All Forum Posts by: Michael Kugler

@Sayed Jaffar Can't say that I agree with you there. We have just as many jumping the ABB ship as the VRBO ship. It is a matter of control that the homeowners do not appreciate being taken from them. (The fees don't help - that you are correct on) But having the nanny state interfere in your own personal investment is more than a lot of homeowners are willing to concede.

And to the admins - I did my absolute best not to advertise - speak of - direct - anything in my post. I am simply stating that there will be another serious contender coming very soon that will put people back in charge. So before you delete my post please review and see that no TOS was violated.

@Michael Greenberg Yeah, sorry - that was a little too coy wasn't it?

On one hand I/we have had enough and "we" are doing something about it. I work way too hard for my cash to throw it all away on OTAs. 

There are lots of options out there - but you have to go with the search terms people are using. It is as simple as that. 

It would be nice if people typed "Place to rent on the beach in Myrtle Beach South Carolina" but they don't. 

They do it the same as they do anything else - they type and search by the common phrases. "Grocery store" "Bowling Alley" "Barber Shop"

"V-a-c-a-t-i-o-n-R-e-n-t-a-l-s" 

and they do it literally 100s of millions of times each month.

I am going to put the power of the process back in the hands of the homeowners and I am not going to destroy their bank account in doing so. 

About 3 more weeks to go....

Help is coming....

They are all on the same. Depending on the time of resync will determine the amount of time it will update. Ours is on a every 3 hours cycle. The others may be quicker or slower. IOW, there is no platform out there that just continually pings. The only way to get up to the second results is to manually sync - but then that takes time and hassle. Normally, the aurosync is more than sufficient.

@Paul Sandhu LOL

Now - alternatively you could simply make VRBO be the "feeder" ( I would HIGHLY recommend against this - but it is your call )

In that scenario, there is zero cost involved because you have already paid the fees to them. 

Have a good one

@Logan Fast Okay, you are kind of mixing things up - so let's keep it simple.

Hold your hand straight out with fingers extended. 

Your outstretched fingers are the "tools" (AirBNB, VRBO, Vacation.Rentals and so on)

The palm of your hand "feeds" the fingers

If you are going to do this you are going to need a "feeder". You do that by getting a reservation company to handle your properties. I use AvailabilityOnline.com for my 12 condos. Webervations is another as well as OwnerRez. There are tons of them out there and they all do the same thing. Customer name - address - email - phone - dates - rate - etc. 

Once you have the feeder setup and running, simply supply the feed to the tools and everything else will take care of itself. This way you are only concerned with feeding one system.

With iCal it is pretty quick and easy to setup. 

It works off of a master/slave feed - meaning that pretty much any source can be the master. i.e. VRBO, AirBNB, Vacation.Rentals and so on.

Copy the URL for the feed

and then paste it into the reader. In this case this is from our site. Then click Import Calendar and it is done.

The grey boxes are existing bookings and not available for inquiry (searches) and the green are still available with pricing. 

Again, this is pretty standard across the industry.

@Cody Purcell, that is way more than he was asking for. If I understood correctly - he just simply wants to put a reservation on the system and have it update all of his platforms at once which is pretty normal. Plus, iCal is free.