Hotel Tech Glossary

A/B testing shows two versions of a page or element to different visitor groups simultaneously and measures which converts better. It replaces opinions about website changes with evidence from real guest behavior.

An abandoned cart in hotels is a booking process a website visitor started but did not finish. Recovery tactics, such as reminder emails and exit offers, try to bring the guest back to complete the direct reservation.

Above the fold is the portion of a webpage visible without scrolling. For hotel websites it is prime real estate, where the value proposition, booking widget and direct booking advantages should appear immediately.

ADR (Average Daily Rate) is the average revenue earned per sold room per day, calculated as room revenue divided by rooms sold. It measures pricing power but ignores how many rooms remained empty.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the practice of structuring content so answer engines, such as featured snippets, voice assistants and AI chat tools, can extract and present it as the direct answer to a traveler's question.

An AI agent is software that uses AI to pursue a goal autonomously, taking multi-step actions such as checking availability, answering guests or updating systems, rather than only replying to a single prompt with text.

AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries Google shows at the top of some search results, answering the query directly with synthesized information and linked sources, often before any traditional organic listing is visible.

Ancillary revenue is all guest spend beyond the room rate, including food and beverage, spa, parking, transfers, early check-in and late checkout fees. It is the growth frontier for hotels whose room pricing is already optimized.

Attribute-based selling prices a room by its individual features, such as view, floor, balcony or bed size, letting guests build their stay by choosing and paying for the attributes they value instead of picking a rigid room type.

BAR (Best Available Rate) is the lowest unrestricted public rate a hotel offers for a given date, typically flexible and bookable by anyone. Many other rates, such as discounts and packages, are derived from it.

A bed bank is a business-to-business platform that aggregates hotel inventory at net rates and distributes it to thousands of resellers, such as travel agencies, tour operators and smaller OTAs, through APIs.

Benchmarking is comparing a hotel's performance metrics, typically occupancy, ADR and RevPAR, against its competitive set or market through shared data programs, to know whether results reflect the market tide or the hotel's own performance.

The billboard effect is the phenomenon where a hotel's presence on OTAs generates additional direct bookings, because travelers discover the property on the OTA and then book on the hotel's own website.

Book direct is the strategy of persuading guests to reserve on the hotel's own website instead of an OTA, using visible advantages such as member rates, flexible conditions, added perks and a booking experience that removes friction.

A booking engine is the reservation software embedded in a hotel's own website that lets guests check availability, see rates and book directly, without going through an OTA. It is the main tool for commission-free direct revenue.

Business intelligence in hotels is the practice and software of consolidating data from the PMS, channels, finance and guest systems into reports and dashboards, so decisions about pricing, marketing and operations are based on numbers rather than intuition.

A cancellation policy defines until when a guest can cancel a reservation without penalty and what is charged afterward. It is set per rate plan, balancing booking conversion against protection from late cancellations.

Card tokenization replaces a guest's real card number with a unique token that is useless if stolen. Hotel systems store and pass the token instead of the card, which reduces fraud risk and PCI DSS compliance scope.

A channel manager is software that distributes a hotel's rooms, rates and availability to multiple sales channels such as OTAs, the GDS and the hotel's own booking engine, keeping inventory synchronized in real time to prevent overbooking.

A chargeback is a forced payment reversal initiated by a guest through their bank, disputing a hotel charge. The hotel loses the funds temporarily and must present evidence, such as signed folios and cancellation policies, to win the dispute.

A hotel chatbot is an automated conversational assistant on the website, app or messaging channels that answers guest questions, helps with bookings and handles routine requests around the clock without staff involvement.

The city ledger is the hotel's account for charges billed to companies and agencies rather than paid at check-out, tracking invoiced amounts owed by corporate clients, event organizers and OTAs until payment arrives.

A cloud PMS is a property management system delivered over the internet as a subscription, with data hosted by the vendor. Staff access it from any browser or device, and updates and backups happen automatically.

