Posts made by Glenn

We’d first like to thank you for your ongoing use of the Tokeet Channel Manager. We appreciate being an important partner in the success of your short-term rental business and intend to continue to rapidly grow our products and services to give you the best tools to make your business profitable and easy to manage.

We spent a lot of time speaking with and listening to you, our customers, taking your feedback and direction to heart, and produced solutions to help you grow your business. We are pleased with the overwhelmingly positive feedback that we have received about each of these products and thank you for being a part of the process.

Over the past few years we completed some of the most ambitious projects to date and successfully launched Webready, Sympl and Checklist while also relaunching Rategenie, Margins and Signature.

When Tokeet entered the market in 2016 we wanted to show that it was possible to deliver a high-quality software suite at a fraction of the cost being charged by other providers. Our success with that approach attracted many competitors to the market, and we recently conducted an analysis of how our prices compare to those competitors. What we learned was that our prices were significantly below the market standard and this was holding us back from investing even more in our business.

On July 25th we will be transitioning to a new pricing structure for the Tokeet Channel Manager (TV3). In short, we are switching to a per rental pricing structure with a unique price for each rental count. We are also removing any feature restrictions within the product such that every account may access all features.

We’ll also be offering a yearly plan at a 20% discount for those who wish to have a contractual agreement. NOTE: This price change will not affect our existing yearly plan users. Those users currently on yearly plans will continue to keep their pricing until their plans expire. This pricing change does not affect any other products within the Tokeet product suite.

If you have questions about our upcoming products or pricing changes please contact our support team.

Read more about our pricing change here. You can also see exactly what your new price will be by clicking here.
We’ve prepared an FAQ to answer your most important questions, click here.

Thank you for being a loyal Tokeet user.

We were able to re-send all the messages that didn’t send except for the ones that were time-based.

To be on the safe side, we went back a little extra far so some messages may have been sent twice.

At present, we are experiencing an outage in both Tokeet and Automata automated messaging (triggers) and possibly automatic invoicing. This has resulted in events not firing when they are supposed to. Our team has identified the issue, are we are currently working on a fix. We hope to have this resolved as soon as possible.

In the meantime, please manually send any messages that would have been sent with your automation since 5:36pm UTC. This will allow you to maintain timely communication with your guest. Once a fix is in place, we will follow-up with you in this chat. We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience.

@Hugo-Candeias - Beta testing is starting the first week of August.

@Konstantinos-Kiamos
Konstantinos... I checked in with Product Management and was told that they do intend to fix it... should be weeks not months away. Maybe sooner, but I don't want to overpromise.

Since dropping this e-mail overnight, quite a few of you have written in to take advantage of the subscription offers, including some returning customers.

Thanks for your commitment to our platform! We promise you our best efforts at quality and responsiveness, so post here or drop me a line any time.

Glenn

I hope that you and your families are safe and healthy, and I wish for a fast turnaround to this current situation.

I know that many of you are experiencing difficult times in your businesses and have reached out for assistance from Tokeet. We are committed in our resolve to work with all of our customers and assist where we can. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic can potentially affect our industry for many months. The only way for us to recover well is to work together and be good citizens in this global industry.

Tokeet came to market when most short-term Property/Channel Management Software was priced high and required long-term commitments and significant upfront expenditure. We helped pioneer the low-priced / high-value segment of the CMS industry and have established a leadership position in this segment. Since then, there have been many new entrants who seek to mimic our success by copying our price, positioning, and model – not to mention their marketing materials. We welcome these companies and are excited by the fresh energy and vibrance they add to our industry. We strongly believe that competition is good for you, our customers.

We also believe that, due to our strong and established customer base and structure, we are well-positioned to help you weather this economic storm and get your business back on track. Below are some additional actions we will be taking to further help our customers through this troubling time.

• We are permanently eliminating all plans for the introduction of an invoice (processing) fee within the core Tokeet product. This fee was first mentioned in our price change email in February.

• By popular request, we are reopening our yearly plan offer to all customers. This will provide an average 30% discount off current prices.

• We are also introducing a two-year plan with a discount of about 40% off current prices. This new plan is immediately available to all customers.

• We will soon be launching Sympl CM to help our smaller property managers who are looking for an easier, more cost-effective solution. Sympl CM is designed for managers of 1-3 properties at a price of $2.99/rental.

The best businesses utilize time during an economic downturn to become even better. I am sure many of you are taking a hard look at your models and are finding ways to be even more efficient than ever. Likewise, Tokeet is not satisfied with sitting still during this lull in our industry. In the coming months, we will be releasing a number of new tools and applications designed to further improve your operations and efficiency. In addition to Sympl CM, we are building a completely new application for creating beautiful websites to help you attract guests directly, and save on commissions. We are also building a product designed for managing your staff, service providers, and vendors. These changes ensure that you will be able to support your business with one integrated platform, rather than having to integrate multiple providers that were never built to work together. None of our existing products or features are going away.

Tokeet is here for the long term. Let’s meet the future together.

Warm regards,
Kwesi Steele
Tokeet CEO

@Milo-Lukic
Milo, we'd love to be able to be more generous with all our customers too. However, we are a startup that's been in business shorter than many of you, and whether you exhort people to leave us or not, you must know that this virus is hurting everyone's business in the travel industry.

