Rentals United

Avantages

Au départ, Rentals United m'a été vendu comme un channel manager performant qui me permettrait d'augmenter fortement le nombre de plateformes avec lesquelles j'allais pouvoir travailler et sur lesquelles proposer mes hébergements à la location courte durée.
Il s'agissait de coupler Rentals United à BookingSync qui est notre PMS.

Inconvénients

La synchronisation avec BookingSync est extrêmement mauvaise.
C'est tout simplement un scandale de la proposer en l'état.
Rentals United n'a jamais fait quoi que ce soit pour améliorer la situation alors que BookingSync, de son côté, a toujours fait le maximum pour nous aider.

Avantages

I work remotely as an assistant to a Property Manager who is also a Realtor. It's just the right app we needed to increase the revenue from the leased properties. Booking confirmations are pouring in, you just have to manage it well.

Inconvénients

You just have to read rules and policies for each of the channels, and be subject to their rules. Other than that everything is fine!

Avantages

It makes your life so much better, when pricing and availability can be managed second to second, through a connected PMS.

Inconvénients

Of course there are issues from time to time. To counter this as a con, however, the support is wonderful and always there.

Avantages

The purpose I used Rentals United was to connect with Google Rentals and plenty other Otas, Renatals united connect with.Complete loss of money and waste of timeOut of 12 reservations I got through rentals united in 6 months only 1 really showed up.

Inconvénients

Complete waste of money and completed waste of time.The OTAs I connected with through Rentals United dont seem to screen guests reservations.in 6 months of use I only had 12 reservations and 11 cancellations!I had my calendar dates blocked by guests that never paid and eventually were cancelled by my team or by them selves.I lost money due to blocked dates by bogus guests

Avantages

STRONG POINTS

1. Rentals United is mostly a solid CHANNEL MANAGER with the broadest spectrum of OTAs available on the market. I've connected to most of them, but 5 top performers generate almost all bookings in London.
Still, there were hardly any connection issues after nearly 2 years, and I avoided the nuisance and stress of double bookings and iCals failing, improving my OTA mix and revenue.

2. PRICE

The more properties you have better the price. After our research and having circa 40 units to manage, it was the best value for money as the price is fixed and you know exactly how much you will pay.
You can integrate some external software which I describe below and that costs extra.

3. INTEGRATION WITH OTHER SERVICES

We found external DYNAMIC PRICING integration (Pricelabs, Beyond Pricing or Wheelhouse) and OPERATIONAL APPS (Wishbox, Chekinn, Doinn, HelloHere, SuperHog) great.
For payments for direct bookings, you can integrate STRIPE (a flat fee per charge if generated from RU, free if you take payment manually).

These apps are optional, and you pay extra for them, but we are glad we found them!

Inconvénients

Free FEATURES could improve

1. BOOK DIRECT Free website generator creates one page per listing, but guest cannot search for availability between all your listings, which makes it not very useful. We mostly get bookings from the OTAs, and direct bookings are from returning guests, so it is not a deal-breaker, but it would be great to have this function.

2. GUEST PLANNER is a place where you can see a snapshot of what is happening at your properties: your current reservations, check-in / check-out; You can also communicate with guests there. It's a bit difficult to use when you have many properties - in our case, we used the multicalendar available in the software and integrated external communication service available on RU.

3. GUEST COMMUNICATION - you will receive messages from all platforms on your email, and you can message guests on most platforms (I believe not all, but I'm not sure) from Rentals United directly. Instead we use one of the integrated software providers for that as it allows us to upsell, take pre-check-in data, security deposit, etc. and communicate via WhatsApp, text message, online chat, so that guests cannot miss our messages - not everyone can access their email at all times, so the text message backup is great.

Avantages

We switched to Rentals United and the experience has been awesome! They have excellent customer service, their training is very well organized and helps you feel confident adding new channels to distribution before you are on your own, and their troubleshooting process is so much easier than what we have worked with in the past. We saw an immediate increase in bookings across our hotel channels and haven't had any issues stemming from their software. They have excellent communication and respond very quickly!

Inconvénients

No cons so far! Easy to use, love the layout, good design, increased our bookings and website placement.

Avantages

Great promises zero delivery, huge problems with connections

Inconvénients

We are 100 mill company we manage over 1000 units Very bad communication, not answering our calls not addressing our technical connection problems. Company have lied to us that has connection with bookingsync. Complete nightmare the worst experience in last 6 years

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Rentals United 

Pourquoi passer à Rentals United

Avantages

They have a great idea, but have never quite managed to make it work...