Commission is the percentage of a booking's value a hotel pays an intermediary, such as an OTA or travel agency, for delivering the reservation. It is the dominant cost of third-party distribution.

A comp set is the group of competing hotels a property benchmarks itself against, usually similar in location, category and price point. Performance indices compare the hotel's occupancy, ADR and RevPAR to this set.

An API (Application Programming Interface) is the standardized way two software systems exchange data automatically. In hotel tech, connectivity refers to how well a PMS, channel manager, RMS and other tools share reservations, rates and guest data.

Contactless check-in is an arrival process without desk interaction, combining online registration, digital payment, identity verification and a digital key or kiosk, so guests go from door to room without queuing.

Conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors who complete a booking. It is the central efficiency metric of a hotel's direct channel, connecting marketing spend that brings traffic with the revenue that traffic produces.

Core Web Vitals are Google's metrics for real-user page experience, measuring loading speed, interactivity and visual stability. They influence search rankings and strongly correlate with booking conversion on hotel websites.

A hotel CRM is software that centralizes guest profiles, stay history, preferences and marketing consent, enabling personalized communication and campaigns that turn one-time guests into repeat direct bookers.

Cross-selling is offering guests additional services beyond the room, such as breakfast, parking, spa treatments, transfers or late checkout, adding revenue per stay while making the trip more convenient for the guest.

A Central Reservation System (CRS) is a platform that centralizes a hotel's or chain's reservations, rates and inventory across all distribution channels, often sitting between the PMS and external channels like the GDS, OTAs and call centers.

CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) measures satisfaction with a specific interaction or stay, typically by asking guests to rate their experience on a short scale immediately after the touchpoint, such as check-in, a service request or check-out.

A dashboard is a visual screen that displays a hotel's key metrics, such as occupancy, ADR, RevPAR and pickup, in near real time, so managers can spot problems and opportunities without digging through reports.

Data migration is the transfer of a hotel's operational data, such as future reservations, guest profiles, rates and invoices, from one system to another during a software change, ideally without losing history or breaking upcoming stays.

A data processing agreement (DPA) is the contract required when a vendor processes personal data on a hotel's behalf, defining what the processor may do with guest data, its security obligations and what happens on breach or termination.

A digital compendium is the online replacement for the printed in-room guest directory, presenting hotel services, hours, menus and local recommendations through a QR code or guest app, always current and available in multiple languages.

A direct booking is a reservation made through the hotel's own channels, mainly its website booking engine, phone or email, without an intermediary. Direct bookings avoid OTA commission and give the hotel the full guest relationship.

Displacement analysis is the calculation a hotel runs before accepting a group or contract, comparing the guaranteed business against the transient demand it would displace, to decide whether the deal adds or destroys revenue.

Distribution cost is everything a hotel pays to acquire bookings, including OTA commissions, GDS and channel fees, metasearch spend, booking engine costs and loyalty discounts. It is typically one of the largest controllable cost lines.

Dynamic pricing is the practice of adjusting room rates continuously based on demand, booking pace, competitor prices and remaining inventory, instead of using fixed seasonal price lists. It is the core mechanism of modern hotel revenue management.

Email marketing in hotels is the use of permission-based email, newsletters, offers and automated lifecycle messages, to drive direct bookings and repeat stays from the hotel's own guest database.

Fine-tuning and RAG are the two main ways to give an AI model specific knowledge. Fine-tuning retrains the model on custom examples, while RAG (retrieval augmented generation) fetches relevant documents at question time and lets the model answer from them.

A folio is the itemized account of a guest's stay in the PMS, recording every charge, room nights, taxes, restaurant, minibar, and every payment. At check-out the folio becomes the guest's invoice.

Forecasting in hotels is predicting future occupancy, revenue and demand by date, using historical patterns, current bookings on the books, pace and market events. Accurate forecasts drive pricing, staffing and purchasing decisions.

