We finally reached the minimum number of fans required to get a custom URL for my InnFirst.com fan page on Facebook.

Please visit our Facebook fan page and “like” us!

UpperMichiganLakeRentals.com looks like an amazing place to get away from it all in the UP (Upper Peninsula) of Michigan. Featuring incredible fishing and seclusion, the lodge and accompanying cabin offer an amazing combination of tranquility and seclusion.

UpperMichiganLakeRentals.com has chosen InnFirst.com to power their online booking and guest management requirements. They’ve also signed up for the CDGCommerce / Quantum Payment Gateway to integrate payment processing within the InnFirst.com application.

SummerPlaceResort.com is a collection of eight vacation rentals scattered throughout the north side of Holland Michigan, all within walking distance of Lake Macatawa.   The owner, Bob Johnson, keeps the units well maintained and in excellent condition.   He has been serving the vacation rental needs of Holland, Michigan for over 25 years.

InnFirst.com powers the online booking and guest management components of his website.   We also designed the entire site from scratch using WordPress and the Thesis framework.   We chose WordPress and Thesis because Thesis makes it super easy to optimize the site for the search engines with seo friendly urls, custom tags and many other features which give us full control over how the site is viewed and spidered by the search engines.

Our developers are also developing vacation rental listing and management plug-ins for WordPress which will allow InnFirst.com property owners / managers to display their complete rental inventory within their WordPress site.  WordPress has moved far beyond just being a blogging platform, it is now a fully functional vacation rental content management system (CMS) and we are taking full advantage of all the power it has to offer.

Website Performance Report and Metrics

Every site we develop and design is optimized for speed and performance. We do this for two reasons:

1. Search engines now consider page load times and performance as a ranking factor
2. It’s common sense that faster loading, higher performance sites will yield more bookings and inquiries from potential guests visiting your site.   If your site is slow, if your images are not optimized, then you will lose bookings to competitors with faster loading web pages.

Here is a screenshot of the performance report for summerplaceresort.com:

Let me just say that I have no idea how relative novices create a Facebook fan page.  I spent hours on this over the past few days.   It finally is starting to make sense, but I almost gave up several times.

1) Connecting your blog to a Facebook Fan Page is not easy

2) Differentiating between a Facebook profile and a Facebook page is confusing to say the least

3) Understanding and implementing a Facebook application (eg a HTML Box) is crazy confusing

4) Understand “Facebook Connect” and choosing the correct plugin so that your blog posts can appear on your Facebook PAGE wall is nuts and then troubleshooting the various settings to get it to work requires tedious reading of support forums.

And now I have 3 fans of my new Facebook Fan Page.   I need at least 25 fans to get a custom URL, so if you are a Facebook user and if you would be so kind as to click on the “like” button to the right under the Facebook banner that would be great and much appreciated!

This feature is only available to property owners who are subscribed to the employees module.

The invoice status alert allows any “employee” (or any individual or group that you have setup with an account) to be alerted when the status of an invoice changes to “paid-in-full”.

Maybe you are a property owner with a condo at a large resort and you want to send the resort an automatic email with guest details, date of arrival, length of stay and any services ordered.  That way the resort can make sure the room is cleaned and ready for the guest.

Currently this feature is limited in it’s functionality.  You cannot set up one property to send an email to one third party and then a separate property to a different third party.

I can foresee a future where property managers have accounts for all of their property owners and can match that property owner to a property and receive alerts only for their properties, etc.  That is the future, but for now baby steps.

Here is a screenshot of where the invoice status alert can be located:

Some additional work needs to be done on the actual email alert that is sent to the “employee”, that will be done shortly.

Also there is an option to “confirm alert before sending”, this option is not available to PayPal users.  This option, if checked, will pop a modal window when they record a payment that results in a particular invoice changing status to “paid-in-full” asking the property owner / manager if they would like to send an invoice status alert.  If left unchecked, the alerts will be sent automatically with no property owner / manager approval.

Enjoy!

Statistics say that 58% of all the inquiries a property owner receives have already found another place to rent by the time you respond.   Even though we make every effort to stay on time of every inquiry, inevitably we have all had times where we heard the dreaded “Thanks for the response, but I’ve already found another rental.”  Or perhaps we just never heard anything back at all.

Online bookings result in a significant uptick in occupancy because it addresses this problem head on.  Potential guests can secure their dates immediately without waiting for a return phone call or email.

