We hope you have guests enjoying National Road Trip Day on their way to your properties...
Before they arrive, squeeze in some time to peruse our latest product update, providing comprehensive details of this week's May 24th release with 13 updates.
Enhancements & Tweaks
SMS Sole Proprietorship Campaign Implemented (BETA)
As we continue to improve the SMS Brand Registration process to work within the ever-changing regulatory environment, we are now in beta with a new Sole Proprietorship Campaign option. Not everyone operates as an LLC or Corporation, so Sole Proprietorship is becoming another option for users who operate as one, allowing them to properly register their SMS Brand for approval with The Campaign Registry (TCR). The TCR works with North American mobile operators and companies in the messaging carrier business to register Application-to-Person (A2P) text messaging Campaigns.
If you're a sole proprietor and have previously been unable to utilize SMS messaging and have questions about this option, contact us for assistance.
Learn more by reading our SMS Overview support article.
Latitude and Longitude Added to the OwnerRez v2 API
Many partners and prospective partners alike work to provide solid API integrations for OwnerRez users through our APIs, particularly the newer OwnerRez v2 API. One upcoming partner asked if we could include latitude and longitude geographic coordinates in the v2 API to provide property locations (depending on OwnerRez user preferences). We obliged and that info is now available!
Learn more by reading our API for Apps Overview support article.
Bug Fixes
Don't Generate Door Lock Codes for Quote Hold Blocks. This edge case occurred when a user sent quotes using the hold dates option to block the calendar, holding it for guests to complete the booking, and experienced door lock code failures (and received corresponding OwnerRez system alerts) for each quote. We have fixed this bug to no longer generate door lock codes for quote hold blocks.
Don't Include Autogenerated Range Descriptions for Surcharges on Long Stays to Avoid Description Limit Issues. This was an edge case where a user received a "The field description must be a string with a maximum length of 384." error. Due to the length of stay duration of this quote (over six months), the generation of the Rent description field exceeded the character limit of 384 characters. We fixed this bug to truncate quote description fields so that they no longer exceed 384 characters.
Don't Try to Create Door Codes for a Booking That Will Be Canceled. One user experienced a door code being generated even though the booking was already canceled. We have fixed this bug to no longer generate door codes for canceled bookings.
Fix Broken Link in Card Processing History Deposit Column. Some users experienced links not working correctly when they clicked on the link for credit card processing information in the Deposited On column in the Deposits section of OwnerRez. This bug has been fixed and in-app links in the Deposited On column in the Deposits History section now work correctly.
Fix Guest Selected Check Payment Method Isn't Saved. This impacted users with offline payment methods, such as check or custom payment. For a while, if a guest chose one of those options as payment during the checkout process, the payment method selected did not save property on the Booking overview tab (i.e., the offline payment method was set to None). It didn't affect payment processing because that was handled offline as usual, but the type wasn't stored for reference by the user. This bug has been fixed to carry through the selected offline payment type by the guest on quote acceptance.
Fixed Host Fee Display on Booking Overview Tab Wasn't Updating. After enabling the Airbnb Transaction Sync, the Airbnb Host Fee was correctly displayed in the Expense tab of bookings, but the Host Fee was missing from the My Net Financials section of the booking Overview tab. This bug has been fixed and Airbnb Host Fees will now display correctly on both the My Net Financials section of the booking Overview and the Expense tab of bookings after users enable Airbnb Transaction Sync.
Fixed Unicode Characters In Messages Could Cause Guest Body Snippet to Fail. Some users that included Unicode characters (An international character encoding standard providing a unique number for every character across languages and scripts.) in their SMS and Airbnb messages experienced message display issues. Unicode characters are now validated, and SMS and Airbnb messages will be displayed correctly.
Handle Case Where Airbnb Property is Disconnected From API But User is Still Connected. An OR user disconnected and reconnected their property on the Airbnb app but could not reconnect fully and experienced an Airbnb permissions error while attempting to reconnect the property in the OwnerRez app. We have fixed this bug to trigger a full sync allowing the property status to change to Inactive and allowing users to change the property mappings to reconnect the property to Airbnb in the OR app.
Remove Yahoo Maps From Property Location and Field Codes/Messaging. Yahoo Maps service closed a good while back, and the option to link to a property location in Yahoo Maps has now been removed from the OwnerRez property location page, field code options, and message templates.
Respond to API Quote Tests With a 400 Error Instead of a 500 Error if the Details Are Not Quotable. To return more useful errors, OwnerRez is now responding to API Quote test errors with 400 Bad Request response status codes (The server cannot or will not process the request due to something that is perceived to be a client error.) rather than 500 Internal Server Error response codes (The server encountered an unexpected condition that prevented it from fulfilling the request).
Skip Surcharge/Discount in Houfy Rate Feed When It Should Never Apply Based on Criteria. To enhance the Houfy rate feed speed, OwnerRez determined that property surcharges and discounts could be skipped in the rate feed if they have never been applied.