Glossary
The short-term rental glossary
Plain-English definitions of the revenue, pricing, and STR terms that actually move rate.
- ADR
- Average Daily Rate — total room revenue divided by the number of booked nights. Says nothing about occupancy on its own.
- base price
- A fixed starting nightly rate that rule-based tools adjust up or down. Quibble replaces it with a model that solves for the optimal rate directly.
- booking window
- The period between when a booking is made and the stay itself. Pricing strategy changes as the window narrows.
- comp set
- The set of genuinely like-kind listings used to benchmark a property — similar units, not a regional average. Read the deep-dive →
- computer vision
- AI that scores listing photos the way a guest perceives them — light, composition, and clutter that correlate with bookings. Read the deep-dive →
- demand forecasting
- Predicting future booking demand for a listing or market so pricing can react before the booking window closes. Read the deep-dive →
- dynamic pricing
- Pricing that changes frequently in response to demand. It describes how often the price moves — not how the price is decided. Read the deep-dive →
- gap night
- An unbookable single night left between two reservations because of minimum-stay rules — lost revenue that smart min-stay settings reduce.
- lead time
- How far in advance a guest books. A single day of lead time can be the difference between capturing a demand spike and missing it.
- length of stay
- The number of nights in a reservation. Pricing and discounts can be tuned to encourage more profitable stay lengths. Read the deep-dive →
- minimum stay
- The shortest reservation a listing will accept for a given date. A lever for protecting high-demand dates and avoiding orphan gaps. Read the deep-dive →
- occupancy
- The share of available nights that are booked. A demand gauge, not a goal — high occupancy at low rates can leave revenue on the table. Read the deep-dive →
- optimization model
- A mathematical model that searches for the rate that maximizes expected revenue for a given night and listing. Read the deep-dive →
- OTA
- Online Travel Agency — a channel like Airbnb, Vrbo, or Booking.com where listings are distributed and booked.
- pickup
- The pace at which reservations come in for a future date — the signal that occupancy and revenue are tracking ahead of or behind plan.
- price optimization
- Using a model to solve for the revenue-maximizing nightly rate, as opposed to applying a base price plus manual rules.
- revenue management
- The practice of varying price and availability over time to maximize total revenue, rather than chasing occupancy or a single nightly rate. Read the deep-dive →
- reviews
- Guest feedback that both reflects and shapes achievable rate — strong sentiment supports higher pricing, weak sentiment suppresses it. Read the deep-dive →
- RevPAR
- Revenue Per Available Rental night — revenue divided by available nights. The single metric that captures occupancy and rate together. Read the deep-dive →
- seasonality
- Recurring high, shoulder, and low demand periods across the year that pricing must anticipate rather than react to. Read the deep-dive →
- sentiment analysis
- Distilling thousands of reviews into the themes that actually move a guest’s willingness to pay.