Another week, another update. Make that 22 updates. 😇
Let's run through it...
New Features
Ethernet is now an amenity that can be selected in addition to the others. It does not replace Internet or Wireless/WiFi. This is useful because some users want to point out that their internet handles Wireless/WiFi connection in addition to hard-line ethernet connections. Business travelers often look for the hard-line ethernet type.
You can now order properties explicitly in OwnerRez. For a long time, users have wanted to order by different types of fields (codes, internal names, external names). Forget all that... You can now specifically set the internal and external order of properties.
Head on over to the Properties menu, click the Display Order button and you'll get two drag/drop lists. Drag your properties around and click save.
Internal and external are exactly what you think they are - internal is inside of OwnerRez's control panel and external is what guests see on public facing features like websites or widgets.
When downloading renter agreements as PDF or showing them on HomeAway API, we now fully render your account information instead of the field codes. Before, the renter agreement might have shown "the owner {MYFULL}" but now it will say "the owner Joe Blow". This so that the agreement can show the owner info when the guest previews it as a sample, even before they go to sign later on. To be clear, we do not render any email address or phone number fields for privacy purposes.
You can now check the DNS records on your hosted website directly from OwnerRez. Wondering why an SSL certificate hasn't been generated or why the live domain name didn't map over yet? Pull up your hosted site, drill in and click the Check DNS button right there by the location fields.
This will show you what OwnerRez sees when we look at your domain name. We'll tell you whether it's configured correctly or something is off. If it's off, you'll see the IP address that we see.
Enhancements and Tweaks
Why get 12 months of spot rates when you can get 24 months instead? Our spot rate import (ie. with channels like Airbnb) now automatically scoops up 24 months of rates at a time instead of 12. To be clear, this is the manual one-time import on spot rates, not an API integration, dynamic pricing or anything else.
Listing Quality Analyzer (under the Tools menu) now checks longer time periods when analyzing rates even if min/max rules are set. This helps scenarios where rates are valid for longer periods of time but the min/max rules don't allow those rates to be used or applied.
On the Email History report, the To filter is now a type-ahead of guest names and email addresses. This allows you to quickly narrow down a guest by name or email instead of guessing or looking elsewhere.
Not quite sure how Katie's name is spelled? No worries, just type a few characters and see what comes up.
Speaking of guests, we also added a Status column to the guest Related Activity list. This helps clarify the type of bookings or quotes you're looking at, for instance when there are several cancelled. You can filter on it as well using the filter button above the list.
There are a lot of lists and options in OwnerRez. Your API integrations show a running log of Sync Actions for instance - we do this to give you transparency into the process. However, sometimes you're hit with information overload and can't find what you need because the information you don't need is in the way. To help with this, we added some filter options to the Sync Actions list on API integrations. Want to find where a sync with Airbnb recently error'ed? You can now do that.
We clarified the Tax Registration Number fields to point out that max length only applies to VRBO, not Airbnb. Speaking of Airbnb and taxes, check out this new tax article specifically for Airbnb taxes.
On the Email History report, we updated the Entity ID filter box to automatically strip extra text from the number that is entered.
Bug Fixes
VRBO reviews not downloading in Channel Bridge. VRBO changed the data format of their Reviews, under the covers, and Channel Bridge could not download them. This was fixed.
Booking total in Tax report. The Tax Summary report showed conflicting booking totals when bookings with no tax results were selected based on specific listing sites (eg. Airbnb) versus all listings sites. This was fixed so that all booking totals would show even if the taxable charges were zero regardless of the listing site selected.
Property URLs with hash fragments. On certain widgets, property URLs were improperly appending parameters after the fragment (ie. hash tag portion) which led to incorrect results. This is now being detected dynamically.
Search widget property culture. The Availability/Search widget was not honoring the correct currency and culture (ie. date format) settings as set on the property. This was fixed.
Adjacent days when arrival is passed. We fixed triggers to ignore the arrival side on adjacent booking criteria if the arrival date has passed. This was causing issues where an automated email would offer the guest a deal, or point out open days, after the stay had already started.
Seasons not saving. If seasons had old rule values configured from legacy rates, the season would silently error when saving. No error message would show but the season would not save. This was fixed.
Damage Protection settings not picked up from calendar import (iCal) settings. Some of our more proactive users will run Channel Bridge on new bookings before the calendar import (iCal) engine picks up the new booking - this is perfectly fine and Channel Bridge will create the new booking. However, the Damage Protection rule was not beiung picked up from the calendar import (iCal) settings since the calendar import hadn't run yet. We fixed this to check and detect if there are calendar import (iCal) settings when Channel Bridge runs.
Listing Quality Analyzer crashes. We fixed LQA to not crash when there are no rates or when there is an Airbnb channel configured but no properties on the account.
Include Notes option not showing. On the Stays By Date Range report, we fixed it so the Include Notes option is honored even if Include Custom Fields is not selected. Previously, they both had to be selected.
Unknown feedback filter on Emails History. We fixed a bug with filtering by Unknown feedback only on the Email History list. That now works as expected.
