A few beginner questions

I just signed up for my test month, and am anxious to use this service to reduce my time committment to bookings, as well as finally being able to easily take security deposits!


Can I integrate the existing calendar I have on vacationrentals.com or do I have to do that manually? When I take a booking here, will it be able to update my calendar on vacationrentals.com automatically or do I have to do that manually (since homeawayconnect is dead now).

I have 3 properties with nearly identical seasonal booking rates, which are pretty longwinded. Can I copy the rates and make adjustments or do I have to enter it all manually 3 times?

I currently take checks, at least until I get the merchant CC thing set up. I think the process should be that the person can reserve it themselves when they sign the renter agreement, but it expires in a few days if I don't enter a received check in time. I tried a test booking, and it seemed like I couldn't finalize the booking without saying I received a check, and they hadn't signed the renter agreement at that point.

Hi Jacques,

Our system will keep your calendars up to date on a lot of listing sites. We do update VRBO and HA calendars, and so that should keep VacationRentals.com up to date as well since VRBO/HA use one integrated calendar for all three sites.

Unless I'm mistaken, I believe that VacationRentals.com also accepts iCal imports which we provide so you can keep it up to date that way as well. I might be thinking of a differnet listing site though.

At the moment, we only sync OUT not in. So our system will not automatically "pull in" the listings you already have. You can enter those bookings manually, or I can provide you an Excel spreadsheet you can use that we can import for you.

At the moment, each property in our system has its own rate and billing settings so you'd have to enter your rates 3 times.

That's exactly how our system works for owners who do check payments. Create a quote (click Quotes > Add) and fill it out. Then use the Email tab on the quote to send it to the guest. When the guest gets it, they can open it and click to read and sign everything online. The instructions tell them how many days they have to send in the check until the booking is auto-canceled. You can also view the same quote info that the guest sees by clicking Payment Form on the quote directly after creating it.

Hope this helps,

-Michelle

It helps very much. Thanks!

So, I have a few more :).

I have been mainly listing on vacationrentals.com in the past, and that's where my main booking calendar is located. I understand I will have to manually put the data into ownerreservations.com - no problem. But, I just also listed one of my properties with homeaway.com and it has a blank calendar. Should I have my 2 listings "mapped" to keep them synchronized, or should I let the software here push it down to both sites separately? Does it matter if I add the listing sites before or after I manually enter the actual dates booked?

Is there any logic available in the template emails? I like to tell them their checkin and checkout times in an automatically generated email, and weekenders get different times than full weeks. Maybe there's a different way to do that.

Hi Jacques,

I believe that HomeAway will, if you ask them, sync the calendars on their side so that any listing on VRBO, HA or VacationRentals uses the same calendar. That would allow you to only keep one listing updated, which our system can do. But you should be able to update both listings independently as well using our system.

At the moment, we don't have logic in the email templates other than field codes. The field codes allow you to 'drop in' booking, quote or inquiry information so that the email templates looks different for each guest, of course, but we don't have a logic or text language that allows you to do "if else" expressions or things of that kind.

As an alternative, you could craft one email for both and simply say "If your arrival is on Fri - Sun, your check-in time is [x]. If your arrival is Mon-Thu, your check-in time is [x]". That's not quite a nice, but it might do the trick?

-Michelle