GuestBook Host: Here’s What’s New — HomeAway, Push Notifications, Cleaner Info…
This week at GuestBook, we released some really exciting updates. We’re happy to share them with you now.
HomeAway / Channel Manager
For a few weeks now, we’ve been hard at work at rolling out the early stages of our full channel manager. We’re excited to share that while we’re still on that journey, we’ve just launched, in Beta release, a HomeAway integration. This means that for all hosts who also list properties on HomeAway, they can now connect and import reservations from that booking site, to their GuestBook account. Everything in one place. This is important for hosts so they can now manage all guests and reservations from both Airbnb and HomeAway in their host mobile app.
The HomeAway integration however, is not as straight forward as the Airbnb connection. Hosts will need to enter guest information in order for services to still work. When new reservations are imported into your GuestBook account, you’ll be alerted to add a mobile number. We’ll do the rest from there. Currently HomeAway does not provide the guest contact information and thus we have to ask you to take this one minor step to complete the process.
This only effect hosts using automation.
As with all Beta releases, we expect there may still be a few bugs, for example, we’re still ironing out the import of revenue data, to ensure the total net earnings that report on your dashboard are accurate and up to date. We encourage you to sign into your dashboard, connect your GuestBook account to HomeAway, and match your properties. Give it a try. :)
Push Notifications
We’ve rolled out a new way to notify you of important events. In the coming weeks, we’ll be replacing our existing SMS notifications system with push notifications. This is a more reliable way to notify you of alerts that need your attention such as, messages from guests, cleaning reports that are available for your review and new reservations that need a contact information update, to name a few. This system has been fully tested. We encourage you to update to the latest version of the mobile app immediately. For those who choose not to update, we’ll be phasing out SMS notifications in the next couple of weeks so you’ll want to do so before that happens, or you’ll miss critical information, including messages from your guests.
We’ve also added an alerts tab to your dashboard so you can access old notifications that may have been swiped away from your phone screen.
Cleaner Identity Information
All cleaning professionals using the GuestBook Pro mobile app are now asked to include / update a profile photo and their name. This will personalize reports and notifications for hosts using the GuestBook Pro service to automate cleaning. Your cleaning professionals photo will now be included in all reports in the jobs tab on your GuestBook Host mobile app dashboard.