I'm leaving your post up to make it clear to everyone reading that we are not deleting negative posts just because it's our board.

Most of you realize that Tokeet is the least expensive option on the market with this feature set, even after our first price increase in several years. If people have to stop using a PMS for a while, we understand. I advise you to check out the Tokeet terms and conditions for our data retention policy in section 6. I'm confident that those who are determined to ride this storm out are going to be happy with the upgrades and new offerings they see released in Tokeet this year.

@Irina-Sheshina
Thanks Irina, for your kind comments. We also would like to improve our language support in the UI, though I have no announcements to make on that front at this time. I am going to pass your name to our Tokeet product manager to follow up on the document collection and beta testing points.

@Leigh-Rees

Leigh, I understand your concerns and will discuss them with Kwesi on Monday. At this point I'll just ask you to understand that we know there's going to be financial impact across the industry that includes us, and we're doing what we feel we can support at this time.

If you want to send any information I can verify about what other PMS platforms are doing for existing customers I'm interested. As far as I know, everything being offered as free or discounted is for new customers only and only for a short time. I understand why they'd do that. I don't expect we will.

@Jaak-Kuld

Jaak,

I suggest you lower the price for customers with 1-2 apartments - you will get more business that way without increasing cost base and it creates a sales funnel without the need to put much effort on extra marketing.

I expect you will like what 2020 has in store for Tokeet customers like you.

Glenn

@Konstantinos-Kiamos
Glad to hear that!

@Seth-Scalf
We did add two months onto the contracts. Was that not clear? When your pre-paid contracts run out, the next two months will be billed at the discounted rate.

Stripe technology does not allow us to make monthly changes to an annual plan, so we had to put it at the end.

@José-Pedro-Pirralha
Jose, we realize that travel around most of the world is affected, so we're not planning to add additional countries. I don't know how we could draw a line beyond 1.

Having said that, we hope the measures we offered to everybody will help. As far as I know, no other PMS has offered their current customers anything but advice.

@Konstantinos-Kiamos

Your interpretation is not correct. We offered existing customers not only a lock in of the old prices (to avoid the 30% increase) but an additional 10% off if they pre-paid for a year. Nothing about that got worse... we are automatically extending the 40% discount for them for two more months.

Those who didn't lock in the old prices still are getting the best price in the industry, even after the first price increase in several years.

We had previously announced a 1% platform fee to cover invoicing services when auto invoicing was released. Today's announcement means that we're not going to do that. This is regardless of whether you subscribed for a year or not.

@Irina-Sheshina

Irina, let's be clear about the 1% discussion. We previously announced that we were developing new auto invoicing features and were considering adding a charge of up to 1% based on all invoices processed through Tokeet partner gateways. If you combine that with Stripe fees, it's still less than what AirBNB charges you for the same service. There has never been any discussion of reservation fees.

With this notice, we are saying that we're going to defer the 1% charge indefinitely but still release the new features. Incidentally, we are looking for beta testers for this, so let us know if you want to be one.

@Leigh-Rees
Italy has the most dire situation of a pandemic that affects not just all of Europe but the entire world. We obviously can't afford to comp everybody, but we wanted to help most where it was needed most.

As far as I know, we have offered the most generous concessions to current customers of any PMS or Channel Manager in the industry. Everyone else is offering advice and information.

I hope that you and your families are safe as the world grapples with this unprecedented catastrophe.

These are very difficult times for our industry. The spread and impact of the coronavirus have taken most of us by surprise, and the government mandates of social distancing affects our businesses greatly. The COVID-19 pandemic is a challenge we must face together. We at Tokeet want to help our customers weather this storm as much as we can. Therefore, we are immediately implementing the following initiatives, no action is needed on your part.

What we are doing to help:

• Current paid customers with account addresses in Italy, with properties in Italy will be given the next six (6) months of their Tokeet subscriptions for free.

• Customers who previously committed to a yearly plan will receive a two-month extension on their contracts. Your extra months will be billed at the discounted rate when their time comes.

• The previously announced platform fee (1% on revenue billed through Tokeet) will be deferred indefinitely. However, the auto invoicing features will still be released as planned.

• New user trials will be extended from 15 to 30 days to allow a longer consideration window.

On our side, we are doing everything we can to ensure that the entire Customer Support, Product Management, and Engineering teams are working to help you. We have also opened a topic on our Community Board for discussing the impact of COVID-19 on our industry and what strategies can help us cope with it.

We hope that these measures will be helpful to you in maintaining your business health through these challenging times. As the pandemic progresses we will follow-up with further announcements as needed.

Best wishes,

Kwesi Steele
Tokeet CEO

One interesting article was published by AIRDNA: Impact of the Coronavirus on Global Short-Term Rental Markets (link). They shared some initial metrics on the reactions of the industry.

Public and government reaction to COVID-19 in many parts of the world crossed the line from concern to active change last week. At the end of it, many workplaces and schools were shut down as well as any event or entertainment facility that attracts a crowd. Many travel plans were canceled, causing a serious impact to the industry.

While it's refreshing and reassuring to see the world take our collective health (particularly that of our senior citizens) seriously, it also has caused financial worry in many industries.

This topic is for discussing the impact of the COVID-19 virus on your business, ways in which our industry can react, and the sharing of information that others may find useful.