Note - for brevity, will just refer to VRBO to represent all Expedia Group brands in the copy below.
Inquiries:
You will receive an email inquiry from VRBO and will need to respond to that inquiry by email.
You will not be able to send a ‘special offer’ like you can in Airbnb. The only way to do so is to amend your rates in PriceLabs for those dates, then save and sync now, then let the guest know the rates have been updated. You would then need to change the rates back after an agreed period if required. Please note, occasionally API issues may delay the updating of prices. It is always best to check that rates have been updated by checking your property's VRBO listing.
If a guest inquires via VRBO, then contacts you directly and books with you using the same phone number and email address held by VRBO, then VRBO will charge you a 10% commission for that booking because they have access to booking info in Felix. If you want to book a VRBO guest in directly if they contact you, make sure you use a different name and email address to avoid this.
Bookings:
The booking will be sent across to Felix from VRBO and the credit card will automatically be sent to Stripe.
Please note, the guest will separately pay a service charge to VRBO at the time of booking – this is completely separate to your side of the booking and is an agreement and transaction between the guest and VRBO only.
An auto action will add a negative refundable security deposit charge to the booking straight away. Because VRBO shows guests exactly what they can expect to pay, we send the security deposit information across. However, because we only withhold security deposits, and we want to process automatic payments for the remainder of the booking, we therefore don’t want the security deposit included in the invoices charges. If you want, you can manually delete both items from the invoice charges (the security deposit and the balancing negative item).
An hour later, an automatic payment will be processed. If check-in is 30 days away or less, then full payment will be processed. If check-in is more than 30 days away, a 50% payment will be processed, and a pending balance payment will be added and will automatically be processed 30 days before check-in.
If the auto payment fails, you will be notified by email. You will then need to contact the guest to chase this up. If you are unable to process payment after an amount of time you deem appropriate (we would suggest 48 hours), then you will need to cancel the booking by changing it from ‘confirmed’ to ‘cancelled’ on the ‘Summary’ tab. This will cancel the booking at VRBO and process a refund of the service charge from VRBO to the guest. If you want your cancelled bookings to be clean in the backend, then you can delete all charges and payments from the booking.
You will receive notification from Stripe when payment has been made.
You can also check your ‘Financials’ dashboard to keep track of deposit payments.
The guest will receive the following automated emails:
- Duve Guest Portal email
- Security deposit and terms and conditions email
The booking will be sent to Duve.
The guest will receive a confirmation email from Duve straight away.
According to your settings, a pre-check-in email will also be sent straight away if check-in is within the specified timeframe.
The booking will be sent to Operto Teams and a check-out clean will be created and auto-assigned according to task assignment rules. Any other task rules you have set up in Operto Teams will also be instigated automatically.
Security Deposit:
The security deposit will be withheld from the card on file 1 day before check-in. Because withheld payments get cancelled after 7 days in Stripe, if the booking is longer than 5 nights, the system will re-process the security deposit every 7 days until check-out.
The guest will receive any other auto communication set-up in Duve, including their instructions for check-in automatically once they have completed pre-check-in.
All communication with guest should happen via the Duve Communication Hub.
Guests will receive pre-check-out via Duve the day before check-out, including a review request.
The security deposit hold will be released 7 days after the final hold.
Extra charges can be added to the booking, or the booking extended at any stage, but please note VRBO will charge you a 3.3% commission on any extra charges added to the booking.
You will be invoiced by VRBO at the beginning of the month for all bookings which checked out in the previous month.
Cancellations:
Cancellations are as per your standard policy – no refund of any payments made, but no further payments to be made after cancellation.
If a guest wants to cancel and accepts your cancellation policy, then you will need to cancel the booking by changing it from ‘confirmed’ to ‘cancelled’ on the ‘Summary’ tab. This will cancel the booking at VRBO. You will also need to amend the total booking charges to reflect the payments made, ie. the cancellation fee.