Hostaway updates hostaway.com

Information

When adding an expense or extra to an owner statement, the date field could be left blank. In the next weeks we will release an Expenses and extras management module that will also improve the way they are added to owner statements.

Basically, expenses will be managed in an independent section and they will be automatically added/excluded in owner statements based on Date and Listing condition OR Date and Owner (new!). Among other improvements, this will make owner statements creation smoother and quarterly or yearly reports will be a matter of 2 clicks. We will give more details soon.

Because of that, we need all expenses and extras to have a date. It’s the best practice when it comes to registering these additional expenses or incomes and will also help us build future accounting capabilities.

For past expenses or extras without a date we will auto-fill them based on the assigned reservation check-in dates or owner statement dates, if no reservation was assigned.

Improvement

Listings that have the same address are now shown grouped together, and guests can page through them in the map. If prices are shown, a range will be displayed.

New

This allows owners to maintain their own Vrbo accounts and manage those from a single Hostaway account.

You can connect as many Vrbo accounts as needed to your Hostaway account, and map listings to them. Each listing can be mapped only to one Vrbo account.

To activate this feature in your account, please reach out to support@hostaway.com .

New

This allows the base rate to be inclusive of some mandatory fees, like credit card fee or booking fee. The fees will be included in the base rate anywhere guests can see them, but in financial reporting and the reservation price breakdown they will show separately.

To set this up, go to listings > edit > price & fees > edit a custom fee > mark the include in base rate checkbox.

New

Extras may not always be relevant to guests. For example, it doesn’t make sense to display the Early check-in extra after the guest has already checked-in. That's why we now allow you to decide when to display each extra in the booking engine or the guest portal.

To do so, go to listings > edit > price & fees > edit a custom fee > select from the options in the Appears in dropdown.

Improvement

Information

AIRBNB TAXES MAPPING TOOL SUMMARY (launched during January and early february 2023)

Previous problems with Airbnb taxes:

Airbnb taxes were only partially reported in Hostaway and they needed to be accounted for using the Hostaway internal taxes, which could lead to incompatibility between the two values (Airbnb vs Hostaway Financial reporting) and requires setting up taxes before importing reservations. And in general, it's better to rely on the numbers that the channel sends

Solution

For 2023 we want to fix this and start relying on the specific taxes reported by Airbnb. All taxes will be stored as financial fields that can be used for reporting purposes. For that and to make it compatible with the rest of our system, we have launched a mapping tool that will list all the different specific taxes coming from this OTA to your reservations to map them to one of our standard taxes. We’ve created an accurate default mapping so that you can see where your taxes fall in the new logic. You can change it anytime if needed, and it will apply to all reservations falling in this new logic.

What does this mean?

During early 2023 we have been releasing the Airbnb taxes mapping tool. This process has now been completed and Airbnb reservations with check-in after the 1st of January 2023 will start relying on the data reported by Airbnb and we will stop calculating the taxes for this channel. This means that you will need to review and update the mapping to match your formula configuration. Most likely none or very small changes will be needed. We created an FAQ for this that will be shared with clients together with the above's explanations.

Summary of early 2023 updates

New

Guests can now purchase extras through the guest portal. This applies to reservations coming from all channels, so you can make more per reservation even on your Airbnb reservations, without paying the channel commission. To set up extras, add a custom fee under listings > edit > price & fees, and mark it as non-mandatory. Extras are only available if the listing/account are connected to a payment gateway, like Stripe.

New

No need to go on Airbnb to cancel a reservation anymore. When pressing cancel reservation in the reservation page, a popup shows with the cancellation details - Airbnb’s penalty (if there is one), cancellation reasons, message to Airbnb/guest. After providing the required details, the reservation is cancelled.

New

We implemented the option to have multiple booking engines per Hostaway account. Each booking engine is independent from the rest and can have its own settings, design and listings, as well as custom domains. To create a new booking engine and manage it, use the dropdown in the booking engine settings page next to the save button.

New

Improvement

You can now set auto-tasks to be created at reservation creation or after it. This will make tasks more useful for back-office duties. We also improved the trigger time selector for auto-tasks.