Hospitality runs on shorthand. Some of it is genuinely useful compression, some is inherited from the days of paper charts, and a fair amount survives mainly because nobody wants to admit they are not sure what it means. The cost lands on new staff, on owners reading their first management report, and on anyone comparing two systems that use the same word for different things. Every term below appears somewhere your property management system prints a report, a group contract sets a deadline, or an OTA extranet asks you to tick a box.
The list is grouped by where you meet each term rather than alphabetically, because that is how the vocabulary is actually learned: rate metrics with rate metrics, housekeeping codes with housekeeping codes. Where a term deserves more than a definition, and around half of them do, there is a link to the article that treats it properly. If you are here because a revenue management system or a monthly P&L used a word you did not recognise, start with the metrics section and the arguments section at the end.
How This Glossary Is Organised
Twelve sections, running roughly in the order a booking travels through a hotel: what you charge, how you compare, what the rate plan allows, where the booking comes from, who checks it in, how the room gets cleaned, what the guest spends downstairs, how it is all accounted for, and which systems carry the data. The last section handles the terms people genuinely argue about, where two competent hoteliers can read the same report differently.
A note on formulas. Most hotel metrics are simple division, and the difficulty is never the arithmetic, it is agreeing on the denominator. Occupancy, RevPAR and GOPPAR all divide by rooms available, and if two reports disagree about what was available that night, every number downstream disagrees too. That is not a rounding problem. It is the single most common reason a management report and a benchmarking report tell different stories about the same month.
Rate and Revenue Metrics
ADR, average daily rate. Rooms revenue divided by rooms sold. It measures the quality of what you sold and says nothing about how much of the hotel you filled. Complimentary rooms and house use are excluded from the room count. Our guide to raising hotel ADR covers the levers, and there is an ADR calculator if you just need the number.
Occupancy. Rooms sold divided by rooms available, as a percentage. The argument is always the denominator, specifically whether rooms that are out of order count as available. STR's benchmarking convention counts the full physical inventory, while plenty of internal reports strip out unsellable rooms, which flatters occupancy. Neither is wrong, but mixing them is. See how to increase occupancy without giving the rooms away, or the occupancy rate calculator.
RevPAR, revenue per available room. Rooms revenue divided by rooms available, which is the same as ADR multiplied by occupancy. It is the standard measure of rooms performance because it refuses to let you win on one half of the equation while losing on the other. Explained at length in what RevPAR is, compared against rate in RevPAR versus ADR, and available as a RevPAR calculator.
NRevPAR, net revenue per available room. RevPAR after the cost of getting the booking, so commissions, transaction fees and channel costs come out first. Two hotels with identical RevPAR can be a long way apart here, and the gap is usually distribution mix. Use the NRevPAR calculator, and see how to reduce OTA commissions for the levers that move it.
TRevPAR, total revenue per available room. All revenue, rooms plus outlets plus spa plus meeting space, divided by rooms available. The right headline number for full-service hotels, and misleading for rooms-only properties where it just restates RevPAR. When to prioritise which is the subject of RevPAR versus TRevPAR, with a TRevPAR calculator to hand.
TRevPAB, total revenue per available bed. The same idea with beds as the unit instead of rooms, which is how hostels and any property selling dorm inventory have to measure things. There is a TRevPAB calculator, and what a hostel is covers the model.
GOPPAR, gross operating profit per available room. Gross operating profit divided by rooms available. The number owners care about most, because it survives the trick of buying revenue with discounts and marketing spend. Covered in the GOPPAR guide, with a GOPPAR calculator.
CPOR, cost per occupied room. The direct cost of servicing one occupied room, typically housekeeping labour, linen, amenities and utilities. It sets the floor under any rate decision, because selling below CPOR loses money on arrival. See the CPOR calculator.
RevPASH, revenue per available seat hour. The restaurant equivalent of RevPAR, treating a seat for an hour as the perishable unit. Covers and average check can both improve while RevPASH falls. Explained in RevPASH, the metric your restaurant is missing.
ALOS, average length of stay. Room nights divided by number of reservations. Short stays cost more to service per night because arrivals and departures are where the labour sits. See average length of stay and the ALOS calculator.
GOP, gross operating profit. Revenue less departmental and undistributed operating expenses, before rent, insurance, property taxes, interest and depreciation. The line where management performance is usually judged, because most of what sits below it is not the operator's decision.