Many property owners are hesitant to try online booking because they have some mystical view that they want to talk to every potential guest on the phone.  The reality is that many in this generation do not want to talk on the phone, they don’t even want to communicate via email.   It is felt that if you do your job and provide the potential guest with a great website, then the website should fully answer all their questions.   Many guests today when they encounter a website that is easy to use, easy to navigate, features large, crisp images, clearly explains the terms and conditions, and displays availability and allows for online bookings, these guests will book online and many times they’ll do it during periods when the property owner is in bed!

I can’t tell you how many online bookings I get overnight.  I’ll go to bed at 11pm and wake up and someone will have booked at 1am.  My guess is that many families, like my own, are busy.  So busy that many times it’s late night before they have an opportunity to surf the web looking for a place for the family vacation.    These days few guests want to send out dozens of inquiries to property owners asking if they have availability for certain dates.  Why? It’s a huge, unnecessary waste of time.  For me, no availability on your website = no sale.  No rate information on your website = no sale.   Small, grainy pictures on your website = no sale. No online booking = no sale.

However, if you’ve taken the time and respected me, the guest, by putting up a great website with great pics, easy to use navigation, clearly defined T&C’s, availability and online booking, then I know the odds are that you will go above and beyond to provide me with a great place to stay and a great vacation and I will book with you without ever speaking to you on the phone or conversing with you via email.

Each the year there are larger and larger percentages of people like me.  We are a demand driven society.  Satisfy the demand,  have a great website,  accept online bookings and you are all set, you will reap the rewards.   These last two years have been the best years in the last ten years for vacation rental owners, but only for those that treat their business and their customers with respect.  The old ways of doing business don’t’ work so well anymore, and for those that still adhere to them, the last two years  have yielded many open dates and / or lots of discounting.  Don’t let that happen to you.  Try the InnFirst.com vacation rental management platform free for 30 days and we’ll show you how to make your business thrive again.

First, I have to give a shout out and thank-you to a new InnFirst.com customer, The Blue Horse Inn in Woodstock, Vermont. They’ve built out an amazing new website (still working on it) and had some great suggestions for a couple of small improvements to InnFirst. Those small improvements gave rise to the enhancements outlined in this email. Here is a screenshot and link to the Blue Horse Inn website in Woodstock, VT.

Online Booking Process

The online booking process has had some modifications that both reduce the amount of screen space required for the reservation details and reduce the number of steps in the booking process. Both modifications make the display more simple and the booking process easier.

The “services” component of the online booking process has been added to step #1 and step #2 removed. The room total box was redesigned and positioned closed to where the number of guests are entered. Also the Show Rate Details area has been changed to a mouseover effect, rather then a drop down effect. The end result is that the interface is cleaner and more intuitive.

Visual Calendar

Using the same mouseover technology that is used in the Show Rates Detail during the online booking process, we were able to incorporate this into the visual calendar as well.

As a property owner myself, it always bothered me that I had to click on the reservation within the calendar to find more information about the reservation such as services ordered, check-in / check-out time, invoice comments, etc. Now it will be possible for you to simply move your mouse over each reservation and a window will appear with additional reservation details. It’s a great time saving people for all of us who value every second of the day! This will launch this week, we are still tweaking the display. Here is a screenshot:

Visual Calendar Rate Quoting

Another feature that I’ve wanted for some time is the ability to quickly quote a rate to a potential guest. There really is no easy way within the current application quote a rate – and that’s a problem!

Later this week (or perhaps next week Monday) we’ll launch the ability to quote rates for individual properties or rooms from within the visual calendar. Multi-unit rate quoting is more complex and will have to wait.

Once it launched you will see a new modal window when making a reservation using the visual calendar. The current modal window looks like this:

The new modal window with Rate Quoting will look like this:

The rate quoting will be general rate quoting it will pull specific rate data, but it won’t allow you to enter services, etc. I am hoping it will allow you to enter number of guests and then refresh the rate quote for those of you that have per person rates enabled. Either way, it’s a big improvement. I’ve been having to load up my online booing calendar to give quotes to potential guests and it gets on my nerves. :-)

Upcoming Enhancements

Reporting. Improved reporting framework that will allow you to create reports that suit your business on the fly.

Amenities Interface. Amenities interface will be replaced with a more dynamic interface that will allow you to enter custom amenities, as well as copy amenities from property to property or room to room.