The front desk is the hotel's reception operation, handling check-in and check-out, payments, guest requests and problem resolution. It is the operational face of the hotel and the main human touchpoint of the stay.

The GDPR is the European Union's data protection regulation governing how organizations collect, use and store personal data. It applies to any hotel handling data of guests in the EU, regardless of where the hotel operates.

The GDS (Global Distribution System) is the network of legacy platforms, such as Amadeus, Sabre and Travelport, that travel agencies and corporate booking tools use to search and book hotels, flights and cars worldwide.

Generative AI is the class of AI systems that create new content, text, images, audio or video, from instructions. In hotels it drafts guest communication, marketing copy, review responses and translations at near-zero marginal cost.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the practice of making content visible and citable to generative AI systems, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, so they mention and recommend the hotel or site when answering travel questions.

Google free booking links are unpaid listings in Google's hotel price panel that show a hotel's direct rates alongside paid ads. Any hotel with a connected rate feed can appear without paying per click.

Google Hotel Ads is Google's metasearch product that shows live prices from OTAs and the hotel's own website inside Google Search and Maps hotel listings, charging advertisers per click or per completed booking.

GOPPAR (Gross Operating Profit per Available Room) is gross operating profit divided by available rooms. Unlike RevPAR, it accounts for operating costs, so it reflects how profitably a hotel runs, not just how much revenue it books.

The GRI (Global Review Index) is an aggregated online reputation score, popularized by ReviewPro, that combines review ratings from many platforms into a single percentage, allowing benchmarking over time and against competitive sets.

A guest app is a hotel's mobile application or web app for guests, concentrating services such as check-in, digital key, service requests, ordering, local recommendations and messaging in one place during the stay.

The guest journey is the full sequence of interactions a guest has with a hotel, from discovery and booking through pre-arrival, stay and post-stay, used as a framework to design communication, service and technology around moments rather than departments.

Guest messaging is communicating with guests over the channels they already use, such as WhatsApp, SMS and web chat, across the whole journey, from booking questions to in-stay requests and post-stay follow-up, often assisted by automation.

Guest segmentation is dividing a hotel's guest database into groups with shared characteristics, such as stay purpose, booking channel, spend level or visit frequency, so marketing messages and offers match each group instead of blasting everyone equally.

An AI hallucination is a confident but false statement generated by a language model, such as inventing an amenity, a price or a policy the hotel does not have. It is the central reliability risk in guest-facing AI.

A hotel website builder is a platform for creating and maintaining a hotel's official website, usually with templates optimized for bookings, integrated booking engine widgets, multilingual content and SEO features specific to hospitality.

Housekeeping software digitizes room cleaning operations, assigning rooms to attendants, tracking cleaning status in real time and syncing with the PMS, so front desk knows instantly which rooms are ready to sell.

An in-room tablet is a dedicated device placed in the guest room that concentrates hotel services, room controls, dining orders, service requests and information in one screen, replacing printed directories and some phone calls.

An integration marketplace is a vendor's catalog of pre-built connections to other hotel systems. It shows which channel managers, payment providers, guest apps and revenue tools already work with the platform out of the box.

Keyless entry lets guests open their room with a smartphone instead of a card, using a digital key delivered through an app or link once check-in is complete, enabling arrival flows that skip the front desk.

A KPI is a metric a hotel tracks continuously because it reflects progress against a goal. Typical hotel KPIs include occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, direct booking share, review scores and staff productivity measures.

A landing page is a standalone page built for a specific campaign or search intent, such as a wedding offer or a city event, designed to convert that particular visitor rather than serve as general navigation.

Length of stay (LOS) is the number of nights a guest books in a single reservation. Hotels analyze and manage LOS because longer stays reduce turnover costs and fill shoulder nights around peak dates.

