You can send custom emails from your personal email program or website to OwnerRez and have the inquiry data parsed out. Our parsing engine looks for a certain set of fields and, if found, will attempt to create an inquiry from the values.
If the sender is a known listing site (VRBO, FlipKey, etc), the parsing engine will continue to use the specific parsing logic for that site.
Fields and Format
Your custom email must include a text body with a specific set of fields in order for the parsing engine to recognize it as an inquiry. The set of fields is as follows:
Property: [value]
First Name: [value]
Last Name: [value]
Arrival Date: [value]
Departure Date: [value]
Adults: [value]
Children: [value]
Pets: [value]
Bedrooms: [value]
Email Address: [value]
Phone: [value]
Comments:
[value]
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Make sure that these fields are included as the text body of the email. The HTML body doesn't matter. You can include that or not - the parsing engine ignores it. The text body is what the parsing engine looks for. If you don't understand the concept of HTML or text bodies, or having both in the same email, talk to your webmaster or programmer.
Example
The following example represents an inquiry from a guest named "John Smith".
Property: ORP12345
First Name: John
Last Name: Smith
Arrival Date: 4/15/2013
Departure Date: 4/21/2013
Adults: 4
Children: 3
Pets: 1
Bedrooms: 2
Email Address: john.smith@email.com
Phone: (672) 555-1212
Comments:
Hi,
I'd love to come to your house! Any availability? The river looks wonderful!
Thanks,
John
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Quick Tips
Wondering why your emails aren't getting parsed? Or maybe you're wondering how much flexibility there is in the format. Here are some more details.
- Each field/value needs to be on a separate line.
- There should not be a space between the field name and the colon. For instance, "First Name :" is incorrect. It must be "First Name:".
- Fields do not have to be in the order shown above. For instance, the "First Name:" line can be further down in the list. "Arrival Date:" could be the top line if you preferred that for some reason.
- Fields do not have to be included at all. For instance, if you don't collect the number of pets in your inquiry form, you can just leave off the "Pets:" line entirely.
- The property field is optional. If you specify it, use the OwnerRez property id, with or without the ORP prefix. You can also put the property id in the email subject, or send the email to the property email address.
- The values for "Arrival Date:" and "Departure Date:" need to be in a date format. The parsing engine recognizes most standard date formats, including mm/dd/yyyy or mmm d, yyyy. If your date format is too strange, the parsing engine will ignore the value.
- The values for "Adults:", "Children:" and "Pets:" need to be numeric. 0, 1, 2, and so on. No letters, commas or other special characters are allowed. If the values for these fields are not numeric, the parsing engine will ignore them.
- The "Comments:" field looks for 20 dashes ("-") as the ending delimiter. You can use more than 20 dashes, but it must be at least 20 dashes long. If there are no dashes, or too few of them, the parsing engine will ignore the field.
Testing
Make sure to test your custom email messages several times and in different ways. For instance, send an email that includes all the fields, then send an email that includes only one or two. When the inquiry is received and processed by OwnerRez, you can check to see if everything was parsed out correctly. Use the Verify tab on the inquiry to see both your original email and what OwnerRez pulled out of it.