Automated Communications. Option for property owners to automate confirmations. Currently all property owners must manually send out confirmations or balance due reminders. New options would allow confirmations or documents of your choice to be sent out upon completion of certain trigger events such as payment of reservation deposit or remaining balance due, etc..

Guest surveys. Guest reviews. Automated email surveys that guests can receive at the end of their stay to help track guest satisfaction as well as integration with TripAdvisor to help increase number of positive reviews being posted to TripAdvisor.

Property Management Module. This one will take awhile, but we are well aware that the property managers using the system need some significant new features and reporting before the application will fully meet their needs.

I hope your year is progressing well. If you have any questions or concerns please contact me directly at 877-593-2083 x3 or via email at sales@innfirst.com.

Best regards,

Brent M. Kleinheksel

Owner, InnFirst.com

Online Bookings by InnFirst.com

We’ve done some optimization to the invoices area of the application.   You should notice a dramatic improvement in speed when editing invoices once it is updated to the production server.   Thanks!

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.

    

One of my developers is currently hard at work coding the ability for users to upload files to the system that can then be used as attachments to emails.  For example, let’s say you are traveling and away from your home PC and a guest wants you to email them directions to the property. but you don’t have that particular document with you.   If you plan ahead and store your most important and most used documents within your InnFirst.com account, you can simply choose the file from your repository and attach it in an email to the guest.

Another feature that is more of a “nice to have” type of feature that will streamline guest communications are appended email responses.  For example, for every vacation rental guest that books a reservation I have to manually send them a confirmation email.

Thus I have to manually type out:

“Dear ____, thanks for the recent online reservation.   Please find attached your confirmation in adobe pdf format.  Please read it carefully.  If you have any additional questions or concerns, please call me at _______.   Thanks again for your business!

Best regards,

Brent M. Kleinheksel”

Now, with the “Appended Responses” feature,  I will be able to save this response and simply append it to my email making it a much quicker way of communicating with my guests.

In the future, we will take it the final step and allow property owners and managers the ability to automate their communications with guests.  It’s a not a feature that is in real high demand among smaller property owners and managers, but for my clients with >20 properties they’ve voiced a need for more automation, and it’s something we are definitely planning for as the software adds more features to support clients with greater numbers of properties / rooms.

Hate to break the news my vacation rental friends, but odds are that your vacation rental website needs improvement.    I can hear the cacophony of disagreement already.

“I am full from Memorial Day to Labor Day every year, my website is just fine!”

“My guests love the Beach Boys background music on my website”

“I don’t want guests to view my availability calendar online, I want them to call me, if they call me I always get the business”

“My pictures are not blurry or dark, they work just fine on other vacation rental sites, I get hundreds of inquiries every year”

…and the list goes on and on and on.

Vacation rental owners have to be the most defensive lot of people I have ever encountered.  Maybe you all are defensive because you think someone is trying to sell you something or maybe the truth hurts.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that I’d say 90% of all vacation rental owners are leaving money on the table as a result of having a poor website.

10 years ago it was still possible for a vacation rental owner to slap together a simple HTML website using Dreamweaver or FrontPage.   Today – not so much.  Today you are probably more likely to sign up fro a domain and then use a website creation package from your registrar or from your web host.   These sites offer templates and then the site owner uploads photos and / or graphics and the software spits out a website.  The quality of the website is largely dependent on the quality of the software and the time the property owner invests in learning the software.

How do you know if you have a bad vacation rental website?

1. Have you ever tried to display your website with different browsers?  Try it out on Internet Explorer and FireFox and while you are at, try Google Chrome as well.
2. When was your website originally created?  If it’s over five years old, then odds are it’s too old and needs updating.
3. Do you utilize any sort of gallery software to allow potential guests to quickly browse the photos of your unit(s)?
4. Do you offer exterior, interior and grounds photos of your units?
5. Do you offer an updated availability calendar?
6. Do you offer an online booking application?
7. Are you a member of the local chamber of commerce and better business bureau?  do you display their logos on your website?
8. Do you have free google analytics code on your web pages to track the success of your marketing campaigns?
9. Do you have a logical menu system prominently displayed? or do you try and cram all information on to one page?
10. Do you have an actual web form where guests can submit questions? or do you just list your email address?
11. Do you lists your rates?  Do you adequately explain your reservation, deposit and cancellation policies?
12. Do you describe the local area and any activities that are available?
13. Did you stage your unit when the pictures were taken?
14. Are your pictures >3 years old? If yes, they probably need updating.
15. Do you offer online floor plans?
16. Do you offer virtual tours or at least a video or two of the property?
17. Have you checked your website for broken links?  EVER?