An LLM (Large Language Model) is an AI system trained on massive text datasets to understand and generate human language. LLMs power the chatbots, writing assistants and answer engines reshaping how travelers research and book hotels.

llms.txt is a proposed standard file placed at a website's root that gives AI systems a curated, machine-friendly summary of the site's most important content, similar in spirit to robots.txt but oriented to guiding LLMs rather than blocking crawlers.

The look-to-book ratio compares how many people view a hotel's availability or listing against how many actually reserve. It is a raw measure of how well interest converts into bookings on a given channel.

A hotel loyalty program rewards repeat guests with benefits such as member rates, points, upgrades or perks, aiming to shift future bookings to the direct channel and increase visit frequency and lifetime value.

Machine learning is a branch of AI where systems learn patterns from data instead of following hand-written rules. In hotels it drives demand forecasting, dynamic pricing, personalization and fraud detection.

Maintenance management in hotels is the systematic handling of repairs and preventive upkeep, tracking issues from report to resolution and scheduling recurring tasks, so equipment failures do not surprise guests or shorten asset life.

A market segment is a category of hotel demand grouped by why and how guests book, such as transient leisure, corporate, group or wholesale. Segmentation underpins pricing, forecasting and marketing decisions.

Markup is the margin a reseller adds on top of a hotel's net rate to form the final selling price. It is the counterpart of commission, where instead the hotel pays a percentage of a public price.

Merchant and agency are the two main OTA business models. In the merchant model the OTA collects the guest's payment and pays the hotel later. In the agency model the guest pays the hotel directly and the OTA invoices its commission.

Metasearch engines, such as Google Hotels, Trivago and Kayak, compare prices for the same hotel across OTAs and the hotel's own website. Hotels can list their direct price and pay per click or per booking.

MinLOS (minimum length of stay) is a booking restriction requiring guests to stay at least a set number of nights when their stay includes a specific date. It protects high-demand dates from being consumed by short stays.

A net rate is a room price given to a distribution partner with no commission included. The partner adds its own margin before selling to the public. Net rates are the standard model for wholesalers and bed banks.

The night audit is the end-of-day process that closes the hotel's business date, reconciling all charges and payments, posting room and tax, and rolling the PMS to the next day. In modern systems it runs largely automatically.

NLP (Natural Language Processing) is the field of AI focused on machines understanding and generating human language. In hotels it powers chatbots, review analysis, sentiment detection and automatic translation of guest communication.

A no-show is a guest with a confirmed reservation who never arrives and never cancels. Hotels typically charge a penalty according to the rate's cancellation policy, often the first night, and release the room.

NPS (Net Promoter Score) measures guest loyalty by asking how likely they are to recommend the hotel on a scale of zero to ten, subtracting the share of detractors from the share of promoters.

Occupancy rate is the percentage of available rooms sold in a given period, calculated as rooms sold divided by rooms available. It measures volume of demand captured but says nothing about the price achieved.

Online check-in lets guests complete registration before arrival from their phone or computer, providing personal details, signing forms and sometimes paying and choosing a room, reducing front desk time to a key handover or skipping the desk entirely.

An open API is a publicly documented interface that lets any developer or vendor connect to a system without secret agreements. In hotel tech it signals that a platform can be extended rather than being a closed box.

Open pricing is a revenue strategy where each room type, channel and segment is priced independently, instead of deriving every rate from a single BAR with fixed offsets. It allows finer control but demands more data and automation.

An OTA (Online Travel Agency) is a website or app where travelers compare and book hotels, such as Booking.com or Expedia. OTAs bring visibility and demand in exchange for a commission on each booking.

An OTA dispute is a disagreement between a hotel and an online travel agency over a booking, commonly about commission charges, cancelled stays billed as completed, relocation costs or guest compensation claims.

Overbooking is accepting more reservations than physical rooms, betting that cancellations and no-shows will free the difference. Done deliberately it protects revenue, done accidentally through sync failures it creates walked guests and reputation damage.

