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I am not sure if it is only me, but I do not see my calendar being updated on the VRBO and HomeAway calendar.

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I am not sure if it is only me, but I do not see my calendar being updated on the VRBO and HomeAway calendar.

I am not sure if it is only me, but I do not see my calendar being updated on the VRBO and HomeAway calendar.

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As Vrbo celebrates their 25th anniversary, we wanted to take a look back at their long history.  Vrbo started the first online vacation rental service back in 1995 and were really the first ones to define what the “vacation rental industry” was.  Until Airbnb came along, Vrbo completely dominated the vacation rental industry and set the tone for everyone.  Even as competitors started to spring up, Vrbo continued to grow and now provides access to 2 million whole-home vacation rentals in 190 countries across the world.

OwnerRez is proud to be one of Vrbo’s few Preferred Partners. We fought hard for channels to work with us directly, and we fought hard for our smaller homeowners users to get access as well.  We meet with Vrbo monthly to ensure OwnerRez is up to date with their latest features and to look for improvements on both sides. Our partnership with Vrbo is strong and we look forward to working with them for many years to come!

We thought it would be fun to take a look back at Vrbo’s humble beginnings and remind our older users about the Good Ole Days.  If you’re new to the vacation rental industry, these old images should make you smile as well.

The following images are courtesy of Archive.org. Click on the below thumbnails to see a larger version.

1997

Here is the very first homepage for Vrbo all the way back in February 1997. No logo, just text. This is the original home page that would ultimately pave the way for the world of vacation rentals for decades to come.

1998

Next we jump forward a year to 1998. They now have some graphics and more text, outlining the benefits of renting from owners for your next vacation. The business benefits are pushed as a new industry emerges.

2000

Two years later, in the year 2000, Vrbo has a more fleshed-out site. They have links to every location you can rent from, statistics and a search bar. They begin to mention that they have thousands of rentals worldwide.

2002

In 2002, Vrbo puts out their first logo, a logo that would stick around for 12 years. The site now has a map of the United States which visitors can use to select destinations visually. They claim to have 9,000 rentals worldwide.

2012

Jumping 10 years into the future, Vrbo is displaying the search bar with other filter options at the top. The map shows multiple versions. They claim 42 million visits per year.  HomeAway is now the parent company.

2014

In 2014, the logo is updated and the site is streamlined. They are still rocking the green colors but the map area has been cleaned up. Vrbo state that they have has no booking fees... how times have changed!

2017

Fast forward to 2017 and the site is starting to look like modern times. Prominent hero unit with search bar in the middle of the page and they've started to shift to a blue color scheme. They begin to tout the 2 million mark.

2020

Finally, we arrive at present day. Their site is clean, they're rocking the new logo, with HomeAway removed, and the new color scheme is adopted site wide. They are promoting their 25th anniversary with free vacations.

We haven’t always agreed with every decision Vrbo has made over the years.  In fact, we’ve held our breath and grimaced along with the rest of you at times.  But it’s undeniable that Vrbo did a huge amount of work decades before many of us got started, and we respect the long path they forged.  We respect and admire that, and we wish them luck as they celebrate this 25th anniversary.

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We've been hard at work for a long time on several large updates. It's taken a lot longer than we thought, so we've started to break out smaller updates that we can release independently.

Over the past couple of months, we've released the following updates:

• Per property scheduled emails. When scheduled emails were released, they were account wide. Any email template you created would be used for all properties. Now you can configure the associated properties per email, sending some emails to one set of properties and others to other properties, or stick with the default and send to all properties.
• Payment reports show scheduled payments. Before, you could only see payments that had already occured. Now you can filter for either already paid payments, scheduled payments, or both.
• Holiday cells are now displayed in a different color on the ribbon and month calendars, so you can easily see which days are holidays.
• Added support for VRBO and HomeAway's new reservation manager interface and JSON API. They are beginning to roll this out, so most people haven't seen this yet. Rest assured, as it rolls out it is fully supported by OwnerRez. There is one thing we are still working through with VRBO/HomeAway and that is triggering the response time statistics when you respond to an inquiry through OwnerRez. We are in active communication with them and hope to have support for this soon.

Yeah, mine is new. Thanks for all your help!

Looks like they grandfathered in old plans: http://help.flipkey.com/hc/en-us/articles/200903347-Subscription-Pricing, but it sounds like yours is new?

Looks like FlipKey has disabled the ability to bypass their booking system.

http://help.flipkey.com/hc/en-us/articles/200903127-Pay-Per-Booking-Plan-#id.fjj8u2l0v5a

Damon

That makes a lot of sense. I actually set up my account and they defaulted to allowing FlipKey payments, and I can't figure out how to turn it off.

I'll contact them!

Thanks

I see those emails coming in. I think I know what's going on now.

Were you recently converted to the FlipKey payments system? Once that happens, FlipKey will block all contact info for the guest until after the guest pays you through FlipKey. They do this to make sure that the guest pays through FlipKey payments and they get their fee, rather than allowing you to process the booking through your own merchant account.

FlipKey also sends emails in a different format that doesn't include contact info, so we can't pull that info out to populate an inquiry.

I'd recommend contacting FlipKey and requesting that they turn off FlipKey payments for your account if you want to get contact info and process the payment yourself.

We do have some work on the roadmap to add integration for systems like FlipKey and AirBNB that will track inquiries and calendar blocks even if OwnerRez isn't processing the payment, but that's a few months out yet.

Ive sent 3 different inquiries today, all still come through as unrecognized emails.

I've looked through your account and several other test accounts we use and haven't been able to reproduce the problem with the FlipKey emails.

Have you seen any other unrecognized inquiries come in or was it just this one? It's possible that there was a momentary corruption issue on FlipKey's end that's now fixed.

Can you send a couple more test inquiries through to I can see if the problem still exists?

Any luck on this?

I just re-sent what I believe is the original

That looks like it's a reminder about a previous inquiry, not an actual inquiry. The email's in a different format from the standard inquiry. It says, "You haven't responded to this inquiry" etc. etc.

Did the original inquiry come through correctly?

Great. I just forwarded it to you.

Damon

They might have, yes. FlipKey has been in a state of flux on their inquiry style and 'book now' program over the past 6 to 8 months. Can you forward the original email you received to our dev@ group? They might have made your new listing part of the 'book now' program which means you can't see or answer guests directly until they book, and you have to log in to respond.

-Michelle

I just set up a flipkey account and it came through as unrecognized email. Did they change something again?

I'm trying to use the custom fields to place a link for the credit card URL for the booking in emails booked on external sites so I can send the guest an email to pay the cleaning fee and capture their card for the security deposit. I'm not seeing how to do that unless I copy the URL for each booking to the custom field??? Somehow I don't think this is how it's supposed to work... can you help?

Is there code available for the ribbon calendar? This would be useful for a traveler if they are looking for availability rather than having to go thru all 8 of my properties individual calendars...

Hi Glenn,

This is because of something new that FlipKey has been doing which we're encouraging users to complain about.

Without providing you any options, they're going to a new "Book Now" option which keeps the guest info hidden and forces all payments through the FlipKey website. We've been contacted by a lot of frustrated users about this.

What we recommend doing is calling FlipKey directly and asking them to stop this practice. Tell them that you prefer getting listings the old way - by email - so that you can process them how you prefer.

There may be an option they can flip on/off for you that puts it back to the old way for you.

-Michelle