (OwnerRez payment method) for all their properties but then split each property into a separate LLC. In doing that, they removed the old Lynnbrook Group payment method and created a new Lynnbrook Group payment method for each property but there were payments associated with the old payment method and upcoming payments on the new split-out methods. To fix this, we check to see if the Lynnbrook Group "charge method" associated with a saved card was created for the same Lynnbrook Group payment method that we're now attempting to charge for the new scheduled payment, etc. If not, we create a new Lynnbrook Group "charge method" on the current Lynnbrook Group payment method, use that, and store it as the current Lynnbrook Group "charge method" on the card on file rather than reusing the old Lynnbrook Group "charge method" like we used to.
Don't Allow Adding an Airbnb iCal if the Property is Connected via API Already. OwnerRez disables Airbnb iCals when the associated property is API connected on a listing channel. However, it was still possible for users to manually add them later, leading to booking requests getting blocked and other problems. We have added a FinalCheck on the CalendarSync that checks for any active Airbnb API-mapped property and no longer allows any Airbnb iCals that match the property to be added/updated if the sync is active.
Don't Allow Adding a New Cancellation Fee For a No Refund Cancellation. During the booking cancellation process inside OwnerRez, if the No Refund radio button was selected, the cancellation fee section was grayed out as expected, but the Add New cancellation fee link was available. This has been fixed.
Fix Error When Viewing All Properties For a Vrbo Channel With Properties That Were Never Linked. When attempting to view all properties for a Vrbo channel, there was a crash when some properties had never been linked to the channel. That has been fixed.
Fix Google Maps API Warning on Geocoding. During the new OwnerRez property setup process, we were receiving Google Maps API console errors. This bug has been fixed.
Flag Airbnb Listing Published on Status Check If It Wasn't Before. There was an edge case where an Airbnb listing wasn't recorded as ever published but was published. Users can now preview their Airbnb API-connected property status by navigating to the far right Actions column and selecting Check Status from the Actions drop-down list to detect and fix accordingly.
Improve Vrbo iCal to API Transition. During the OwnerRez Vrbo iCal to API transition, some users were experiencing iCal errors. OwnerRez has tightened up the transition using the determination of active Link Access Protocols (LAP) to improve the Vrbo API connection process.
On Vrbo CB Import, Handle Case Where RDD Amount is Subtracted vs. Added for Checksum. This was an edge case where a user experienced a Refundable Damage Deposit (RDD) amount displaying as a subtraction on their Vrbo Channel Bridge (CB) import rather than displaying correctly. This bug has been fixed.
Only Block Airbnb Publish for Location Updates. In a recent release OwnerRez started blocking Airbnb publish when there was a pending sync to ensure that users didn't publish something during a pending update. This frustrated users because they'd change something, and the system wouldn't allow those changes to publish. The point was to keep users from publishing when fields, such as location that cannot be changed after publishing, hadn't been synced yet, so the block was changed to do just that.
Optimize Airbnb Channel Push by Skipping Cases Where Nothing Has Changed. OwnerRez has optimized the Airbnb channel push sync by allowing the index to skip properties that have experienced no changes, such as rates, bookings, photos, descriptions, etc.
Optimize Lock Integration Index Page By Removing External API Hit. The view page for lock integrations listed all locks when loaded. It used to do this to find lock names, but a few years back, we started storing them on the OwnerRez side. However, the page still downloaded all lock integrations even though it didn't need to. That's been removed, making things load snappier on that page.
Optimize New Ribbon Precalc Length to Speed Up Display of Long Bookings. Some users block their properties for ten years or longer, which caused the new Ribbon Calendar to take a long time to load due to the precalculation of booking data. We have optimized it to only precalculate up to a point for longer bookings/blocks. We recommend users set their property's booking window to handle this need rather than placing years-long blocks. Users can accomplish this by navigating to Properties > Rules > Booking Window.
Remove Legacy Booking.com OwnerRez Tax Calculation Mode. Booking.com opens up a property's calendar upon booking cancellation by default. Still, this process can cause double booking problems because the calendar is occasionally open even when OwnerRez thinks it's closed. We have corrected this bug so that upon a Booking.com cancellation, if the booking is already canceled or isn't linked to the calendar, we clear the Link Access Protocols (LAP) availability to make the system push availability again.
Show Preview Rates for Feed Based Channels as Well as Direct Sync. An intrepid OwnerRez user pointed out that you could only preview rates for specific listing channels like Airbnb, Booking.com, and TripAdvisor, but not Vrbo and other "pull" channels. So we've added the preview shortcut for Vrbo etc. as well. Users can now preview their Vrbo API-connected property rates by navigating to the far right Actions column and selecting Preview Rates from the Actions drop-down list on the API channel's properties tab.
Show Saving Spinner on Grid Batch Tags Save Button. For some reason, the spinner on the Save button was not "spinning" while users saved batch tags. This bug has been corrected and the Save button now spins as expected.
Update ECBYO Instructions Email Address. The Emerald Coast By Owner (ECBYO) email address on the API integration instructions tab was updated with a different ECBYO email address.
Update WP Plugin to Refer to the WP Premium. OwnerRez displayed generic and unhelpful connection error messages related to the WordPress Plugin. Corrected connection error messages will now refer to the WordPress Plugin premium feature and the IP address in the blocked message for additional and more accurate information for our users.
Use 400 Status Code for Validation Failures on Legacy API. We experienced some dynamic pricing partner update requests causing validation and HTTP status 500 errors with min nights values higher than the property max nights. We now return the proper 400 status code to respond to these requests.
When Regenerating a Manual Door Lock Code, Don't Reuse a Code From a Different Manual Door Lock. There was an edge case where regenerating a manual door lock code for one lock could reuse a door code from a different manual lock, leading to confusion. This bug has been corrected so that manual door locks will only reuse their own codes.