Pace is the comparison of current bookings on the books for future dates against the same point in previous years or against budget. It answers whether the hotel is ahead or behind where it should be.

A package rate bundles the room with additional services, such as breakfast, dinner, spa access or tickets, sold at a single combined price. Packages raise total spend and make direct offers harder to compare with OTA prices.

Parity monitoring is the automated surveillance of a hotel's own prices across OTAs, metasearch and its website to detect rate disparities, especially cases where third parties undercut the hotel's direct price.

A payment gateway is the service that securely processes online card payments for hotel bookings, connecting the booking engine or PMS to card networks and banks, and handling authorization, capture and refunds.

PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) is the security standard every business that stores, processes or transmits card data must follow. For hotels it governs how guest card details are handled across PMS, booking engine and front desk.

Personalization is adapting content, offers and service to the individual guest based on their data, such as showing returning visitors their preferred room type or sending offers matched to past behavior, instead of treating every guest identically.

Pickup is the number of new room nights or revenue added for a future date over a given period, for example bookings received in the last week for next month. It shows how demand is building compared with expectations.

PII (personally identifiable information) is any data that can identify a specific person, such as names, passport numbers, emails, phone numbers and payment details. Hotels handle large volumes of PII and are accountable for protecting it.

A Property Management System (PMS) is the core software a hotel uses to manage reservations, check-ins, room assignments, billing and guest profiles. It acts as the operational hub that most other hotel technology connects to.

PMS migration is the process of moving a hotel from one property management system to another, including transferring reservations, guest profiles and rates, retraining staff and reconnecting every integrated tool in the stack.

A post-stay survey is a questionnaire sent to guests after check-out asking about their experience. It captures private structured feedback the hotel controls, complementing public reviews and feeding scores such as NPS and CSAT.

A pre-arrival email is an automated message sent days before check-in, confirming details, offering online check-in and presenting relevant upsells such as upgrades, breakfast or transfers, at the moment guest anticipation is highest.

A pre-authorization is a temporary hold placed on a guest's card for an estimated amount, typically at check-in, to guarantee payment for the stay and incidentals without actually charging the card yet.

Predictive analytics uses historical data and statistical or machine learning models to forecast future outcomes, such as demand, cancellations, no-shows or guest lifetime value, so hotels can act before events happen rather than react after.

Price intelligence is the analysis layer built on top of rate shopping data, turning raw competitor prices into insights such as market positioning, demand signals and pricing opportunities for specific dates and room types.

A prompt is the instruction or question given to an AI model to produce a result. Prompt quality largely determines output quality, and reusable well-crafted prompts have become practical operational assets for hotel teams.

Rate parity is the practice, often contractual, of keeping the same public price for the same room and conditions across all distribution channels, so no OTA or reseller publicly undercuts the hotel's own website.

A rate plan is a defined combination of price, conditions and inclusions under which a room is sold, such as a flexible rate, a non-refundable rate or a breakfast-included package. Hotels typically run several plans in parallel.

Rate shopping is the automated collection of competitor room prices across channels and dates, using specialized tools. The resulting data feeds pricing decisions and revenue management systems with a live view of the market.

Repeat guest rate is the share of stays or guests that come from people who have stayed before. It measures loyalty in behavior rather than sentiment, and repeat guests typically book direct and cost far less to acquire.

A reputation score is a composite metric summarizing a hotel's online review performance across platforms, weighting ratings, volume and recency into one trackable number that can be benchmarked against competitors.

A resort fee is a mandatory daily charge some hotels add on top of the room rate, covering amenities such as pool, gym or internet. Common in North American markets, it is controversial and increasingly regulated.

Retargeting is advertising shown specifically to people who already visited the hotel's website or started a booking, reminding them of the property as they browse elsewhere, with the goal of bringing them back to complete a direct reservation.

Review management is the systematic handling of guest reviews across platforms such as Google, Booking.com and TripAdvisor, monitoring new reviews, responding consistently, and feeding the insights back into operations.

