Wow, lots of great new features are launching on Friday! All of these features were suggested by our customers and we listened. It’s not always that easy, but we’ve designed our application to be extremely flexible. Unlike many of our competitors with client-based or dated web-based applications, the InnFirst.com application can introduce new features very quickly – provided they make sense and help all of our customers run their business more effectively and efficiently.
We’ve finished up the coding and testing of the following items:
- Document upload. Property owners can now upload ancillary documents and these documents will then be available for attachment to guest emails.
- Appended Responses. Property owners can now save frequent responses and simply append them to their guest emails. This functionality will streamline guest communications and further decrease the amount of time spent on each reservation. It’s a great new feature, one that I am excited to use for my own rentals.
- Guest Names. Some of you have enabled “per person” rates. This means that your rates vary by the number of guests in the group. However, some were having trouble with guests that would book a property claiming to have (for example) three guests and then actually end up having >three guests in the unit. To help with that a few users requested that the guest be required to enter their names during the online booking process. That functionality is now live on the production server and can be enabled within the “rates settings” area of each property. Likewise, when enabled the property manager can manually enter guest names within the guest control panel.
- Enhancements to Online Booking Process.
- More Information. On the first page of the online booking process there has always been a link to “more information” under the property description. This link traditionally opened up a new window to the designated URL for the property. Now when this link is clicked the additional property information will simply drop down within the page. It’s a simpler interface that does not detract from the online booking process.
- Integrated Rental Agreements. On the next to the last page of online booking process, at the bottom of the page we traditionally displayed the property owner’s cancellation and deposit policy, as well as a box which outlined the reservation deposit required. The guest could not continue with the reservation unless they checked the box which stated that they read and understood the deposit and cancellation policies.This page has been changed. The cancellation and deposit policies will still be displayed, but the box containing the text that outlined the reservation deposit requirements has been removed. The reservation deposit requirements will now be displayed as the last item of the page under a section entitled “Next Steps”.
Most importantly, property owners can now display a generic rental agreement embedded within the page that will be available for downloading and printing. Many property owners have a rental agreement that they have traditionally emailed or mailed to guests for reading and signature. The guest must then sign the agreement and return it to the property owner. Property owners retain these agreements to protect themselves in the event of a chargeback and also to make sure the guest understands all the various terms and conditions of the rental.
Many property owners don’t have a clear answer why they use rental agreements, they simply do it because so many others do. Personally, in ten years of owning eight vacation rentals, I have never had a chargeback and I do not use a rental agreement. However, I do make sure that the guest CLEARLY understands the terms and conditions of my rentals and prominently display this information in my website and on all guest correspondence.
There have been times where a guest has not had their deposit returned as a result of violating my cancellation policy or as a result of damage to the unit. In a couple of instances the guest got upset. However, I simply referred them to their confirmation (which InnFirst.com archives) and to the appropriate area of the website where my policies are displayed. In all instances, the guest dropped their appeals and many times returned as a guest at a later date.
My point is that by integrating a generic rental agreement within the online booking process and adding an additional checkbox that the guest must click to assure that they’ve “read and understood the rental agreement” before the reservation can proceed, the property owner can remove the entire process of having to obtain a signed rental agreement.
In the future we will reinforce this process with the addition of digital signatures, which a guest can sign during the online booking process. The property owner will then have an archived copy of the signed agreement stored with the reservation and available within the guest control panel. We are not there yet, but this implementation is a great step in that direction.
A rental agreement will ONLY be displayed during the online booking process if the property owner has uploaded a rental agreement to InnFirst and designated that document as a “rental agreement” within the system. The document is uploaded to InnFirst and then reuploaded to Scribd, which uses their patent pending iPaper technology to convert the document to flash which allows InnFirst to seamlessly embed the document within the actual webpage. Guests must have Flash installed on their PC to view the document. However, they must also have Flash installed to view the online booing calendar. 99% of all PCs now have flash installed on their PCs.
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