Skip to content
Glossary
Hospitality & dive software glossary
Plain-language definitions of the property-management, booking and dive-operations terms used across Gurita — from guest folio and channel manager to trip manifest and MCP.
- Property Management System (PMS)
- A property management system (PMS) is the core software a hotel, resort or accommodation business runs on. It handles reservations, the front desk, room and housekeeping status, the guest folio, billing and invoicing, and usually reporting — often with a booking engine and channel manager attached. Gurita is a PMS built for resorts, hotels, liveaboards and dive centers.
- Guest folio
- A folio is the running bill for a guest’s stay. Every charge — room, restaurant, bar, spa, shop, rental gear or dives — posts to the folio, which can be split across guests, companies or nights and settled with one or more payments at checkout. A single folio per stay is what keeps a guest’s total accurate.
- Channel manager
- A channel manager keeps a property’s rates and availability in sync across the online travel agencies (OTAs) it sells through — Booking.com, Expedia, Agoda and others — and pulls their bookings back automatically. It prevents double-bookings and manual re-entry. Gurita’s channel manager connects to 160+ OTAs.
- Online travel agency (OTA)
- An online travel agency (OTA) is a third-party website that sells accommodation and travel — such as Booking.com, Expedia or Agoda — usually for a commission. Properties connect to OTAs through a channel manager so availability stays correct on every channel at once.
- Booking engine
- A booking engine is the software that takes reservations directly on a property’s own website. A commission-free booking engine lets a hotel, resort or liveaboard sell direct without paying OTA commission on each booking, while still keeping availability in sync with other channels.
- Point of sale (POS)
- A point of sale (POS) is the till used to ring up sales at an outlet — a restaurant, bar, shop or rental desk. In a PMS like Gurita, the POS posts each charge straight to the guest’s folio, so onsite spending is billed back to the room, trip or account automatically.
- Liveaboard
- A liveaboard is a boat on which guests live aboard for multiple days, typically to reach dive sites that are far from shore. Liveaboard operators manage cabins and berths, fixed-departure trip itineraries, onboard sales, and guest and diver records — which is what liveaboard management software is built to do.
- Trip manifest
- A manifest is the list of guests booked on a specific trip or departure, with the details a crew needs — cabin or berth assignment, certifications, dietary and medical notes. Liveaboard and dive-trip software generates a printable manifest per departure from the bookings.
- Dive log
- A dive log is the record of dives that have taken place — site, date, depth, duration and the divers involved. Dive operations software logs each dive as it happens and builds dive statistics over time, alongside the diver roster and schedule.
- Diver roster & certifications
- A diver roster is the list of divers on a trip or at a center, carrying each diver’s certification level, agency (such as PADI or SSI), and rented equipment. Tracking certifications ensures divers are matched to appropriate dives and sites.
- Occupancy
- Occupancy is the share of available rooms, cabins or berths that are filled over a period. It is a core hospitality metric; a PMS shows live occupancy so operators can manage availability, pricing and revenue.
- ADR (Average Daily Rate)
- ADR, or average daily rate, is the average revenue earned per occupied room (or cabin) per night. Together with occupancy, it is one of the key numbers a resort or hotel tracks to understand pricing and revenue performance.
- Split billing
- Split billing divides a folio across more than one payer — for example separating a company’s share from a guest’s incidentals, or splitting a group’s charges per person or per night. It lets a property issue accurate, separate invoices from one stay.
- On-premise (single-tenant) deployment
- An on-premise or single-tenant deployment runs the software on infrastructure dedicated to one customer, rather than shared multi-tenant cloud. It gives an operator maximum control over where data lives and who can access it. Gurita offers cloud or on-premise single-tenant hosting.
- MCP (Model Context Protocol)
- The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that lets AI assistants securely connect to external data and tools. Gurita exposes a read-only MCP endpoint, so you can ask AI tools questions about your occupancy, revenue and trips in plain language without giving them write access.
See these features in the product.
Browse the documentation, or request access to a live walkthrough.