RevPAR (Revenue per Available Room) is room revenue divided by total available rooms, or equivalently ADR multiplied by occupancy rate. It is the standard headline metric for comparing hotel room revenue performance.

A Revenue Management System (RMS) is software that analyzes demand, booking pace, competitor rates and historical data to recommend or automatically set room prices, aiming to sell the right room at the right price at the right time.

A room block is a set of rooms reserved under one agreement for a group, event or company, held at negotiated rates until a cutoff date, after which unclaimed rooms are released back for general sale.

Room status is the operational state of each hotel room, typically vacant or occupied combined with clean, dirty or inspected. Accurate status is what lets the front desk assign rooms confidently at check-in.

Schema markup is code added to a website that describes its content in a standardized vocabulary machines understand, telling search engines and AI systems explicitly that a page represents a hotel, its rooms, prices, reviews or FAQs.

Sentiment analysis is the automated classification of text, such as reviews and guest messages, as positive, negative or neutral, often broken down by topic, so hotels can quantify what guests feel about breakfast, cleanliness, staff or noise.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of improving a hotel website's visibility in unpaid search results through technical health, relevant content and authority signals, so travelers find the official site before or alongside the OTAs.

Structured data is information organized in a machine-readable format with defined fields and types, as opposed to free text. On hotel websites it usually refers to embedded annotations that describe the property, offers and content to search engines.

Total revenue management extends pricing and demand optimization beyond rooms to every revenue stream of the property, including food and beverage, spa, meeting space and parking, optimizing for total profit rather than room revenue alone.

A tourist tax is a per-person, per-night levy many cities and regions charge hotel guests, collected by the hotel and remitted to the authority. Amounts and rules vary widely by destination and hotel category.

TRevPAR (Total Revenue per Available Room) is total hotel revenue, including rooms, food and beverage, spa and other outlets, divided by available rooms. It shows how well a hotel monetizes its entire property, not only its beds.

TripAdvisor is one of the largest travel review platforms, where guests publish hotel reviews and ratings that influence booking decisions. It also operates metasearch price comparison and paid visibility products for hotels.

Two-way sync is an integration pattern where two systems both send and receive updates from each other, so reservations, rates and availability stay identical in both. It is the standard hotels should demand between PMS and channel manager.

Upselling is offering guests a better version of what they already bought, such as a room upgrade, a higher floor or a view, for an additional charge, typically before arrival or at check-in.

A virtual credit card (VCC) is a single-use digital card number that OTAs and travel agencies issue to pay hotels for prepaid bookings. Each VCC is tied to one reservation, with a set amount and activation date.

A voice agent is an AI system that answers phone calls in natural spoken language, handling hotel inquiries such as availability, directions and reservation changes without a human operator, and transferring complex calls to staff.

A walk-in is a guest who arrives at the hotel without a reservation and asks for a room on the spot. Walk-ins are sold at the desk, typically at the current best available rate.

WhatsApp for hotels is the use of the WhatsApp Business platform as a guest communication channel, handling confirmations, arrival coordination, in-stay requests and upsells on the messaging app most international guests already have open.

A wholesaler is an intermediary that buys hotel rooms at contracted net rates and resells them to tour operators, travel agencies and online resellers. Wholesalers provide volume but are a frequent source of rate leakage.

Workflow automation is connecting hotel systems and rules so routine multi-step processes, such as sending pre-arrival messages, creating housekeeping tasks or flagging VIP arrivals, run automatically on triggers instead of depending on someone remembering.

Yield management is the discipline of maximizing revenue from a fixed, perishable inventory, hotel rooms, by controlling price and availability. It is the older, rooms-focused ancestor of today's broader revenue management practice.

A zero-click search is a query resolved entirely on the results page, through featured snippets, knowledge panels or AI Overviews, so the searcher never visits any website. A growing share of travel questions ends this way.