Hotel software carries a century of hotel vocabulary, and Prostay adds some of its own. This page defines each word once and points at the article that covers it properly. If you have arrived here from the middle of another article, read the one line you came for and go back.
Rooms and rates
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Accommodation type | A kind of room you sell, such as Standard Double, rather than one physical room. Availability, rates and channel listings are all built on types, and the individual rooms sit inside them. Accommodation types and rooms. |
| Base rate | The nightly price of an accommodation type before anything is added or taken off. Everything else is calculated from it. Base rates and seasons. |
| Rate plan | A way of selling that room at a different price or on different terms: breakfast included, non-refundable, seven nights for the price of six. A rate plan is derived from the base rate rather than typed independently. Rate plans and packages. |
| Season | A date range where the base rate is different. Two seasons cannot cover the same night for the same type. |
| Out of order, out of service | Two ways of taking a room off sale. Out of order removes it from your available inventory, out of service does not. Rooms out of order and out of service. |
Bookings and guests
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Reservation | One booking: who is coming, which room or rooms, which nights, at what rate. It carries its own status separate from the room's. The reservation page. |
| Guest profile | The person, kept once and reused across stays, with their contact details, preferences and history. A reservation points at a profile rather than holding a copy of it. The guest profile. |
| Stayover, no show, skipped | Reservation statuses. A stayover is a guest continuing into another night, a no show never arrived, a skipped guest left without checking out. Room status and reservation status. |
| Night audit, rollover | The nightly close that moves the property to the next day, posts the night's room charges and produces the day's figures. What it finds wrong is a discrepancy. Discrepancies and the night rollover. |
| Booking source | Where a booking came from: your website, a travel agent, a booking site, the telephone. Commission and reporting both hang off it. Booking sources. |
Money
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Folio | The bill attached to a stay. Every charge, tax and payment for that guest lands on a folio, and a stay can have more than one so that a company pays the room while the guest pays the bar. Reading the folio. |
| Charge, payment, refund | The three things that can be posted to a folio. A charge is what the guest owes, a payment is money received, a refund is money given back. Posting charges, payments and refunds. |
| Item, service, add-on | Anything sellable that is not a room night: a bottle of wine, a late checkout, an airport transfer. Items, services and add-ons. |
| Property currency | The one currency your property's books are kept in, set on System Settings, then General. Rates, folios, invoices and every report are denominated in it, and changing it does not retranslate anything already recorded. General system settings. |
| Payment option | A way of paying that your property accepts, such as cash, bank transfer or a card. Each one is configured and can be switched on or off per place it is offered. Payment options. |
| Payout | The transfer of money already taken from guests into your own bank account. It is a separate event from the payment, usually days later, and several payments are paid out together. Payments, payouts and account records. |
| Chargeback | A guest asking their bank to reverse a card payment. The money is taken back from you while it is investigated, and you answer it with evidence rather than by refunding. Handling a disputed payment. |
| Chart of accounts | The list of accounts your bookkeeping is organised into: bank accounts, income, expenses, what you owe and what you are owed. Every entry in Prostay Accounting posts to one of them. The chart of accounts. |
Selling through other people
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Channel | A booking site your rooms are listed on. The channel manager keeps its availability and rates in step with yours. How the channel manager fits together. |
| Mapping | Telling a channel which of your accommodation types and rate plans correspond to which of its listings. Nothing sells until it is mapped. Mapping rooms and rate plans. |
| Allotment | A cap on how many rooms a channel may sell, so one site cannot take your whole hotel. Limiting what channels can sell. |
| Booking engine | The booking pages on your own website, where a guest books you direct with no commission to anybody. How guests find and book. |
Access and the account
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Permission | A single named right, such as being allowed to change email server settings. Screens check permissions and usually say which one they wanted when you lack it. |
| Role | A named bundle of permissions given to a person, per property. The same person can hold different roles at two hotels on one account. Users, roles and permissions. |
| Property | One hotel. Nearly everything in Prostay belongs to a property: its rooms, guests, settings, books and your permissions. Switching between them. |
| Module | One of the products inside Prostay, chosen from the grid button at the top left. What each module is for. |
| Prostay Nexus | The shared inbox, where guest email arrives and your team replies from. It appears as Knowledge base in the module list and as Nexus on some settings screens. The unified inbox. |
Four words that mean two things
These are the ones worth reading even if you know the vocabulary, because the same word means something different depending on which module you are standing in.
| Word | In the front desk and Prostay Pay | In Prostay Accounting |
|---|---|---|
| Customer | The guest who stayed, or the person who paid. Customers, refunds and receipts. | A business you invoice, such as a travel agent or a company account. It is not the guest list. Customers. |
| Invoice | The document you give a guest for their stay, produced from the folio. Folio configuration and invoicing. | Either a sales invoice you have issued to a business customer, or a bill a supplier has sent you. Also, confusingly, the bill Prostay sends you for the subscription. Your invoices from Prostay. |
| Word | One meaning | The other |
|---|---|---|
| Block | Holding rooms back from sale for a group or an event. Blocks and holds. | Stopping a channel from selling particular dates, which the channel manager calls closing out. Closing out dates. |
| Integrations | The module that connects Prostay to outside software. What Prostay connects to. | A set of front desk settings screens whose web addresses start with the same word, including taxes, folios and invoicing. Nothing to do with the module. |
Where to go next
- What Prostay is, and which part you are in, if a word turned out to belong to a module you have not opened.
- Signing in and finding your way around, for the controls that get you there.
- Where the settings live, for finding the screen behind a setting you have just read about.