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Hotel software & hospitality glossary
Plain-English definitions of the hotel technology, distribution and Malaysian compliance terms every hotelier, front-desk team and hospitality student should know.
Property & front desk
- Property Management SystemPMS
- The core software a hotel runs on. A PMS handles reservations, the front desk (check-in and check-out), room assignment, housekeeping status, guest billing and reporting from one place, so a property operates from a single source of truth.
- Front office
- The department and system functions that manage guest arrivals, departures, room moves and the front desk. In a PMS, the front office module is where staff check guests in and out and manage their bills.
- Folio
- A guest's running bill during their stay. Every room charge, F&B bill, tax and payment is posted to the folio, which is settled at check-out.
- Housekeeping module
- The part of a PMS that tracks room cleaning and maintenance status (for example dirty, clean, inspected or out of order), so the front desk knows in real time which rooms are ready to sell.
- MyKad check-in
- Scanning a guest's MyKad, the Malaysian national identity card, at the front desk to auto-fill their profile details. It speeds up check-in and cuts manual data entry.
Distribution & bookings
- Online Travel AgencyOTA
- A third-party website that sells hotel rooms to travellers, such as Agoda, Booking.com, Traveloka, Expedia or Airbnb. OTAs charge the hotel a commission on each booking, typically 15% or more.
- Channel manager
- Software that connects a hotel's inventory to all its OTAs at once. It syncs rates and availability across every channel in real time, so selling a room on one site instantly updates the others and prevents overbooking.
- Booking engine
- A tool on the hotel's own website that takes reservations directly from guests. Because there is no intermediary, direct bookings carry no OTA commission and the hotel keeps the full room rate.
- Rate parity
- Keeping the same room rate for the same date across every channel, both OTAs and the hotel's own site. Parity stops one channel from undercutting another and protects the value of direct bookings.
- Overbooking
- Accepting more reservations than there are available rooms, usually caused by channels updating out of sync. A channel manager with two-way sync is the main way hotels avoid it.
- Metasearch
- A price-comparison layer such as Google Hotels or TripAdvisor that shows a hotel's rates across multiple sites at once. Hotels can list here to capture direct bookings from comparison shoppers.
Revenue & performance
- Occupancy rate
- The percentage of a hotel's available rooms that are sold over a period. Occupancy equals rooms sold divided by rooms available, multiplied by 100.
- Average Daily RateADR
- The average price a hotel earns per occupied room. ADR equals total room revenue divided by the number of rooms sold. It measures pricing, independent of how full the hotel is.
- Revenue Per Available RoomRevPAR
- The headline measure of a hotel's room-revenue performance. RevPAR equals room revenue divided by available rooms, or equivalently ADR multiplied by occupancy rate. It combines how full the hotel is with how much it charges.
- Dynamic pricing
- Adjusting room rates automatically based on demand, occupancy, lead time, competitor rates and seasonality, so the hotel charges more when demand is high and stays competitive when it is low. Also called revenue management.
- Best Available RateBAR
- The lowest unrestricted rate a hotel publicly offers for a given date. It is the standard reference rate guests see before any discounts or negotiated rates are applied.
Malaysian compliance & tax
- LHDN
- Lembaga Hasil Dalam Negeri, the Inland Revenue Board of Malaysia. It is the government authority that administers income tax and the e-Invoice mandate.
- e-Invoice
- A digital record of a sale transmitted to LHDN in near-real time for validation, replacing paper and PDF invoices. Once validated, each e-Invoice carries a QR code the buyer can use to confirm it.
- MyInvois
- LHDN's official portal that receives, validates and stores e-Invoices. Hotel systems submit e-Invoices to MyInvois, either one by one or in bulk.
- Consolidated e-Invoice
- A single e-Invoice that aggregates many transactions where individual e-Invoices were not requested, for example walk-in or foreign guests. It lets hotels stay compliant without issuing a separate e-Invoice for every small sale.
- Sales and Service TaxSST
- Malaysia's consumption tax. For hotels, a service tax applies to accommodation and food & beverage. Rates are set by the Royal Malaysian Customs Department, so hotels configure the current rate in their billing system.
- Tourism TaxTTx
- A flat charge of RM10 per room per night on foreign (non-Malaysian) tourists staying at accommodation premises in Malaysia. Malaysian citizens and permanent residents are exempt.
- Tax Identification NumberTIN
- A taxpayer's identification number used on e-Invoices. Where a guest cannot provide one, such as a foreign tourist, e-Invoicing rules allow a general public TIN together with the guest's passport or ID.
Payments
- FPX
- Financial Process Exchange, Malaysia's online banking payment system. It lets guests pay directly from their bank account and is one of the most common ways Malaysians pay online.
- DuitNow QR
- Malaysia's national QR-code payment standard. Guests scan one QR with any participating bank or e-wallet app to pay. It is widely used at hotel front desks and F&B outlets.
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