Inconvénients

Some people from Rental United customer service should give them a medal for good work, endurance and exemplaryness, they are really good, for putting up with so many complaints and software malfunctions, and still giving such good service.

Avantages

The best part of this channel manager is the function that allows you to import the properties from Airbnb. It really saves you a lot of time! The setup time to make everything ready from zero 'til you are ready to work is really impressive. Excellent support from their team whenever you may need help or have any issue.

Inconvénients

The only thing that I found missing it's the possibility to insert internal names to the properties like on Airbnb. The amenities for the rooms could have the amenities grouped by type instead of being listed A-Z and a better app for the phone

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Rentals United

Avantages

As a revenue manager working for a property management company in Barcelona (with 100's of units), I could not be happier with Rentals United. They keep on meeting our needs and their CS representatives (mainly [sensitive content hidden]) excel in their duties with such kindness. 10/10!!

Inconvénients

We have had some minor issues that were quickly dealt with.

Avantages

There's really not much positive to say about Rentals United. They do allow us to list our rentals on a variety of channels (VRBO, Booking.com, Expedia) but their product is barely usable in a variety of ways. Really the onl

Inconvénients

Our main interactions with Rentals United are via their API. Our in house PMS software connects to RU and pulls in reservation information, syncs calendars, pricing, taxes, etc. Rentals United API is antiquated (XML only) and barely functional. The endpoints frequently change with no prior warning, and you can tell they have no QA because we'll see that the change was some misspelling of an existing attribute that caused our integration to stop working. We have to depend on a "comments" section in each reservation to pull in vital financial information like how much the guest paid in cleaning and taxes. This information is frequently omitted and RU support just throws up their hands and claims ignorance as to why its not provided. Almost every interaction with support is drawn out and doesn't lead to any positive outcome.

Avantages

Dashboard provide information summary information such as how many properties, how many bookings and how many channels connected. There are more details display on total arrival, bookings the next 7 days and all bookings the past 30 days. Which is quite handy, to have a glance look if we need to search booking arrival within a week.

On Services, Sales Channel, it displays all the channels which is connected and showing any listing errors
Guest planner is a great overview for bookings and you can search bookings on it as well.

On My Bookings, we can filter bookings based on arrival or when the booking is made and also from certain channel, confirmed or cancelled bookings, this information can be exported to Excel file

On my properties, if you work with ResHarmonics, then any data loaded in resharmonics for the properties will be transferred to RU on this page. Where we can view the property page as guest and the link can be sent to guests where they can check the rates and also make the booking from the link

Inconvénients

Can't delete or hide the past sales channel even though we are no longer working with them

There is no error notification sent back to us by RU if the rates or LOS sent to OTA failed. Expedia and Booking.com has maximum 28 days booking window and if by mistakes we send an update, where there is a minimum 3 nights on certain dates and remaining length of stay is 30 days. This update will fail in nights restrictions,but rates will be updated and the minimum nights will revert back to 1 night in Expedia as they don't accept more than 28 days LOS.

Reporting errors, we need to fill the forms online, which takes more time then sending an email to support. It would be easier if we could send an email to support team and auto email response created the case number instead of fillings all the questionnaire.

Support team is great, but it does take time for them to come back and help to rectify the error. You will hear the response within 72 hours since the case is raised

Avantages

Working with Rentals United has been great. I have had anywhere from 8-21 properties live and connected to multiple channels at any one time. I have personally worked with other property management companies, none of which have been able to handle the load and capacity in which we needed. The programming runs very smoothly and when ever I have had questions or concerns, Customer support (my contact at Rentals United), was immediately responsive and helpful. Every single time I had a question, she responded swiftly with information that answered what ever my question was. If she did not know the answer to my question she would immediately track down someone who would be able to help me. There was never a delay in her reply, and her attitude was always upbeat and focused on her client (Me). This made me feel very taken care of, as a customer. From what I have noticed, the customer service team at Rentals United works very much as a full on support team, so even if you have one person dedicated to helping you, you actually have a full team of support behind that one person.

