Hospitality Industry Glossary

We offer a glossary with hospitality industry terminology that will help you better understand technical terms.

• Average Daily Rate (ADR): it is the total room revenue for a given period (day, month to date, month, year to date), divided by the number of rooms occupied for the same period. Frequently used as a measure of economic performance.
• Add-on: is a platform extension that adds extra features and is chosen by the end user. It may extend certain functions within the application, add new items to the application's interface, or give the program additional capabilities. It may or may not have a cost associated.
• Application Programming Interface (API): facilitates the secure transmission of data between different software applications. It connects the different departments and systems of the hotel in an easy to access and use interface.
• Availability and Rates Interface (ARI): a system for transferring a property's room availability and pricing details between systems, such as a channel manager and booking channels.
• Back of house: while the front of house positions are important, they can’t run a hotel alone! Often invisible to guests, the back of house team keeps things running smoothly behind the scenes. They have minimal guest contact, either working in offices separate from guest areas or in guestrooms when the guests are out. 
• Booking channel: a method or system for distribution on which travellers can search for and book rooms at accommodation providers. Also referred to as channel, booking website, online travel agency (OTA), travel website and distribution channel.
• Booking summary or Reservation summary: it is a summary of the guest’s reservation details provided by the hotel to the guest. It may include the hotel's contact details, amount of guests under the reservation, check-in and check-out dates, room type, amounts charged, owed and paid, etc.
• Channels: how did the reservation arrive at your farm: by mail, phone, email, directly in the management system (PMS), walk-in customer, etc.
• Channel management: controlling the allocation of hotel inventory and rates across all distribution channels including website, third parties and the global distribution system. Effective channel management solutions should reduce labour costs and improve efficiency by providing a centralised way to control multiple channels.
• Channel manager: it allows hotels to manage inventory, rates, availability, restrictions, etc. on a number of sales channels, allowing hotels to manage their rooms and reservations, reduce time, increase revenue, and prevent duplicate bookings, by continually updating data across all of the distribution channels they may use including direct online bookings, travel wholesalers, contact centres, and online travel agencies to name a few.
• Chatbot: it is a software robot that can converse with an individual or consumer through an automated conversation service that can be performed through choice trees or through an ability to process natural language.
• Cloud platform: a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet and used to store, manage, and process data in place of local servers or personal computers.
• Connectivity: the fact of connecting and synchronizing your computer system (PMS) with one or more distributors (OTAs), with a reservation engine, with a reservation center (CRS). 
• Conversion rate: the ratio of website visitors converted into paying customers.
• Customer profiling: it is the practice of organizing customers into specific groups possessing similar goals or characteristics.
• Customer Relation Management (CRM): it enables hotels to manage guest relationships at scale through profiling and marketing automation. At the core of any good Hotel CRM lies guest profiles that are created from data in property management systems, reputation management software and other third party data sources like social media. These profiles are then used to personalize marketing communications at scale. Hotel industry marketers use email marketing software to send personalized campaigns that drive material revenue for their properties without spamming their entire guest lists with generic offers. CRM software is mostly associated with email communications but increasingly is powering multi-channel communication like SMS, Facebook Messenger and more.
• Centralized Reservation System (CRS): this is a type of reservation software used to update and maintain hotel inventory and rate information so that properties can manage reservations in real time.
• Call To Action (CTA): content usually presented in the form of a button that is intended to prompt the visitor, reader or listener to perform a specific action. It is usually an instruction or directive such as "Book Now" or "Click Here".
• Customer Experience (CX): it is the sum total of customers' perceptions and feelings resulting from interactions with a brand's products and services. Customer experience spans the lifetime of customers' relationships with a brand, starting before a purchase is made, continuing to active use and advancing to renewal or repeat purchase.
• Customer Engagement (CE): it is an interaction between an external customer and an organization through various online or offline channels.
• Dashboard: a dashboard provides at-a-glance views of key performance indicators, ability to manage property and user settings in one location.
• Front of house: the front of house departments are guest-facing. They work directly with guests and handle operational tasks, like check-ins and check-outs. Front of house employees often work in shifts, with some covering overnight shifts so that an employee is always available whenever a guest needs assistance.
• Guest: a person staying at a hotel or guest house. 
• Guest journey: all the contact points between your establishment and the audience. The customer journey is multi-channel and multi-media. It is the way you interact with your audience on: search engines, OTAs, your website, your social networks, review platforms, your emails, your booking engine, etc.
• Hospitality industry: hospitality is the generous and cordial provision of services to a guest.
• Integrations: the synchronization of data, with other software companies, e.g., PMSs, RMSs, hotel applications, etc. in order to enhance the platform and provide a richer customer experience.
• Internet Booking Engine (IBE) or Online Booking Manager (OBM): the direct channel for hotels on the web.
• Marketing automation: is a technology that manages marketing processes and multifunctional campaigns, across multiple channels, automatically. With marketing automation, businesses can target customers with automated messages across email, web, social, and text.
• Occupancy: the percentage of available rooms occupied for a given period of consecutive time. This figure is calculated by dividing the number of rooms occupied for a period by the number of rooms available for the same period and is expressed as a percentage.
• Online Travel Agency (OTA): are online companies whose websites allow consumers to book various travel related services directly via Internet.
• Operation management: a hotel operations manager oversees all of the operational departments at a hotel. The operations manager must ensure that the front office, housekeeping, food and beverage, and maintenance departments perform their roles sufficiently to deliver a good guest experience and meet revenue and occupancy goals.
• Online Reputation Manager (ORM): it is an e-reputation management software. The ORM allows you to aggregate all the reviews that the establishment has on different platforms in one place, the dashboard. It usually reformats all the reviews to make them fit into a single repository and thus allow comparison between several platforms/establishment/over time. They collect reviews (mainly by email), moderate them and distribute them. The diffusion takes place either on the establishment's website (often through a widget) or towards third-party platforms such as TripAdvisor, Trivago, Google My Business, etc.
• Platform: single point of entry to a group of technologies and services used as a base upon which applications can be run and integrated to.
• Property Management Software (PMS): it is a software suite that property owners use to manage their business by coordinating reservations, availability, payments and reporting in one central place. The PMS allows property owners to check-in and check-out guests, see room availability, make adjustments to existing reservations, and schedule housekeeping or maintenance events. With a central system, hoteliers can better manage and monitor the key metrics needed to run their business.
• Progressive Web App (PWA): it is a website that looks and behaves as if it is a mobile app. PWAs are built to take advantage of native mobile device features, without requiring the end user to visit an app store, make a purchase and download software locally.
• Revenue Per Available Room (RevPAR): is a straightforward hotel performance metric that tracks how much money a hotel is making on its rooms. It’s correlated directly with a hotel’s average daily rate and its occupancy rate. 
• Revenue Manager Software (RMS): it is the process of understanding, anticipating and reacting to consumer behavior to maximize revenue subject to availability. Predicting real-time customer demand and optimizing the price and availability of products to match that demand. 
• Software As A Service (SaaS): the software solution is hosted outside the company and is accessible on demand via Internet access and billed as an all-inclusive subscription (including support and maintenance).
• Total Revenue Per Available Room (TrevPAR): it is a hotel key performance indicator (KPI) that gives a preview of the total revenue from all departments which the room can generate - including the hotel's bar or restaurant, for example. While RevPAR only takes account of the revenue generated by the room rates themselves.
• Unified Inbox: it is a central inbox that combines messages and/or emails from multiple sources. In the hotel brand software industry, unified inboxes are features used to allow hosts to centralize messages from guests who have booked on different online channels.