Every day, I encounter website after website that needs significant improvement.   A website is the single most important marketing tool you have, yet most vacation rental owners give it only a passing thought at best.

Why not let us give you an assessment of your website?  The only we will try to sell you is the importance of using an online booking and guest management application.  If InnFirst.com is not right for you, we can suggest others.   If your website needs improvement, we can do that as well, and usually we can do it very inexpensively.   But our primary business is vacation rental software, so while we will gladly take your money and fix up your website, we don’t really care where you get the work done, we are just telling you what needs to be done for you to fill up your units at the highest possible rates while spending less time doing it.

Some new features will be rolling out in the next 7-10 days, including:

1) Customizable visual calendar.  This is a feature on the back end where property owners / managers can quickly view, at-a-glance what their reservations are looking like over the next couple of years.

The problem exists only for property owners / managers who have more than 8 properties and also use large monitors.  The current size of the calendar is fixed.  Thus if you have more than 8 properties or rooms and you use a large desktop monitor at a high resolution, the calendar doesn’t maximize the use of your display size.

The enhanced calendar will automatically size to the height of your screen.  However, the property owner will also be able to set the row height.  This will allow users with large screens and many properties to display a very large amount of properties without having to scroll down to view the remaining units.

Additionally, once that is complete we will be working on options to expand the calendar horizontally that will allow more dates to be viewable without having to scroll forward.

These are some great enhancements and I have Frank at MiamiVacations.com to thank for the suggestions.

2) The second set of features might not launch for a couple of weeks or more yet, but these features will allow a property owner / manager to display additional information about the guest and reservation on the visual calendar by simply mousing over the reservation.  This will be a nice time saving feature for the property owner to quickly view the full guest name and contact data, as well as important information on the status of the reservation, remaining balance due, security deposit, etc.

3) The third set of visual calendar features that are still probably a month away are visual calendar rate quoting.   Many times I have guests who call and want a quote.  There isn’t currently a real easy way to do this in the system.  However, in the future you’ll be able to use the visual calendar to easily obtain a rate quote for a property or room.

4) New reporting framework.  We will also be rolling out a new reporting framework which should simplify the process of creating and saving custom reports.    Each user tends to have custom reporting requirements.  We’d live you to have the ability to mine your own data and create reports that that meet your needs.  Having to contact us for custom reports is time consuming and unnecessary.

5) Rates that vary by length of stay.   We are really close to completing testing on some enhancements for our rates.  Many property owners and managers have rates that vary by length of stay.  These discounts are usually in addition to weekly and / or monthly rates.  For example some property owners give a 10% discount for stays >10 nights and 20% discount for stays >20 nights.  Our current system supports daily, weekly and monthly rates, as well as per person rates, but we don’t support rates that vary when certain stay triggers are tripped.  This will soon change.

I hope you continue to enjoy the InnFirst.com system.  I certainly am enjoying working with all of you and am really happy at the number of new customers who continue to sign up and use the system each day!

How to Setup Rates – InnFirst.com Vacation Rental Software

Vacation Rental Software by InnFirst.com. This video shows how easy it is to setup seasonal rate bands and then apply them to a graphical calendar.

This is my first Camtasia video, so please forgive any quirkiness in it’s production.  I will get better, much better as I produce more videos and start using scripts, etc.

Today I got a call from a new trial user requesting an enhancement to the system.  During the course of that call he told me that another firm was trying to woo him away from InnFirst.   However, they used a pricing model which charged a percentage of every reservation that was transacted using their system.  This did not sit well with the customer due to the cost.

While I understand the benefits to the technology company of such a revenue model, I don’t see any benefits to the actual customer.  For my own vacation rentals I’ve worked hard over the past 10 years to build up a huge network of repeat and word of mouth business.  My website is robust and I understand how  to effectively market my rentals.  WHY IN HELL WOULD I PAY A COMPANY 1.5% – 3% OF EVERY RENTAL TO USE THEIR SOFTWARE? Maybe I’d pay them .5% for every new rental they could verify they brought me, but I’d pay them nothing for existing rentals.

Assuming $250,000 a year in sales I would be paying them at a minimum $4000 a year to use a simple vacation rental management platform?    I think over the long term companies like LiveRez and Escapia and any other product that prices as a percentage of revenue will ultimately face too much competition from companies like InnFirst.com which price at a reasonable level according to the number of rooms or properties under management.

