Stayz Introduces Booking Pre-Approvals (well almost)

<![CDATA[In an effort to encourage holiday rental owners to respond quicker and to mimic the already popular Airbnb functionality, Stayz has recently replaced “booking Requests” with a new pre-approval mechanism.  Instead of sending a payment request, owners now click on a new <strong]]>Reply & pre-approve button to generate the payment request.     This generates a screen showing a summary of the pre-approval request:     Owners can check the details are correct or if they wish to make alterations they can navigate to the previous screen to make changes. Next the owner can enter a message to the guest. This is where I got really excited…expecting to be able to populate this field automatically such as is the case with the online payment confirmation email. But alas…there was no such functionality.     But where there’s a will there’s a way, so I created a new enquiry template just for this field – that way I could simply copy and paste the text in. This would eliminate having to send a separate message to the guest.     Alas…my plans were foiled again when I pasted my beautifully crafted text into the message to guest field only to find…     A character count maximum of 500…ARGH! The other issue is that when the email is sent to the prospective guest it appears as a “Payment Request”.  This is really confusing for the guest, as they don’t understand why they’ve been sent a payment request when all they asked for was a quote to stay.  If the email said that they’d been “pre-approved to stay” it would have made more sense. So it’s a case of “close but no cigar” for Stayz on this one. We can only hope that further functionality is in the pipeline. Confused? Why not book a 15 min discovery session and we’ll help to demystify Stayz for you. Cheers, Craig Reid, CEO Profitable Holiday Homes Stayz Booking Confirmation Text is back! A few years back when Stayz introduced online payments they also added some really useful functionality within the Email templates section:     When a guest paid the online payment request the confirmation email would automatically be populated with the text from the template. This was a real improvement for owners as there was no need to generate a separate email with instructions. That was until Stayz made changes to introduce their Booking Request functionality which broke it…thereby returning us to the dark ages of having to not only approve a booking request but to navigate to our templates then generate a separate email with instructions. As an efficiency nerd I lost way too much sleep over this backward step. Having mentioned this improvement to Stayz Director James Cassidy in person a year ago I was delighted when I saw that the text is now pre-populated…only to realise that the dreaded 500 character limit is in place. Whilst I can understand the need to be succinct, 500 characters is not enough to convey check-in instructions to a guest  (even for people like me who have hyperlinks to PDFs in the cloud). So if you think you can tell your guests everything they need to know in under 500 characters, give the “Payment Received (Online Payments)” template a crack! For now I’ll still be sending them a separate email. Sigh. Need help with Stayz? Why not book a 15 min discovery session and we’ll show you how. Cheers, Craig Reid, CEO Professional Holiday Homes  ]]>