344 articles
The Prostay Blog
Practical thinking on hotel technology, revenue, operations and the guest experience, from the team building the platform.
Hotel Operations Optimization
House Accounts in Hotels, and How They Leak Money
A house account is where a hotel puts charges that belong to nobody in a room: a day guest, an agency, a staff meal, a group master. Opening one is easy, and every hotel does it. Collecting on it is where the money goes missing, usually months later, in a ledger nobody reads until the auditor asks. Here is how the ledgers fit together, who should approve credit, and what an aged balance is actually worth.
Jul 30, 2026 · 15 min read
Hospitality Industry
Hotel Terminology Explained, From ADR to Walk-In
Hospitality runs on shorthand, and most of it is never explained to the people expected to use it. This glossary defines the terms you actually meet on a PMS report, a group contract and an OTA extranet, grouped by where you run into them rather than alphabetically. It also settles the ones that cause the most arguments, like whether out of order rooms belong in your occupancy denominator.
Jul 29, 2026 · 17 min read
Digital Marketing
Tripadvisor Ranking: What Moves It and What Doesn't
Most advice on Tripadvisor ranking repeats the same myth, that replying to reviews lifts your position. It does not, because responses are not a ranking factor. Quality, quantity and recency are, and recency is the one most hotels neglect. This guide covers what actually moves the Popularity Ranking, what Tripadvisor's own research says responding is worth, and why your reviews now matter to ChatGPT and Claude as much as to Tripadvisor.
Jul 27, 2026 · 14 min read
Revenue Management
RevPASH: The Metric Your Restaurant Is Missing
Restaurants measure covers and average check, and both can rise while the business gets worse. RevPASH, revenue per available seat hour, is the one number that catches what they miss, because it treats a seat for an hour as the perishable inventory it actually is. This guide covers the formula, how to read it hour by hour, realistic benchmarks by service style, and the four levers that move it: turn time, table mix, menu engineering and demand shifting.
Jul 26, 2026 · 13 min read
Revenue Management
Day-Use Hotel Rooms: Sell the Same Room Twice
Every night, most hotels let their most perishable product expire twice: rooms that sit empty all day before an evening arrival, and rooms that never sell at all. Day-use bookings monetise the first, and a disciplined last-minute playbook rescues the second. This guide covers who actually books daytime rooms, how to price the time bands, the housekeeping logistics that make or break it, and how to move tonight's unsold inventory without wrecking your rate.
Jul 25, 2026 · 13 min read
Hotel Technology & Innovation
How to Get Your Hotel Visible and Bookable in ChatGPT
In March 2026, OpenAI quietly killed its plan to let travelers book hotels natively inside ChatGPT, and in doing so it told hoteliers exactly where the game is now played. AI owns discovery; the booking happens on platforms with live rates, and increasingly on your own website. This guide covers how travelers actually use ChatGPT to choose hotels, what the checkout retreat means, and the four moves that make your property both visible and bookable.
Jul 24, 2026 · 15 min read
Hotel Technology & Innovation
Hotel Automation: The Complete 2026 Guide
Most hotels do not have a staffing shortage; they have an automation shortage. This guide maps everything a hotel can automate in 2026, reservations and distribution, the guest journey, housekeeping, pricing, and the nightly finance grind, in which order to do it, what should stay stubbornly human, the time and revenue numbers that justify the project, and how to choose between an integrated platform and a stack of bolted-on tools.
Jul 23, 2026 · 14 min read
Hotel Operations Optimization
Restaurant Inventory Management: The 2026 Guide
Food cost is the most controllable number in any restaurant, and inventory is where you control it. This guide covers the working system: food cost percentage and the 2026 benchmarks by concept, COGS done with real counts, par levels that match how you actually sell, a weekly counting routine that does not eat a whole night, the variance analysis that finds waste and theft, and recipe costing that keeps the menu priced ahead of inflation.
Jul 22, 2026 · 13 min read
Hotel Technology & Innovation
Oracle OPERA PMS Alternative: The 2026 Switching Guide
The OPERA 5 to OPERA Cloud migration is forcing thousands of hotels into a decision they did not plan to make: absorb a heavier Oracle contract, or use the disruption to reconsider the platform entirely. This guide covers when leaving OPERA genuinely pays off, when staying is the right call, what a migration to a unified platform actually involves, and the questions to settle before you commit either way.
Jul 21, 2026 · 14 min read
Hotel Operations Optimization
Hotel Breakfast: Formats, Pricing and Profit
Breakfast is the most reviewed meal in hospitality: a filter on every booking site, a scored category on review platforms, and the last thing most guests experience before checkout. This guide treats it as a product: choosing the format your volume actually supports, pricing it as an included rate or an add-on, controlling food cost and waste, the menu items guests really remember, and selling breakfast at every step of the booking journey.
Jul 19, 2026 · 15 min read
Revenue Management
Hotel Weddings: How to Turn Your Property Into a Booked-Out Wedding Venue
A single wedding can be worth more than a month of transient room nights: venue fee, catering for a hundred, a sold-out room block, spa and breakfast spend, and a couple who returns every anniversary for the rest of their lives. Yet most hotels treat weddings as an occasional disruption rather than a business line, quoting from a stale PDF and hoping the banquet team copes. This guide covers the full machine: what makes a property genuinely wedding-ready, how to design packages that sell themselves, pricing structures from venue fees to minimum spends, room blocks that capture the travelling guest list, the BEO discipline that keeps the day flawless, and the marketing that turns one good wedding into a pipeline of them.
Jul 17, 2026 · 15 min read
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