True, they can make the short term argument that they offer more features than what InnFirst.com currently offers, but that gap only exists in the short term.  We are putting out new functionality on a weekly basis based upon the input and requests of our rapidly growing customer base.  It’s not rocket science to put out an on-demand vacation rental CMS, or offer enhanced distribution methods or offer additional search / sort / booking options…it’s just not rocket science.  It just takes time and money and a great understanding of the market.

I am quite confidant that someday when a VR Manager takes a look at the InnFirst.com platform and compares our pricing to that of LiveRex or others, versus our features, and realizes “wow I can save $xx,000 a year or more by switching to InnFirst.com and have similar functionality?”  It’s a no brainer.  I’ve got to laugh at these companies with their big payrolls, sales staffs, etc..  I just don’t think they understand the true metrics of SaaS and how to build a long term, sustainable business model on the Internet today.

Take notes my friends, I’ll show you the way.

For all of you PayPal lovers out there,   today InnFirst.com officially supports PayPal.

To integrate within the InnFirst.com application, you must first have a PayPal Business or Premier account and follow the instructions I’ve posted here:

http://support.innfirst.com/entries/117060-how-do-i-setup-paypal-to-integrate-with-innfirst-com

Once you’ve completed those instructions, guests will be able to book online and pay the reservation and security deposit using PayPal.  As a property owner you have the ability to approve / void PayPal reservations, as well as invoice guests using PayPal for remaining balances, etc..   ALL FROM WITHIN THE INNFIRST.COM APPLICATION! Actually, that’s not completely true, you will have to login to your PayPal account to capture or void payments and issue refunds.  But behind the scenes all of the results of your actions within your PayPal account will update within InnFirst.com.

The implementation is very tight.  Granted, it’s not as tight as for merchant accounts, but that is the fault of PayPal not our development team.    It’s still a very nice option for smaller property owners or for European property owners who might not want to bother with the hassle of obtaining a merchant account.

Instructions for using PayPal within the application will be forthcoming soon.

Note this support is for PayPal Website Payments Standard

We have no short term intentions of support PayPal Website Payments Pro or the PayFlow products.

So I am on a flight RIGHT NOW and I am on the Internet writing this blog entry and making changes to guest reservations for my properties using InnFirst.com.   That is the future folks.   Soon with ubiquitous Internet you’ll be able to keep up with your reservations anywhere in the world….as long as you are using a web-based application to manager your vacation rentals.

Using my old client based application, I would have to wait until I get back to my office where the reservation system was and then catch up on all the email requests, reservation changes, new reservations, etc…   Now I am getting that all done while on the plane!  No catchup work when I get back to the office.  Now that is beautiful!

Someday we are going to put out a wordpress plugin for InnFirst.com.  But until we do, wordpress users should know that InnFirst.com currently supplies HTML code for embeddable widgets and booking buttons  that can easily be placed anywhere in your wordpress blog or website.

However, I can envision some really nice functionality that a vacation rental management and booking calendar plugin for wordpress would contain:

• single sign-on with wordpress
• reservation notifications
• property listings / photos

The real meat of the application would still be hosted in InnFirst.com servers, but once your properties are all set up, some of the functionality could be present on wordpress only requiring the property owner to occasionally flip over to the application to process payments, send out invoices, etc.

To sign-up for the free, no credit card required, 30 day trial of InnFirst.com please click on the image below:

InnFirst.com will soon launch support for PayPal.  A vacation rental property owner will be able to select PayPal as their preferred payment method.    The integration of PayPal will allow guests to choose PayPal to pay for their initial reservation deposit.  Once the deposit has been paid via PayPal, the property owner will be notified they they need to login to their InnFirst.com account to confirm or reject the new reservation.

The property owner will confirm the reservation by being taken to PayPal, logging in to their PayPal account and “capturing” the fund which were sent.  If the property owner wishes to reject the reservation, a similar process will be followed except the property owner will “void” the payment.

InnFirst.com will communicate behind the scenes with PayPal to update account payments / voids / refunds, etc.

The one disadvantage to PayPal is that the property owner never receives the guest credit card details.  Thus the guest needs to be invoiced when the remaining balance is due.

We are excited to launch support for PayPal website standard payments and looking forward to supplying more details next week!

For better or for worse, we’ve removed the credit card requirement to qualify for the free 30 day trial.  I think it’s a good thing as I really want the little guy, the property owner with just 1 or 2 properties, to try the software to see what a huge difference it can make in terms of increasing bookings and productivity.

