Hotel glossary

The abbreviations you meet in contracts and reports

Hospitality runs on abbreviations, and vendor quotes tend to assume you already know all of them. This is a quick reference, written in plain language.

41 terms

Revenue and rates Reservations and distribution Operations and housekeeping Guests and technology

Revenue and rates

The metrics that appear in every performance report.

OccupancyOCC: Rooms sold divided by rooms available to sell for a night. The denominator must exclude out-of-order rooms, otherwise the figure reads falsely low.
Average Daily RateADR: Room revenue divided by rooms sold. What guests actually paid after discounts and commission, not the published rate.
Revenue Per Available RoomRevPAR: Room revenue divided by all rooms available, empty ones included. Equals ADR times occupancy, and is comparable across hotels of different sizes.
Total Revenue Per Available RoomTRevPAR: Like RevPAR but including revenue beyond rooms: restaurant, spa, laundry, services. Useful where non-room revenue is significant.
Gross Operating Profit Per Available RoomGOPPAR: Gross operating profit divided by available rooms. Unlike RevPAR it is net of operating costs, so it reflects real efficiency rather than turnover.
Best Available RateBAR: The lowest rate an individual guest can book on a given date without special conditions. The anchor other rates are built around.
Rate parityParity: A commitment to show the same rate across all channels. Many intermediary contracts include this clause, so read it before discounting on your own website.
Revenue managementRM: Adjusting rates and selling conditions against forecast demand to maximise revenue from a fixed number of rooms. Requires historical data to work.
Length of stayLOS: The average number of nights per stay. Used to set minimum-stay conditions in peak periods.
Pick-upPace: Rooms booked within a period for a future date. Tracking it tells you whether to raise or lower rates before that date arrives.

Reservations and distribution

The vocabulary you meet when working with booking intermediaries.

Online Travel AgencyOTA: Platforms that sell rooms on the hotel's behalf for a commission. They bring new guests but reduce the rate you collect.
Channel managerCM: Software that keeps availability, rates and selling conditions matched across every channel. Without one you edit each channel by hand and double bookings follow.
Booking engineIBE: The component that lets guests book directly on the hotel's own website. Bookings from here carry no intermediary commission.
Direct bookingDirect: A booking made through the hotel's own website, phone or front desk. Higher collected rate, and you keep the guest's details.
Rate planPlan: A specific way of selling the same room type: with or without breakfast, refundable or not, prepaid or pay on arrival.
AllotmentBlock: Rooms held for a tour operator or partner over a period. Unsold rooms return to general inventory when the hold expires.
Cut-off dateCut-off: The moment held rooms are automatically released back into general sale if they have not been taken up.
OverbookingOB: Deliberately accepting more reservations than rooms to cover guests who do not arrive. Its safety depends on your own no-show rate.
No-showNS: A guest who booked, did not cancel and did not arrive. Different from a cancellation because there is no time left to resell.
Walk-inWI: A guest who arrives at the desk without a reservation, usually charged at the rack or desk rate.
CommissionComm.: The share of revenue an intermediary keeps on each booking. This is why ADR from intermediaries is always below ADR from direct bookings.

Operations and housekeeping

The words used daily at the front desk and in housekeeping.

Property Management SystemPMS: The core that holds the room plan, reservations, check-in and check-out, billing and reports. Every other hotel system revolves around it.
Point of SalePOS: The selling system in the restaurant, bar or minibar. Connected to the PMS, its bills post straight to the guest's room.
HousekeepingHK: The department that cleans rooms and updates room status — clean, dirty, in progress — the data the front desk relies on to know what can be released.
Out of orderOOO: A room too damaged to sell, which must be removed from the room count when calculating occupancy.
Out of serviceOOS: A room with a minor fault, temporarily not sold but still counted in sellable inventory.
Night auditNA: Closing revenue, reconciling and rolling the business date over, usually on the night shift. After it runs, the day's figures are locked.
FolioFolio: The running account of everything a guest incurs during a stay: room, food, services. The basis for the invoice at check-out.
Early check-inECI: Letting a guest into the room before the standard time, usually with a surcharge and dependent on whether housekeeping has finished.
Late check-outLCO: Letting a guest stay past the standard departure time. It affects the cleaning schedule directly, so housekeeping must be told immediately.
Room statusStatus: The current state of a room: occupied, vacant clean, vacant dirty, being cleaned, not for sale. Mismatched status is the usual cause of handing a guest the wrong room.

Guests and technology

Terms about guest data and how systems connect to each other.

Customer Relationship ManagementCRM: Where guest records and interaction history live: previous stays, preferences, things to avoid, past complaints.
Guest profileProfile: A single record for one guest, merging every stay. Without it, a returning regular is treated like a stranger.
UpsellUpsell: Offering a room upgrade or extra service. Most effective when based on preferences already recorded in the guest profile.
Loyalty programmeLoyalty: A scheme rewarding guests who return. It only works if the system recognises the same person across separate stays.
Application Programming InterfaceAPI: How two pieces of software talk to each other automatically. When asking a vendor about integration, this is what decides whether it is possible.
CloudSaaS: Software running on the vendor's servers, reached through a browser. Quick to start, with no infrastructure of your own at the property.
On-premiseOn-Prem: Software running on a server at the property. The hotel keeps full custody of the data and it keeps working when the outside connection fails.
QR self-serviceSelf-service: Guests scan a code on their phone to view services and send requests without calling the desk. It removes load at peak hours.
Audit logLog: A record of who did what and when in the system. It only has value when every staff member has their own account.
Role-based accessRBAC: Restricting each person to the part of the system their job needs. The front desk does not need payroll, and the reverse holds too.