Flow-through. How much of an increase in revenue actually reaches GOP. Ninety percent flow-through on a rate rise is normal, since a higher rate costs almost nothing extra to deliver. The same revenue won through extra occupancy flows through far less, because every additional room has to be cleaned.
Benchmarking and Competitive Position
Comp set, competitive set. The group of hotels you measure yourself against, normally five to eight properties competing for the same demand. Choosing flattering neighbours produces comfortable reports and bad decisions. See building a competitive set.
Fair share. Your share of the comp set's room supply. If you hold 20 percent of the rooms, fair share is 20 percent of the demand, and an index of 100 means you captured exactly that.
MPI, market penetration index. Your occupancy divided by the comp set's occupancy, multiplied by 100. Above 100 means you are filling more of your rooms than the set average.
ARI, average rate index. Your ADR divided by the comp set's ADR, multiplied by 100. Reading MPI and ARI together tells you whether you are buying occupancy with rate.
RGI, revenue generation index. Your RevPAR against the comp set's, multiplied by 100. Also called RevPAR index, and the one number that cannot be gamed by trading rate for volume. All three are available in the RGI, MPI and ARI calculator.
Rate shopping. Systematically collecting competitor rates by date, channel and room type. Done manually it is a weekly chore that goes stale immediately. See the rate shopper guide.
Pace. How your bookings for a future date compare with the same point in time last year. Being 200 room nights ahead means nothing until you know whether you were ahead at this point last year too.
On the books, OTB. Confirmed business already held for a future date. The starting point for any forecast, and the thing a booking curve is measured against.
Rate Plans, Rate Codes and Restrictions
Rack rate. The published maximum for a room, the ceiling almost nobody pays. It still matters as the anchor everything else is discounted from, and in some countries it must be displayed. See what rack rates are.
BAR, best available rate. The lowest unrestricted rate on sale for a given date, the number a guest sees when they arrive with no conditions attached. Covered in the best available rate guide.
Rate plan, rate code. A sellable price with rules attached: what it includes, who qualifies, when it can be booked, whether it can be cancelled. Most rate confusion in a PMS is really rate plan sprawl, where nobody remembers what a code from three years ago was for.
Rate fence. The condition that justifies a lower price and keeps guests who would pay more from qualifying. Advance purchase, non-refundable terms, minimum stay, membership and geography are all fences. Remove the fence and you have simply cut your price.
Advance purchase. A discounted rate available only a set number of days before arrival, usually paid at booking and rarely refundable. The fence is time, and it works because leisure guests plan while corporate guests cannot.
Non-refundable, prepaid. Paid at booking with no cancellation rights. Converts a possible booking into certain revenue and shifts the risk to the guest, which is why it carries a discount.
LNR, local negotiated rate. A fixed rate agreed with a specific company for a defined period, usually in return for volume. Often called a corporate rate, and normally reviewed annually.
Package rate. A room plus something else, breakfast, parking, dinner or spa access, sold as one price. Useful for hiding rate movement from parity comparisons, and easy to run at a loss if the components are not costed properly.
MLOS, minimum length of stay. A restriction requiring a stay of at least so many nights. The standard tool for protecting a high-demand weekend from one-night bookings that block a three-night guest.
MaxLOS, maximum length of stay. The reverse, capping how long a stay can run on a given rate. Used to keep cheap advance-purchase business from occupying rooms across a peak date.
CTA, closed to arrival. No new arrivals accepted on that date, though guests already staying can continue. Protects a night when you are full of longer stays.
CTD, closed to departure. Departures not permitted on that date, which forces stays to extend through it. Rare, and irritating to guests when applied carelessly.
Stop sell, close out. Stopping sales for a date, room type or channel entirely. The blunt instrument, and the one most often left switched on by accident after a busy weekend.
Allotment. A number of rooms set aside for a specific partner, tour operator or channel to sell. See room allotment management.
Release period, cut-off. The deadline by which unsold allotment rooms return to your general inventory. A generous release period quietly hands your best dates to a partner who may not sell them.
Yield management. Varying price and restrictions by expected demand to maximise revenue from fixed capacity. The older term, and still the clearest. See hotel yield management.
Dynamic pricing. Rates that move continuously with demand, competitor position and pace, rather than sitting on a seasonal grid. Covered in the dynamic pricing strategy guide.
