Hotel Software Glossary: 30 Terms Explained in Plain English
Hotel software has a vocabulary problem — every demo assumes you already speak it. Here is
the whole dictionary in one place: one or two honest sentences per term, no jargon defined
by more jargon.
By Aeternum Intelligence · Updated 18 July 2026 · Reference — skim as needed
Front desk & rooms
PMS (property management system)
The operational hub of a hotel: reservations, check-ins, room status, folios and the night audit. Full guide →
Folio
The running bill attached to a room or guest — room charges, restaurant bills, extras and payments, settled at checkout.
Room status
Whether a room is occupied, vacant, clean, dirty or out of order. A live status grid is what saves the front desk from walking the floor.
Night audit
The end-of-day routine that posts room charges, reconciles payments and rolls the business date. Full guide →
Business date
The hotel’s accounting day, closed by the night audit. It ends when the audit runs, not at midnight — a 1 a.m. arrival still belongs to yesterday.
Walk-in
A guest who arrives without a reservation and books at the desk.
Day-use
A room sold for hours rather than a night — checked in and out on the same business date.
No-show
A confirmed booking whose guest never arrives. Unprotected no-shows turn sold rooms into empty ones. How to cut them →
Ghost booking
A reservation that was never real — made with fake or fraudulent details — that blocks inventory until it quietly cancels or no-shows.
Group block
A set of rooms held under one reservation for a wedding, tour or company, released or picked up by a cut-off date.
Rooming list
The guest-by-guest name list a group organiser supplies to fill a group block.
Revenue & pricing
Occupancy rate
Rooms sold divided by rooms available. A 12-room hotel selling 10 tonight runs 83% occupancy.
ADR (average daily rate)
Room revenue divided by rooms sold — the average price of the rooms you actually sold.
RevPAR (revenue per available room)
Room revenue divided by all available rooms, or occupancy × ADR — the single best one-line summary of room performance. KPI guide →
TRevPAR
Total revenue — rooms, restaurant, extras — per available room. The first KPI that notices your restaurant.
GOPPAR
Gross operating profit per available room. Revenue is vanity; GOPPAR knows what the revenue cost you.
ALOS (average length of stay)
Total room nights divided by number of bookings. Longer stays mean fewer turnovers and cheaper occupancy.
Revenue management
Pricing rooms by demand — forecasting busy and quiet dates and moving rates accordingly. Starter guide →
Rate plan
A price with rules attached: refundable or not, breakfast included or not, member-only, corporate-negotiated.
BAR (best available rate)
The lowest unrestricted public rate for a date — the anchor most other rates are derived from.
Rate parity
Keeping the same public price across your website and OTAs, usually required by OTA contracts.
LOS restriction (length of stay)
A rule like “minimum two nights over the festival weekend” that protects busy dates from one-night stays.
Distribution & channels
OTA (online travel agency)
A third-party booking site — Booking.com, Expedia, Agoda — that sells your rooms for a commission.
Channel manager
Software that syncs your inventory and rates to every OTA and pulls their bookings back in, so you never sell the same room twice.
Overbooking / oversell
Selling more rooms than exist for a date, usually caused by slow or disconnected channel syncing.
Booking engine
The reservation form on your own website — commission-free direct bookings.
Direct booking
A reservation made with the hotel itself rather than through an OTA. Every point of direct-booking share is commission recovered.
CRS (central reservation system)
A system that consolidates reservations across properties and channels — mostly a chain and group concept.
Restaurant & back office
POS (point of sale)
The system that takes orders and payments in the restaurant and bar. Integrated with the PMS, a dinner charges straight to the room folio.
KDS (kitchen display system)
The screen that replaces paper tickets on the kitchen line, fed live by the POS.
86’d item
Restaurant shorthand for a menu item that has run out — a good system pushes the alert to floor staff instantly.
Reconciliation
Matching what the bank says you were paid against what your ledger says you charged — tedious by hand, a natural job for AI. AI guide →
All of these, one system
HotelBi runs the PMS, POS, channel manager, revenue and the night audit on a single data model — so the vocabulary stops mattering.