Inconvénients

There was two times in the past 7 months where there was a site outage. I believe that it was for less than an hour each time ( don't quote me on this it may have been less). The only thing I didn't like was the amount of time between the outage and the email to notify me. Although it was done pretty quickly, in the technological age we are in, we all want immediate actions/results. So if there was a way to make these come in, in real time that would be great. Other than that, my programming was completely unaffected by any outage. The support team was there to deal with my panic and everything continued to run smoothly.

Avantages

Don't exist !!! RU don't add anything to a good PMS apart connections. And if connections are not effective .... is a waste of time and money !!!!!

Inconvénients

Terrible customer support. Not Italian speaking (I speak English everyday but when I'm a customer I want someone speaking my own language) not skilled and no knowledge of vacatio rental business. Incredible but true!!! May be good technician ... but I'm not sure !!! REMEMBER: during your activity for sure something willl go wrong with technology and will be easy for you to lose in few days of malfunction more of what you are asked to pay for 1 year of subscription for RU service !!!! Customer support MUST be effective !!!! I suffered more than 4 overbooking in 3 months using 6 properties !!!!! because malfunctions!!!

Avantages

The credibility of the service, the guarantee that calendars are up to date instantly.
The variety of connections to the various platforms is undoubtedly an asset in UK services.
Strongly recommend them!

Inconvénients

There is no way to create a customer contact file

Avantages

The idea sounds great and the user interface looks nice, but I'm afraid it stops there. While we were very excited to get things going, nothing seemed to work.

Inconvénients

The reality - while a great idea, none of what we've been sold worked properly. We tried out Rentals United last year and had a bad experience. We decided to give it another go this year, but unfortunately more things didn't work than did and we ended up making a loss over the period that we were signed up with them as availability was not even pushed across correctly. They kept charging us even after we left the contract and used the direct debit without authorisation. When contacted they kept saying they're not charging and they kept charging. Big waste of time - stay away!

Avantages

It just works, makes very complicated connections fairly straight forward, with very little training my team learn how to use the software quickly. The most important element is 'trust' and we trust Rentalsunited with our properties connections.

Inconvénients

User interface could do with a little updating.

Avantages

1. Straight forward easy to use
2. Synchonisation with YESBOOKIT is getting better

Inconvénients

1 Mapping is a little messy. I think you should be able to do this from the property rather than the channel. i.e. select your property and right click connect to all available channels.
2. Ability to hide channels that are not applicable
3. Errors need to be emailed
4. More Synchonisation
5. Ability to have more complex rate strucures

Avantages

Rentals United helps us distribute our properties through different channels through our short term rental PMS. It really understands our needs and we have always felt valued as a client.

Inconvénients

We have had synching problems between our PMS and Rentals United, whenever we have an issue we feel that they throw the ball around rather than actively engage in solving the issue together. I understand sometimes the problem in on the other end but it would be nice some follow up from their end to our PMS given that we are in the middle.

Avantages

I love that the software is user-friendly and that they offer manuals specific for every channel connection. That guide helps immensely. Photo upload is simple, and updates are easy to make when needed. I also like that they personally email me to notify me of additional channels that may be beneficial to my business or other updates. The help desk is also quick to respond.

Inconvénients

The live chat option has not been a supportive venue.

Avantages

The software itself is user friendly, and more importantly if any issues do come up, our market manager is always available and able to assist very quickly.

Inconvénients

The only flaw I can see is sometimes specific fields required don't get pushed from Guesty, but it's a relatively easy fix that can be done manually in RU.

Avantages

It's a good software, connecting with Guesty. It's a pretty good setup and make sense once you work with it for a while as they complete each other and together are very powerful and smart.
It takes a bit of time to learn, like anything useful in life.

Inconvénients

Nothing really negative. Like everything in life it takes time to learn it.
This is up to the user.

Avantages

The simplicity of use : connecting OTAs is very easy.
Friendly staff.
Overall good and very affordable Channel Manager.
It could be part of the best solutions in the market with some improvements.

Inconvénients

We missed a few important options for pricing but I guess it's not that important for other small hosts.
Customer support reactive but sometimes it takes time to have things done.

Avantages

It is very easy to use and understand and our rep [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] is very responsive and helpful.

Inconvénients

I wish there were more amenities to choose from so more details would push through to the OTA's.

Avantages

Software is functional and the engineering team is helpful

Inconvénients

This team has overbilled us by almost $100k since the start of the covid pandemic. They acknowledged this and offered us a "free month" to "make things right".

The team led by [Sensitive Content ] is not great at keeping clients happy