Open pricing. Pricing each room type, channel and segment independently instead of moving one BAR and holding fixed differentials. More work, and considerably more revenue when demand is uneven across room types.
Displacement analysis. Working out what a piece of business, usually a group, costs you in transient bookings you would otherwise have taken at a higher rate. The calculation that stops a full hotel from being an unprofitable one.
Distribution, Channels and Commissions
OTA, online travel agency. Booking.com, Expedia, Agoda and the rest. They bring demand you would not otherwise reach and charge for it, typically 15 to 25 percent depending on market and programme.
Agency model. The guest pays the hotel, and the hotel pays commission after the stay. Cash flow stays with you, and so does the payment risk.
Merchant model. The OTA takes payment from the guest and pays you an agreed net rate later. You lose the float and the guest's card details, which changes both your cash cycle and who handles the refund conversation.
Net rate. The rate you actually receive after commission or under a merchant arrangement. The only rate worth comparing across channels. See true net ADR after fees and the OTA commission calculator.
GDS, global distribution system. The reservation networks travel agents and corporate booking tools work through, principally Amadeus, Sabre and Travelport. Still where a large share of managed corporate travel lives. See the GDS guide.
CRS, central reservation system. The system that holds rates and availability centrally and distributes them outward, historically to brand.com and the GDS. Explained in the CRS guide.
Channel manager. The connection layer that pushes rates and availability to every channel and pulls reservations back, so one inventory pool serves all of them. See what a channel manager is and how it pairs with the PMS.
Booking engine. The part of your own website that takes a reservation and payment. Every direct booking that arrives here avoids commission entirely. See the booking engine guide.
Metasearch. Google Hotel Ads, Trivago, Kayak and similar sites that compare rates across channels and pass the click on. Priced per click or per booking, and one of the few places you can outbid an OTA for your own guest.
Billboard effect. The direct bookings you gain because a traveller saw you on an OTA first. It is real, hard to measure precisely, and routinely used to justify commission after the fact.
Rate parity. Contractual pressure to show the same rate across channels. Wide parity, which covers every channel including your own site, has been restricted in the EU, while narrow parity is a narrower obligation. The current position is set out in rate parity after the EU crackdown.
Look-to-book. Searches divided by bookings. A rising ratio on your own site usually means a rate, availability or trust problem rather than a traffic problem.
Booking window, lead time. How far ahead of arrival a reservation is made. Shortening windows compress the time you have to price a date properly. See the hotel booking window.
Reservations and Front Office
PMS, property management system. The operational core: reservations, room assignment, rates, guest profiles, folios and the night audit. Everything else in the stack connects to it. If you are weighing what one should cost, see PMS pricing and total cost of ownership.
Folio. The running account of everything a guest owes, room charges, outlet postings, taxes and payments. Splitting it correctly at checkout is where most billing disputes are won or lost. See the hotel folio guide.
Guest ledger. The total owed by guests currently in house. It empties as people check out and settle.
City ledger. Amounts owed by parties who have already left or never stayed, typically companies, travel agents and event organisers on account. This is your receivables book, and it is where uncollected money hides. See the reconciliation playbook.
Night audit. The overnight routine that closes the financial day: posting room and tax charges, reconciling outlets against the PMS, checking credit limits and rolling the date. Covered in the night audit guide, and as a role in the night auditor's job.
No-show. A confirmed guest who neither arrives nor cancels. Whether you can charge depends entirely on what the rate plan said. See hotel no-shows and cancellation rules.
Walk-in. A guest who arrives without a reservation. The one segment where you hold all the pricing power, since they are standing in your lobby with no alternative booked.
Walking a guest. Relocating a guest with a valid reservation to another hotel because you have none left. You pay for the room, the transfer and usually the first night elsewhere. The predictable end of overbooking done without arithmetic. See hotel overbooking.
Overbooking. Deliberately selling more rooms than you have, in the expectation of cancellations and no-shows. Defensible with data and reckless without it.
Stayover. A guest staying another night, so the room needs servicing but not turning over.
Run of house, ROH. A rate that entitles the guest to whatever standard room is free at arrival rather than a specific type. Convenient for you, and a source of complaints when it is not explained at booking.
DNCO, did not check out. A guest who left without stopping at the desk, having settled or authorised payment. Distinct from a skipper, who left owing money.
