Introducing the "Vacation Rental Tools" project and importing reviews in bulk

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As great as our new Reviews feature is, we knew from the moment we released it that we would have to follow it up with some tools to help get reviews into the system faster.

Manual entry sucks! You don't want to have manually copy/paste every review you get into OwnerRez, so we set out designing ways of making it easier.  To that end, we have two big things to announce.

You can now import reviews in bulk using Excel.

The import screen is similar to, and located near, the other import screens and pretty self-explanatory.  Take a look at this support article for all the details:

Storing Reviews by Importing Them in Bulk Via Excel

But even though you can import via Excel, that still means you have to manually fill in the Excel spreadsheet, right?  That's where the next part comes in!

Introducing the new "Vacation Rental Tools" lab project!

For awhile now, we've been dreaming up a way of providing better tools and tighter integration with listing sites while not having to wait on listing sites to develop that access on their own.

"Vacation Rental Tools" is our answer to that problem.  It's a Chrome extension you can install in your browser that will provide you extra features for the listing sites you work with.  And it's free for everyone to use whether you're an OwnerRez customer or not!

Visit the new website at http://VacationRental.tools or take a look at these support articles:

If you use TripAdvisor, you'll be able to use Vacation Rental Tools to download an Excel file of all your TripAdvisor reviews in a click of a button.

That same Excel file can then be imported into OwnerRez in another click, meaning no manual entry.

Hundreds of reviews moved from TripAdvisor to OwnerRez in just a few seconds. Awesome, right?!

Get ready for more great browser tools coming to Vacation Rental Tools and help us spread the word!

6 Comments (add yours)

BlueMtnCabins
Oct 20, 2017 7:44 AM
Joined Jun, 2016 1127 posts

I have 2 separate TA accounts, and one VRBO account. So I downloaded reviews from one TA account (for cabin #1), worked beautifully. But now how do I switch to download for the other account? Or from VRBO? When i open tools., it shows connection to 1st TA account.

BlueMtnCabins
Oct 20, 2017 7:48 AM
Joined Jun, 2016 1127 posts

Ok, found how to switch the TA accounts... tthanks

Sam Westcott
Oct 20, 2017 8:06 AM
OR Team Member Joined Dec, 2009 240 posts

For anyone else wondering about that, it's based off of whatever TripAdvisor account you are currently logged into. Vacation Rental Tools is a browser extension, so it's working off of the information it has in your local browser. If you have multiple TripAdvisor accounts, you'll have to open TA in a separate tab and log out of/into the different accounts and then come back to the VRT extension to do it again.

BlueMtnCabins
Oct 20, 2017 9:26 AM
Joined Jun, 2016 1127 posts

But no VRBO or AirBNB review import yet, correct? By the way this is AWESOME, TA reviews were imported flawlessly

Sam Westcott
Oct 20, 2017 9:50 AM
OR Team Member Joined Dec, 2009 240 posts

That's correct, but those are both right at the top of agenda - VRBO and Air both. We'd like to get Facebook, HomeEscape and Google My Biz reviews in as well. FB reviews may be able to be imported via OwnerRez integration since they have an open API and offer that data through the API. The others would have to be a VRT tool. We started with TripAdvisor because there tends to be a ton of history with them and reviews and they also had a clean page model we could scrape.

Groome Vacation
Dec 4, 2017 12:48 PM
Joined Feb, 2017 9 posts

id love vrbo and fb imports- watching for that!