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Writer's pictureSiobhan O'Neill

Do you know your ADR from your LRA? How to get your head around hotel terminology

Like all industries, the hotel sector comes with its own jargon and technical terms to learn and understand. Our glossary can help people get up to speed.


In March my life took a sudden left turn when I found myself with a new job, writing about tech solutions that I’d never had much cause to understand before.


Although I’ve written about different aspects of hotels and the hospitality industry for many years, the world of revenue management and channel distribution were new to me. I’d seen terms like RevPAR and EBITDA before, but never really needed to understand them.


Most industries come with their own terminology and abbreviations for employees to get their heads round, but the complex global system that governs how hotels get their rooms in front of potential guests is one that’s jam-packed with its own language and acronyms. The first several pages of my notebook - filled with learning from the earliest days of my new role at Fornova - are littered with these terms as I battled to add them to my own vocabulary. I spent a lot of time on Google, looking things up.


But I know I’m not alone. With new ways to benchmark and measure performance, new technical solutions and new companies coming to the marketplace every day, even people who’ve worked in the industry for a long time can wrestle with the acronyms and what they stand for. What’s the MinLOS and BAR for a dynamic package on your MICE market? Anyone?


This can create problems either from a breakdown in communication when you’re talking to colleagues, customers or channel partners who aren’t familiar with a particular abbreviation, or because people are using different definitions for the same term. For example, is a hotel asset a property in a hotel chain, or an item of value held within the hotel itself? Could it be both things? (Answer: yes.)


For greater efficiency then, it’s important that everyone has the same understanding of the language we use to describe the environment we operate in. To help with that, Fornova has built a handy glossary of some of the common but confusing terms you regularly hear when dealing with hotel room rates and the different KPIs that measure how effective your distribution strategy is. (If only we’d launched it several months ago when I really needed it.)


The Fornova Hotel Glossary is intended as a practical and user-friendly dictionary of common terms deployed in the hotel industry, particularly around the departments of distribution, revenue management and marketing. Whilst we have made every effort to present current and accurate definitions, the glossary should be considered as a helpful resource and not as an authoritative reference.


Our industry is ever-evolving and complex, so even though it’s impractical to include every applicable term, we will make every effort to keep the glossary updated with the latest additions to our lexicon.

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