Upgrade. Moving a guest to a better room at no extra charge, usually to recover from a problem or to clear a room type you need.
Upsell. Selling that better room, or an added service, for more money. The two words get used interchangeably at the desk, which makes upsell revenue reporting unreliable. See hotel upselling.
Pickup. Rooms booked during a defined period, usually since the last report. The daily heartbeat of revenue management, and the number a forecast is corrected against.
Registration card. The arrival record carrying the guest's details and signature. In much of Europe its content is set by police reporting rules rather than by preference.
Groups, Blocks and Events
Block. Rooms held for a group at an agreed rate until a deadline. Held rooms are unavailable to everyone else, which is why a badly managed block costs more than an empty one.
Tentative and definite. A tentative block is pencilled in while the organiser decides; a definite block is contracted. Tentatives that are never chased are the most common form of quiet revenue loss in group business.
Wash. The gap between rooms blocked and rooms actually taken up. Experienced sales teams wash blocks down deliberately based on the organiser's history rather than trusting the original number.
Attrition. The contractual allowance for a group to release part of its block without penalty, with damages beyond that point. Attrition clauses are only useful if somebody actually tracks the cut-off.
Cut-off date. The date unsold blocked rooms return to general sale. Miss it and you carry the group's unsold rooms into a date you could have sold yourself.
Rooming list. The organiser's list of names against the block, usually due at cut-off. Late lists are the reason group arrivals go wrong at the desk.
BEO, banquet event order. The operational document for an event: timings, covers, setup, menu, audio visual and billing. The single source of truth between sales and the kitchen. See the banquet event order guide.
F&B minimum. A contracted minimum spend on food and beverage, charged whether or not it is consumed. Common where meeting space is given at a nominal rate.
Comp ratio. Complimentary rooms granted to an organiser, conventionally one per forty room nights, though it is negotiable and frequently negotiated.
MICE. Meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions, the umbrella term for organised group business. See the MICE guide.
Housekeeping and Room Status
Departure clean. A full turnover after checkout: linen, bathroom, amenities and inspection. The longest clean of the day and the one that gates your check-in time.
Refresh, stayover service. The lighter service for an occupied room. Typically a third to a half of a departure clean in time, which is why arrival and departure patterns drive housekeeping labour more than occupancy does.
Deep clean. Periodic intensive cleaning beyond the daily routine, mattresses, upholstery, descaling and behind furniture. Scheduled properly it is planned downtime, and neglected it becomes an out of order room at the worst moment.
OOO, out of order. A room that cannot be sold because something is broken or under renovation. Normally removed from sellable inventory, which is exactly why it distorts occupancy comparisons.
OOS, out of service. A room withheld for a short-term reason but still counted in inventory, a lingering smell or a minor fix. The difference from OOO is a reporting decision as much as an operational one.
Room status codes. The shorthand on the housekeeping board: vacant clean, vacant dirty, occupied clean, occupied dirty, inspected. Getting these wrong is how a guest gets walked into an unmade room. See housekeeping technology.
Turndown. The evening service that prepares the room for sleep. Increasingly offered on request rather than by default, both for cost and because many guests do not want it.
Par level, linen par. How many complete sets of linen you hold per bed. Three is the working minimum, one in use, one in the linen room, one in the wash, and four is comfortable. See the linen par calculator and the housekeeping supplies list.
Credits. A workload unit used to balance assignments, where each room type and clean type is worth a set number. Fairer than counting rooms, since a suite departure is not a studio refresh.
Food, Beverage and Outlets
Cover. One guest served. Covers count people, not bills, so a table of four is four covers and one check.
Average check, average spend per cover. Outlet revenue divided by covers. Rising average check with falling covers is often a sign you have lost your regulars and kept the occasion diners.
Turn time. How long a table is occupied from seating to reset. The main lever on RevPASH, and the one most easily improved without touching prices.
Menu engineering. Classifying dishes by popularity and contribution margin, then reworking the menu around what sells well and earns well. See menu engineering.
Food cost percentage. Cost of ingredients as a share of food revenue. Useful as a trend and dangerous as a target, since it can be improved by shrinking portions until guests stop coming.
POS, point of sale. The system that takes outlet orders and payments. Its value to a hotel depends almost entirely on whether it posts cleanly to the guest folio. See the point of sale system and how POS to PMS charge posting actually works.