Sign up for the free, no credit card required, 30 day trial today!

InnFirst.com is proud to announce the launching of their vacation rental software affiliate program.  Rather than reinventing the wheel InnFirst.com has partnered with iDevDirect.com to offer affiliates a robust affiliate program with all the tools to help affiliates sell the InnFirst web-based, vacation rental software application.

Best of all affiliates will enjoy 25% payouts on all sign-ups provided the customer turns into a paying customer.  The good news is that 90% of all InnFirst.com trial signups turn into paying customers.

Click on the link below to get more details and to signup:

InnFirst.com Affiliate Program Details and Sign-up

• improved speed / functionality for List Reservations page, including new column for Balance Due date with sorting feature
• Removal of credit card requirement to qualify for free trial
• Invoice Notes tab will now highlight in red if notes are present
• Invoice “Balance” and ” Deposit” buttons fixed to show correct amounts.  “Deposit” button was too confusing as there are reservation deposits and other deposits, so it was renamed to “Confirm”.    Confirm balance is the amount required to confirm the reservation.
• Bank transfer option added as a payment method option.  Property owner / manager can enter banking details and have those details displayed to guests that choose that option.  Primarily for European customers.
• Misc. changes to “invoices” that are automatically sent to guests and property owners when a reservation is made

Those items should for sure get launched next week.  Another significant new feature that has been in hot demand is “discounts triggered by length of stay”.  So while we currently support daily, weekly, monthly and per person rates, we don’t support the automatic discounting of rates when certain triggers are met.  A property owner might have a daily rate and a weekly rate and an automatic  10% discount for stays of 3 to 6 nights, or a 20% discount for stays of 14 nights or more, etc..

We hope to get this functionality coded, tested and out the door possibly by Friday of next week, but more realistic is either Monday or Tuesday of the next week.

After giving it some long and hard thought, I’ve decided to remove the credit card requirement from the 30 day free trial.

1. I am seeing roughly 50% of the users who sign up for the free trial, never actually start the trial because of the requirement to enter their credit card information.  Even though the card is not charged, and the user can cancel at anytime from within their account,  many sign-ups simply won’t proceed with the trial when required to enter billing information.

I am not sure if this will cause any increase in paying new customers, but I don’t see any downside.  So I’m willing to give it a shot.

Target for Implementation: February 5, 2010

As a result, I’ve had to update the Terms of Service, the new policy can be found here:

http://www.innfirst.com/terms-of-service.html

Every year our team of vacation rental professionals gets to review thousands of vacation rental websites.   It becomes real apparent, real quick what works and what doesn’t with vacation rentals.   To that extent, our team has decided to leverage our considerable resources to offer vacation rental website design and development services.

We only take on a select number of customers that respect our experience and our understanding of vacation rentals.  We specialize in easy-to-use, easy to maintain, search engine friendly web sites that utilize the latest technologies to deliver large number of inquiries at the lowest possible cost.

Because of our considerable experience and access to very talented, low cost designers and developers, we can generally get most websites out the door for a one-time fee of $3000 to $4000 which would include the design, development and the integration of the InnFirst online vacation rental management application.    There will also be an ongoing monthly maintenance and application fee ranging from $19.99 to $99.99 per month depending on the number of units you own or manage.

If you are interested in learning more about our vacation rental website design services, please fill out the interactive website design questionnaire, save it and email it back to sales@innfirst.com

lodgix_website_questionairre_12_16_2009

Once we receive your completed questionnaire, we’ll probably have a few follow-up questions and then we’ll respond with a full quote and timeline for completion.

We require 50% of the payment upfront before work can begin.

Some property owners and managers have fees that vary and are dependent on the rental charges in the reservation.   A great example of this is travel insurance.    Travel insurance is typically quoted as a percentage of the overal rental charges for the reservation.   Most property managers in coastal regions mandate this coverage unless the guess specifically asks to opt out.

To setup a fee that varies as a percentage of the reservation, please go to the property setup area of the application and edit your property.   Then open the Taxes / Fees / Deposits tab:

Additoinally,  many property managers have some taxes that are not applicable to certain fees.  In the past, it has only been possibly to blanket exempt a fee from all taxes.  Now the property owner can select which taxes apply to the fee.  If none of the taxes apply, then all the boxes can be unchecked, if all of the taxes apply than all the boxes should be checked.