OwnerRez opens owner bookings to every plan, no Property Management add-on needed

Owner bookings in OwnerRez are no longer behind a paid tier. The feature used to require the Property Management premium add-on. Since the 21 October release, every host and co-host can use it, whatever they pay for.

An owner booking is a stay blocked for the property owner rather than sold to a guest. It keeps the dates off the calendar, usually without charging, and keeps the owner's own use visible in reporting instead of hidden behind a manual block. Managers running properties for third parties have always needed it. Plenty of hosts who own one or two places and lend them to family have wanted it without wanting the full management module.

How it works now

Any host or co-host can set an Owner Booking Contact in two places: on the property, under Property then General Info, or while creating a booking.

One detail to note. Changing a property's Owner Booking Contact only affects new and future bookings. It does not rewrite the owner attached to bookings that already exist, so if you reassign a property to a different owner mid-season, the historic bookings keep the old contact. That is the right behaviour for accounting, and it means a mid-year change needs to be handled deliberately rather than assumed to apply backwards.

There is also a permissions piece. When an account owner invites an Owner Booking Contact, they can decide whether that person gets Team Access Portal rights to view, add or cancel owner bookings. So an owner can be given the ability to book their own weeks directly, or kept read-only, or given nothing at all.

Why move a feature out of a paid tier

Unbundling is unusual enough to be worth a sentence. Software vendors generally move features up into higher tiers, not down out of them.

The most likely reading is that owner bookings had become table stakes rather than a differentiator. Co-hosting has grown sharply, and a co-host managing a handful of properties for friends or small owners sits in exactly the gap this closes: too small for the Property Management module, but with a genuine need to record whose stay is whose. Charging for the ability to block an owner's own week was starting to look like a toll on a basic function.

It also feeds the Team Access Portal, which is where OwnerRez has been investing. Every owner who gets portal access to book their own dates is an owner who stops emailing the manager to ask. The feature is free; the stickiness it creates is not.

For hosts and managers

If you have been blocking owner stays with manual holds or dummy bookings, this is worth switching over. Owner bookings report separately, so owner use stops polluting occupancy and revenue figures, and the dates carry a contact rather than a note in a field.

If you already pay for the Property Management add-on for this reason alone, it is worth reviewing what else that module gives you before the next renewal.

And if you are about to invite owners into the portal, decide the permission level before you send the invite rather than after. An owner who can cancel their own bookings is handy. An owner who can cancel them during a changeover week is a conversation you do not want to have.