O Canada...We want your feedback!

Hey Abby

Though Toronto bears some similarities to NYC (I believe Steve Martin said it best “Toronto is like New York, but without all the stuff”)* we do have some very stark differences when it comes to Direct Booking. I dare say Toronto (and Ontario) would be your biggest market so important for you to understand a few key things:

1/ TICO. See my post. If Hospitable were to speak with TICO and find a way to be the surety on behalf of all clients, then you would have a HUGE benefit to extoll. 

2/ MOST municipalities worth their weight now impose the 180-day hosting limit. In Toronto, that is strictly enforced in partnership with Airbnb and Booking (data sharing) and without a license, you will not appear on their platforms. Any direct operator (who has already checked the box on #1 above) would need to keep good accounting on MAT fees and ensure they remit and report quarterly. https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/housing-shelter/short-term-rentals/short-term-rental-operators-hosts/short-term-rental-municipal-accommodation-tax/

3/ Americans call them ‘cabins’, we call them ‘cottages’ as we still somehow have the King (or Queen) on the back of our bills and we love cheery olde English. In any event, the cottage market is a massive piece of Ontario rentals. There are MANY sites dedicated to cottages - Cottagesincanada.com (CIC) as a prime example. Working with these providers on better API and listing integrations would be huge so it doesn't feel like they are islands. At least CIC will take an iCAL feed and block the calendar. Trying to compete against them on a solo listing stage seems daunting. 

I think thats a good primer. Honestly, I don’t see direct being a part of our mix for much of anything in the near term. It just doesn’t make sense if it should run afoul of rules and in terms of the effort to generate traffic to the site based on the landscape. 

-----

Dave is O/O of Casa Co-Host, a mid size (large size?) property manager in Southern Ontario, Canada. 

Dhillar@casacohost.com 

*Steve Martin reference on 30 Rock (best clip I could find):  https://www.instagram.com/reel/DCOFG_LxxFy/?hl=en

Thank you for your feedback ​@Dave Hillar! We’ve seen your posts re: TICO and we’re in touch with them. It’s a bit of a gray area but as the MoR for Direct Premium, we take responsibility for preventing scams and fraudulent activity on our platform, which is TICO’s goal. If we make progress here you’ll be the first to know!

Hello,

We’ve been using Hospitable for about two months now and really love the UI as well as the AI features. We currently manage over 30 properties across Canada and are continuing to grow.

Our main pain point, and honestly our biggest disappointment at the moment, is with the Owner Statements and Transactions features. They feel about 95% complete, but the current limitations make them unusable for our operation. Because of this, we’re still forced to build custom monthly reporting manually in Looker Studio, which is extremely time-consuming.

Here are the key limitations we’re facing:

Owner Statements

• Field names are confusing, and simply being able to rename or edit them would make a significant difference.

• We need more control over which line items appear in the statement (especially in the bottom-left section).

• The ability to customize the labels of the summary totals would greatly improve clarity for owners.

Transactions

• Expenses due to the manager do not properly account for taxes. As a result, when these appear in the owner statements, the totals don’t reconcile, making the statements unreliable.

• We were hoping to fully replace spreadsheets with the Transactions feature, but this would require the ability to choose which transactions appear on owner statements and which do not, as some expenses are not chargeable to owners.

Overall, these changes would allow us to fully adopt Hospitable’s reporting tools and eliminate a large amount of manual work each month.

Thank you for taking the time to review this feedback.

Best regards,

Hersson & Mariève

We should chat. I have ideas. Ive emailed you.

Thanks for the feedback ​@Hersson ! I’ve shared this with our Mogul team.

For your point regarding “Expenses due to the manager do not properly account for taxes” - as part of the expansion of Hospitable Payments into Canada, we will be calculating Canadian taxes (GST/HST/PST and lodging taxes) for guest payments. We’ll also explore automatically calculating taxes for owner statements.

​@Hersson fellow Canadian here, I’m new to AirBNB. How are the laws doing Airbnb in Ontario? Do you have to be living at the property to do Airbnb? 

​@Abby Grous we recently started cohosting a property in the USA and live in Canada. We are having trouble adding a Bank in Hospitable to do upsells. We opened a Stripe account but don’t know how to add it. We really need your help as it’s been a few days that we’re trying to figure this out. Thank you.

​@Hersson we recently started cohosting a property in the USA and trying to get everything set up. If you have suggestions on how to set the bank information in Hospitable please let me know. We are running into so many problems. Thank you.

 ​@Abby Grous we recently started cohosting a property in the USA and live in Canada. We are having trouble adding a Bank in Hospitable to do upsells. We opened a Stripe account but don’t know how to add it. We really need your help as it’s been a few days that we’re trying to figure this out. Thank you.

​@manny nikki I’m on it - we have some restrictions currently because we don’t support payments for Canadian properties yet (that’s coming), but we should be able to get you set up for your property in the US. I reached out to our payment processor. I’ll follow up with you via email!

​@Abby Grous I have not heard back from you. Thanks.