Holiday Rent Payment

We are moving away from collecting payments through Yapstone for a variety of reasons.

Pros: It is pretty easy to use. It does have the capability to integrate with Salesforce. Yapstone works well for rental property management.

Cons: There is a lot of manual data entry needed with the way our payments and salesforce integration is setup. For customers to update their credit card information, it takes around 2 weeks.

We used to have to manually enter credit cards weekly, then follow up on any that didn’t go through. Having an immediate way to verify the card has saved us countless hours of work, translating to thousands of dollars in man-hour savings. Overall, they are a great value.

Pros: The credit card integration with our reservation software is seamless. The back-end is easy to use. The overall value is great. Their system is reliable and dependable.

Cons: The ACH feature doesn’t integrate with our reservation system, but it is a wonderful feature… it just requires an extra step on our end. We were on a fixed percentage model, but last year VRP decided to change this with less than 45 days notice, which didn’t allow us much time to shop around for alternatives. The prime plus model we are currently on allows us less predictability, but so far has saved us a few dollars. They have also moved their customer support to a different country so there is a language barrier when calling tech support. We no longer have a dedicated representative which is not ideal, but we are working with it.

Pros: Their product worked most of the time for us, but beware if you ever want to try and stop using them! They will nail you with hidden fees that you had no idea about.

Cons: After years of using them, we had issues with getting virtual credit cards to work due to a change they made, never able to get a fix so we were forced to find a different processor. When we tried to cancel our account, we were told they had us on an automatically renewing 3 year contract and that we would have to pay them the fees they would have collected from our credit card processing for the remainder of the contract. This amounted to thousands of dollars! So we are forced to continue paying a monthly fee for the next two years despite our not using their system or pay thousands to cancel. Doesn’t matter that their system stopped working for us. Sad because we never had any issue with them until this.

I can easily accept payment from short term renters who hear about my properties from a source other than a listing site. For example, there are thousands of FEMA contractors and federal FEMA employees on St. Thomas. All of these men and women must pay via credit card. Without VRP, I would not be able to rent to FEMA contractors. I do so because we really need their help! Plus, the big hotels are still closed, so short term rentals are their only option. Thank you VRP for providing this service to individual property owners like me.

Pros: Vacation Rent Payment (VRP) is extremely easy to use and their support staff provides a lesson to new users, so not worries if you are a techno-phobe. For the first time in 7 years, I needed tech support. I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t charge a credit card for one particular guest who had been renting for over a year. So, I called VRP and the tech-support rep knew immediately what was causing the problem. It was user error. The tech-support rep then explained how to continue charging the same credit card and I learned more about the VRP system. For short-term rental owners and property managers, VRP is a MUST!

Cons: Honestly, I like everything about it. The fee could be lower of course.

It works but it could work better. I believe they could offer better service. I had to get my own merchant account with AMEX because they said it would take 10 days and they wanted another percentage point in merchant fees.

Pros: It is fully integrated with our Liverez property management software so for the most part, processing payments and refunds are fairly simple.

Cons: The portal is very difficult to search guest transactions. Payments made by the guest in the payment portal do not transfer back to the reservation - they have to be hunted down and entered manually and this is tedious and unnecessary. I seem to get multiple deposit reports a day.