Managing guests is an important part of your vacation rental business workflow. Read our Guests Overview article for a high level overview on what "guests" are and how they relate to the rest of the system. Then learn how to create guests in OwnerRez.
But what good is it to create guests if you can't find them? This article will talk about the several ways you can look up guest information in OwnerRez.
- Quickly find a guest from any page anywhere (via the Tools menu)
- Search and filter from the global Guests area
- Search by text from the top search bar
Quickly find a guest from any page anywhere (via the Tools menu)
No matter where you are in OwnerRez, you can find a guest without navigating anywhere else. Yep, that's right! Even in the middle of editing a calendar or reading a report, you can search for a guest by name, email or phone without navigating elsewhere or even changing the page you're looking at.
Let's suppose that you're busy working on something in OwnerRez, and you get a phone call from a potential guest. You recognize the guest's name or number and want to pull up their record quickly without leaving the page you're one. You can do that!
Under the top Tools menu, click "Find or Create Guest".
You'll see a dialog window open on top of the page you were working on. The page will not redirect or change. If you were filling out a form, the form will remain the same.
Enter the name, email or phone number of the guest you are trying to find. As you type, the app will attempt to find matches and show them.
Click on the guest that matches, and you'll see the guest's information displayed in the dialog window. From there, you can make a quick update to the guest's record, copy the information away (such as to an email program to send the guest a message) or close the dialog window.
After you close the dialog window, you can continue working on the page you were on originally.
Search and filter from the global Guests area
There is a global Guests area in OwnerRez that serves as the home for all guest-related information. To visit this area, click the global Guests menu. This will open a full page grid, showing all of your guests.
Over time, as you store more and more guests, this grid will obviously grow. Most users have thousands of guests records; some have tens of thousands.
To dig through thousands of guest records, it's important you understand how to use the grid's filter capability - this is the most powerful place in OwnerRez to search for guests.
You may want to find a specific guest by:
- Partial address (eg. you know the guest's city or zip but not the street)
- Booking volume (eg. you want to find everyone that has booked at least 5 times)
- Amounts (eg. narrow to a min/max total amount)
- Age (eg. look for guests added years ago)
- Contact info (eg. mix and max phone and email filters)
We make that easy by exposing a variety of filters in the grid, and you can mix and max the filters to narrow the results.
At the top left of the grid, click the Filter button.
This will open a set of fields where you select exactly what you're looking for. As an example, let's supposed that you want to find all guests that:
- Were created in 2017
- Have booked at least 1 time
- Have at least 1 email address
Enter that criteria in the filter fields, click Search and get the results.
From there, you can drill into the guest records or perform actions on them in bulk like: delete, merge, export, print and so on.
Search by text from the top search bar
You can quickly find guests via the top search bar. The top search bar is a fast full-text search or "omni bar" that looks across a variety of records in the system and returns information quickly.
To get started, click into the top search bar and enter your guest's name.
Click the enter key and you'll get a list of results back in a few milliseconds. Guest information is mixed into the inquiries, quotes and bookings that you see in the results, so clicking on a result will take you to a inquiry, quote or booking, not a guest record directly.