All Forum Posts by: Henry Decoo

Hi Sharon,

Once the guest has completed their stay, you can send them a review request through HomeAway.  Their is a link in your account for reviews that can be sent to anyone who stayed at your property.

That's correct. There is no way to remove the fee on new bookings. Only way I found around it is to just reserve the dates for them in the calendar and invoice through PayPal, QuickBooks, or any other cc processing service.

I sent the payments via PayPal because if you use vrbo, they would get charged the vrbo fee again. They were ok with PayPal. I blocked off the dates on the new site. Again if we did it through vrbo, they would incur a second vrbo fee. If you are ok eating it or they are ok paying it again, I guess you can do that.

Yes but the payments have to go to a bank account with someone's name attached to it. An account that you take over will have a bank account that belongs to the previous owner attached to it. If you take over the account you would have to change it to your bank account so the payments go to you and not the previous owner. Homeaway does not change bank accounts to ones in another persons name very easily. Again, they don't want people transferring accounts so they probably won't allow this.

What did you do to changed the bank account linked to the account? I assume you had to change that to accept payments. You have to call homeaway to do that and they will know you are trying to reuse the old account for a new owner when you do that. This is against the homeaway terms and they will tell you that at the time.

I was given all of those. I guess it depends on how detailed the previous owner was. I was pretty lucky in that regard. He even included the website for the house.

A lot of the bookings I took over were from homeaway as well. The previous owner just sent them an email that I was the new owner and would be taking over their bookings. I then emailed them and said that I will honor their bookings but they would have to pay the remaining balance via PayPal. This is really the only way to do it unless you or them want to eat the homeaway booking fee a second time to redo it via their site. You can still save the reservation in the homeaway calendar without charging through the site.

The new listing and old were both active for about a month before the old one was deactivated. The old owner was going to leave it up and just send any inquiries my way but I think homeaway canceled his when they saw what was going on. In terms of keeping the old old bookings, I think a thing you need to remember is that I was honoring existing bookings that had already paid a deposit. The previous owner would always collect a 25% deposit for all bookings with remainder due 60 days before checkin. Any existing bookings always had at least a 25% deposit paid. If they didn't agree to keeping the booking, they would have lost the deposit. Thus it was very easy for me to keep and transfer over any existing bookings. Have your existing bookings already paid a deposit? I would assume the previous bookings you are trying to transfer over paid a deposit. Otherwise I don't know what your previous owner was doing with his business. If they didn't pay a deposit, why would he even hold a booking? It should be simple for you to transfer over these bookings. Let me know if this makes sense or if you have other questions. Henry

I purchased a vacation rental that was in the same situation being listed on homeaway with a ton of reviews and bookings. Basically I just ended up creating a new listing and the previous owner just sent me the contact info for the future bookings. I just emailed them to let them know I bought the house and would honor their bookings. At that point I just updated the new calendar to match the bookings I took over and when it came time for the final deposits to be paid, I just invoices them through PayPal. So far so good. All bookings transferred and I'm up to about 10 5 star reviews so we are getting there. It's always better to just bite the bullet and make your own listing because it becomes a real pain to change the banking info for payments and homeaway does not want people transferring the listings.

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