Happy Hump Day! Let's talk updates.
Last week we were short-staffed and had a bunch of things in transition, so there was no Wednesday update. This week, we'll discuss the 17 updates that occurred collectively over the past two weeks, most of which were enhancements and bug fixes.
New Features
We now support Ascent Processing as a new credit card payment method. You'll notice that Ascent is prominently displayed in our payment method and recommended as the go-to option for US merchants.
All other credit card payment methods are still supported - no one was dropped - but Ascent has a great product and is able to set up new merchant accounts right now when some other processors are struggling with COVID-era underwriting requirements. If you had issues with your credit card application being delayed or not approved, look into using Ascent. We have had good luck recently with their team.
Enhancements and Tweaks
The "Setup Done" page at the end of onboarding now links to the Bird's Eye View video in our support docs. Give that a look if you haven't already. It's a great video that shows most of the major areas of the site and what they are used for. We've heard a lot of old users remark how much that has helped even though they've been using OwnerRez for several years. As part of an effort to clean up our marketing and onboarding, we are pushing that video out in several places.
Speaking of marketing, the OwnerRez logo is being normalized everywhere. The login and join pages used to show the old logo, but we've fixed that.
We now support long keys for Stripe. Recently, a number of Stripe users have mentioned that the API keys they are getting from Stripe are longer than the previous standard. We now support up to 128 character keys for Stripe. Hopefully this gives us a few months of breathing room before Stripe changes it up again. 😬
Some OwnerRez users only ever publish and deal in weekly rates. While OwnerRez requires (or at least strongly suggests) that you enter a nightly rate, you don't want those nightly rates showing if you only deal in weekly's. So we added an option to the rate table widget to not show nightly rates even if they technically exist.
The channel rate tester has also gotten some work. As users have started using it, we've had to enhance some things for clarity. If you only have one channel integration configured, the channel rate tester will be pre-selected for that one channel. And we link to your Airbnb tax dashboard now if you're running a Airbnb test. Make sure to look at, and thoroughly read, that Airbnb tax dashboard if you haven't before. It is extremely helpful for seeing your tax situation.
The property ordering page has been enhanced for clarity and accuracy as well. Great feedback on that from everyone!
Channel Bridge has had several more updates. The Dutch (.nl) version of Airbnb is now supported in Channel Bridge, and we also updated the import logic for VRBO bookings to skip bookings with no traveler info.
As usual, users continue to test the flexibility of our widgets! We've gotten great feedback on how properties should be pre-selected if a property key parameter is detected, so we added that. Widgets now support the or_propertyKey parameter and will pre-select the property drop-down if detected.
Bug Fixes
Hosted websites not showing correct property order. We noticed that our recent property ordering feature was not displaying correct on external websites (such as the properties menu). Not sure how that made it through testing, but it's fixed now!
Accommodation amenity not spelled right. Now fixed. OwnerRez is a giant system with many emails, templates, website, pages and so on. If you run across a misspelled word, please let us know. We like to be accurate but we don't see it all.
Phone number type hiding behind number. When editing guest phone numbers, the mobile/home/work selector was wonky looking. That has now been fixed.
Duplicate inquiries being created. We discovered an issue where some guests with slow internet connections were smacking the "Send Inquiry" or "Book" button on the Book Now widget over and over again because they thought it wasn't working - it was, just slow because of their internet connection. When that happened, 10 or 12 inquiries might be created under the covers. We now show a working indicator and disable the button.
FloridaRentals reporting monthly rates instead of weekly. This has been fixed. No need for you to correct your rates; the API should now push the right indicator.
System alerts not showing right culture (currency/date) format. Depending on where system alerts were sent from, some alerts were reverting back to US-based culture settings and not the user-defined culture settings. This has been fixed.
