hoteltech.news July 29, 2026

Travel industry glossary

Your reference guide to hotel technology, distribution and marketing terms. For professionals who use them every day and for students still learning them. Each term comes with a clear definition and a concrete example. This is nobody's official glossary, it is how we at Hotel Tech News explain the concepts that show up in our analysis.

92 terms

Revenue

Length of stay

Length of stay is how many nights a guest stays on average. Longer stays lower the cleaning and turnover cost per night. Revenue...

Hotel technology

Llave móvil

The mobile key turns the guest's phone into the room key, with no stop at reception. It activates after online check-in and opens...

AI and automation

LLM

A large language model is an AI trained on huge amounts of text that predicts the next word and with that writes, summarizes and...

Airlines

Load factor

Load factor is the percentage of seats sold out of those offered on a flight or across a network. It is to an airline what...

Airlines

Low cost

A low cost airline sells cheap flights by cutting everything non-essential: a single class, tightly used aircraft, secondary...

AI and automation

Machine learning

Machine learning is the part of AI where the system improves by itself from data, without anyone coding every rule. It finds...

Distribution

Mayorista

A wholesaler or bedbank buys rooms at a net rate and resells them to agencies, tour operators and other OTAs worldwide. It gives...

Hotel technology

Mensajería con el huésped

Guest messaging is direct communication over WhatsApp, SMS or chat before, during and after the stay. It is used to answer...

Distribution

Metasearch

A metasearch engine compares prices for the same hotel across several channels at once and sends the user to the one they pick....

Commercial

MICE

MICE covers meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions. It is a high value segment that fills hotels midweek and outside...

Revenue

MLOS

Minimum length of stay is a restriction that forces booking a number of nights to be allowed into a given date. It protects high...

Distribution

Modelo agencia

In the agency model, the guest pays at the hotel and the hotel later settles the commission with the OTA. The hotel keeps the...

Distribution

Modelo merchant

In the merchant model, the OTA charges the guest upfront and then pays the hotel its net rate, keeping the difference. The hotel...

Distribution

NDC

New Distribution Capability is an IATA standard that lets airlines sell through third parties with the same richness as on their...

AI and automation

NLP

Natural language processing is the branch of AI that lets a machine understand and produce human language. It is what allows...

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