Escapia

I like the gradual commitment to improvement that Escapia has been implementing over the past year. I think the COVID-19 crisis prompted urgent action on improving their software, now that most people in the vacation rental industry are working remotely. The UI changes and business/performance dashboards have made navigating and interpreting information much better.

The unit integration navigation still feels clunky. Thankfully, we don't have a substantial amount of 3rd-party apps that we need to integrate, but it would be nice to have a core integration hub that makes app navigation easier.

Escape customer support has done a good job troubleshooting and explaining how things work when I contact them. There are also lots of training resources, self-help articles, explanatory videos, etc, available. I have also heard that the Escape accounting features are useful and thorough. I have not had any experience with the accounting side of Escapia.

One of the things that have been most frustrating about Escapia is the Owner web feature, which is supposed to provide an owner portal where our property owners can log in and see property details, upcoming reservations, owner documents, etc. Owner web itself is pretty limited, which is fine if that's what you want. One problem is that as of now owners cannot reset their password, and so they always have to contact us if they forget it so that we can change it for them. Another challenge has been that many of our owners own more than one property and that for accounting purposes each of these units has to be set up with different owners. That means that when one of those owners logs into the owner portal they can only see one of their properties unless they set up separate logins for each property, which includes separate email addresses. But then those email addresses will automatically be where their owner statements are sent, so if they want all the owner's statements to go to one email, they will have to forward them. We do not want to make our owners jump through hoops like this. We want their experience to be as simple and streamlined as possible.

Escapia also lacks some features (such as automated emails, simpler reports, better filters for sending a guest communication, and the ability to add attachments to that communication) that would make the software more functional. I have also heard from our maintenance and housekeeping teams that Escapia is challenging for them to understand and use as they would like to. Basically, we've ended up using other software and strategies to fill in the gaps and give us the features we want, which is a little disappointing considering the seeming hugeness and complexity of Escapia.

The support we receive from the Escapia team has been like no other software companies we have used! The changing over to Escapia was hard for our team who have been using v12, but the Escapia team made sure we were comfortable being going live. The new rates manager is amazing! It makes setting and adjusting rates a breeze! No more looking at different windows and setting rate rules . Its all in one screen.

We are missing some key reports we used in V12, but the Escapia team has listened to our requests and are working on new reporting for Escapia. Its a learning curve to switch software companies, but its been worth it.