Charge posting, room charge. Sending an outlet charge to a guest's folio instead of collecting at the table. Convenient for guests, and the single largest source of disputed lines at checkout when the integration is unreliable.
Wastage. Food and beverage lost to spoilage, over-portioning, errors and theft. Measured properly it is the fastest route to margin in most hotel kitchens. See restaurant inventory management.
Payments, Accounting and Compliance
Pre-authorisation. A hold placed on a guest's card to confirm funds without taking them. Holds expire, which is why long stays with a single pre-auth at check-in end in declined cards. See pre-authorisation versus deposits.
Deposit. Money actually taken in advance. It secures the booking and brings obligations, including refund handling and, depending how you store card data, a wider compliance footprint.
Chargeback. A guest disputing a charge with their card issuer, who reverses it pending evidence. Hotels lose most chargebacks they cannot document, which makes folio detail and signed authorisations worth keeping.
Tokenisation. Replacing card numbers with a reference token so the real number never sits in your systems. The most effective way to shrink what an attacker can steal.
PCI DSS. The card industry's security standard, applying to anyone who takes card payments. Version 4 brought new requirements that hotels have been slow to meet. See PCI DSS 4 compliance for hotels.
City tax, tourist tax. A per person per night levy collected by the hotel for a local authority. Rules on exemptions and children vary by city, not by country, which is why a group booking across two cities produces two different bills. See the tourist tax compliance guide.
USALI. The Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry, the global standard for how hotels report revenues and expenses. First published in 1926, and now in its 12th revised edition, adopted on 1 January 2026. That edition added a mandatory labour cost schedule, a sustainability section covering energy, water and waste, guidance for all-inclusive hotels, and a clarification on recording day-use revenue and its effect on ADR and occupancy. See USALI explained and, for the revenue stream it clarified, day-use rooms.
Departmental profit. Revenue less direct expenses for a single department, rooms, food and beverage, spa. It stops before any shared overhead, so a department can be profitable while the hotel is not.
EBITDA. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation. Used by owners and buyers to compare operating performance across properties with different financing and asset ages.
Systems, Data and Integrations
RMS, revenue management system. Software that forecasts demand and recommends or sets prices. Its output is only as good as the segmentation and history you feed it. See demand forecasting methods.
CRM, customer relationship management. The guest database and communication layer, holding history, preferences and consent. See hospitality CRM.
API. The interface one system exposes so another can read and write its data. When a vendor says an integration exists, the useful question is which direction it runs and how often.
Two-way integration. Data flowing both ways, so a change in either system reaches the other. One-way integrations are the usual cause of rate and availability drift. See channel manager and PMS sync issues.
Tech stack. The set of connected systems running the hotel, and the integrations between them. See connecting your hotel tech stack.
Segmentation. Grouping business by type, transient, corporate, group, wholesale, so you can see which segment produced which rate. Without it, an ADR movement is uninterpretable.
The Terms That Cause the Most Arguments
Five pairs generate most of the disagreements between an operator, an owner and a benchmarking report. They are worth settling in writing before a board meeting rather than during one.
Occupancy denominators. Whether out of order rooms count as available. Benchmarking convention keeps the full inventory; internal reports often strip them. Pick one, write it down, and use it consistently, because the gap can be several points during a refurbishment.
ADR versus rate. A rate is what one room is sold for. ADR is an average across everything sold, and it moves when your mix changes even if no rate did. A quiet month of suite bookings raises ADR without any pricing decision at all.
RevPAR versus TRevPAR versus GOPPAR. Rooms performance, total revenue performance and profit performance. Rooms-only hotels can use RevPAR alone. Full-service hotels reporting only RevPAR are hiding the half of the business that carries the cost.
OOO versus OOS. Broken and unsellable, against withheld and still counted. Two hotels in the same group frequently apply these differently, which makes their occupancy incomparable.
Guest ledger versus city ledger. In house against already departed. Money that should have moved from the first to the second and did not is the most common finding in any hotel receivables review.
No-show versus cancellation. A cancellation was communicated, a no-show was not. The commercial difference is entirely in what the rate plan permitted, which is why rate plan hygiene matters more than the label.
If a term is missing that you keep meeting, it is probably specific to your brand, your management company or your market, and that is worth knowing too. A surprising amount of hotel vocabulary is local convention wearing the costume of an industry standard.
