I setup my rate structure, and experimented with various additional surcharge options, and I believe this can work so far.
For Billing Settings, is there a way to revise the first payment due date?. Today I do not require up front payment, because I have people who can book several months in advance but I do not want to collect any money until 60 days in advance for first payment, 30 days in advance for balance (plus security deposit at that time).
Any suggestions?
I was thinking perhaps of changing my policy to work with OwnerRez.
Hi Jon,
Unfortunately, there isn't a way to set the billing settings to not collect a payment up front. If you enable the 'check' payment method, your guests could accept and finalize the quote using that, and then you could cancel the pending state. When someone accepts a quote with check payment, the system puts the booking into a [x] days 'pending' state until their payment arrives. That would sorta kinda get you what you wanted but it would probably be confusing.
I can push this to the dev team as a feature request, but I'm not sure it would be approved. I have, personally, never heard of an owner that didn't require a payment up front to hold the booking.
I'm curious... If guests were able to select dates from your website and book directly, without interacting with you or receiving a quote, would you let anyone do that without submitting a payment? I'm thinking longterm for when our website/booking integration is finished how this type of policy might affect that. I suppose you could limit a no-payment booking to just the people you sent quotes to.
-Michelle
Hi Michelle,
You raise excellent points. I'm moving from a very manual process to a nearly automated one with your solution, and have to re-think the process. The way that I do things today, if someone wants to rent 6 months from now, to "lock in" their rental I have them sign the rental agreement and send it back to me. Those who aren't interested won't sign and return the agreement. They then pay 1/2 60 days prior, and the balance + security 30 days prior. It's all done through checks. Since people can cancel with rentals so far off in the future, I didn't want to hold money unnecessarily.
That's today. And if I have bookings already in 2013 that I need to enter, with that current practice in place, I don't want to shift gears on those renters. Moving forward, I can probably just change my policy to work the way the tool works- because as you say if the benefit of this site is that people can book directly, without interacting with me as they do now, how do they "lock in" their rental. Could that be however by just providing a credit card to be put on file, as that is how it works with on-line hotel bookings?
On another note, I just received notice that my trial is ending soon... if I need more time to experiment with bookings/etc. to understand the process/tool before committing is there a way to extend by another 15-30 days?
During the quote acceptance process, the guest does have to accept the renter agreement. That's one of the pages that they have to look at and accept. Your renter agreement is shown and they have to sign their name before moving to the payment part.
I have extended your trial for another 30 days. You can see your new trial ending date under the My Account menu.
Thanks Michelle, appreciate it. I'll continue investigating. What I need to just confirm is that for any existing bookings we have for 2013, if I transfer those over I'll be able to do it in a "cost neutral" way, to preserve the integrity of our current system, even if it means work-arounds.
In terms of fees, we don't charge anything for bookings created within the trial period. So you can add as many of your bookings to the system as you want right now and they'll be free.
In terms of your existing operations - guests who have been told that their payments are due 60 or 30 days from arrival - our system shoudl be able to accomodate that smoothly.
You can create Scheduled Payments for any booking. So after entering those bookings, you would schedule their credit card to be processed at 60 and 30 days from arrival. Same with the security deposit - those can be scheduled too. You would have to have their credit card information to do this. Perhaps you can call and ask for it?
Or I think I can just put in receipt information for checks provided, if I'm not using credit cards, right? I will play around with it - this has been helpful thank you.
