Every bit of shorthand on this site, in ordinary words.
This industry runs on abbreviations, and most of them get used as if everyone already knows them. 42 of them appear somewhere on this site, so here they all are: what the term means, and why it matters to someone running one or two rentals. Nothing here is a sales pitch.
The money words
ADR
Average daily rate. Divide total room income by the nights you actually sold, and that is what you charge per night on average. Two properties can take the same money with very different ADRs.
Occupancy
The share of available nights that got booked. 20 nights booked out of 30 available is 67% occupancy.
Break-even occupancy
How full you have to be just to cover costs. Below it you are paying to host; above it you are earning.
RevPAR
Revenue per available night. Rate and occupancy combined into one number. It catches the trap of a high nightly rate that almost never sells.
Cash-on-cash return
The cash a property returns in a year divided by the cash you actually put in. It answers "what is my money earning?" rather than "what is the place worth?"
Cap rate
A property's yearly income after operating costs, divided by its price. A rough way to compare two very different buildings.
Capex reserve
Money set aside monthly for the big items that eventually fail: roof, deck, hot tub, water heater. Not a repair budget, a replacement one.
P&L
Profit and loss. The running list of what came in and what went out, and what is left.
Schedule E
The US tax form where rental income and expenses are reported. "Schedule-E-aligned" means the spreadsheet is already sorted into the categories that form asks for, so nothing has to be re-sorted in April.
1099-K
The form a platform sends reporting what it paid you. It reports the gross, before their fees. That is why it often looks higher than what actually reached your bank.
Remit
To hand collected tax over to the authority that levies it. Platforms collect and remit some lodging taxes for you and not others, which is the part that catches people out.
The trade words
VRABC
Vacation Rental ABCs. The name of this site, and the point of it: the basics of running a rental, written down so they can be handed to someone else.
OTA
Online travel agency. Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com are the big three. They bring you a guest and take a cut for it.
Direct booking
A booking that comes through you, with no platform fee in the middle. Your own site, an email, a repeat guest.
PMS
Property management system. The software a manager runs the business in: calendars, rates, guest records. Track, Barefoot, Guesty and Escapia are examples.
Channel manager
The piece that keeps your calendar and rates the same everywhere at once, so a booking on one platform closes the dates on the others.
iCal link
A web address your calendar publishes so other software can read your booked dates. Airbnb and Vrbo both give you one; pasting it somewhere else keeps that calendar in step automatically.
Doors
Trade shorthand for units. "Per-door pricing" means a fee for every property you own. This site deliberately does not use that model.
Turnover
Everything between one guest leaving and the next arriving: the clean, the linens, the restock, the check.
Same-day turn
A checkout and a check-in on the same day. The tightest, most failure-prone kind of turnover.
Par level
How many of a thing should be in the property when a stay starts: six bath towels, four rolls of paper, two coffee pods. It gives a cleaner a number to restock against instead of a guess.
SOP
Standard operating procedure. A written routine someone else can follow without calling you. The point of writing it down is that it survives you being unavailable.
Comp set
The handful of genuinely similar nearby places you price against. Similar means comparable size, location and quality, not simply nearby.
Gap night / orphan day
A single night stranded between two bookings, too short for most minimum-stay rules to allow. Often the difference between a good month and a full one.
The cabin & safety words
Potable
Safe to drink. On a private well, some taps may not be. That is exactly what the signage in the well-water pack is for.
Shock chlorination
A one-off heavy chlorine dose to disinfect a well or water system after contamination or a repair.
Legionella
Bacteria that grow in warm, still water and cause serious pneumonia. Hot tubs and rarely-used plumbing are where it starts. It is why water chemistry and flushing schedules matter.
VGBA
The US Virginia Graeme Baker Pool and Spa Safety Act, which requires drain covers designed so a swimmer cannot be trapped by suction. Relevant to any hot tub a guest uses.
GFCI
A protective outlet or breaker that cuts power the instant current leaks. It is standard around water, and the thing an inspector checks near a hot tub.
Creosote
The tarry residue wood smoke leaves inside a chimney. Enough of it is what turns a normal fire into a chimney fire, which is why sweep intervals exist.
Defensible space
The cleared zone kept around a building in wildfire country so an approaching fire has less to burn and crews have somewhere to work.
R1 / R2 / R3
US chain-control levels posted on mountain roads in winter. R1: chains required unless you have snow tires. R2: chains required unless you are four-wheel drive with snow tires. R3: chains on every vehicle, no exceptions. Guests need to know before they set off, not at the roadblock.
Drain field
The buried area where a septic system's liquid finally soaks away. Wipes and grease are what kill it, and replacing one is the expensive lesson.
The online-visibility words
SEO
Search engine optimization. The work of getting found in ordinary search results.
AEO / GEO
Answer engine optimisation, sometimes called generative engine optimisation: whether the AI answer itself names you when someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI where to stay. A separate question from where you rank in the blue links.
GA4
Google Analytics 4. The current version of Google's free website statistics tool.
GTM
Google Tag Manager. The container that decides which tracking snippets load on your site, so they can be changed without editing the site itself.
Key Event
GA4's name for an action that counts as a success: a booking, an inquiry. An event can fire perfectly and still be ignored until someone marks it as a Key Event, which is why "conversions" so often read zero.
UTM tag
Extra text added to a link that tells your analytics where a visitor came from. Without it, an email click is indistinguishable from someone typing your address.
Schema markup
Hidden, structured labels in a page that tell search engines and AI what a thing is: this number is a price, this is a review score, this is a business address.
Share of voice
Out of a fixed set of buyer questions, how often you get named compared with your named competitors.
Raw HTML
What a page contains before any JavaScript runs. Search engines and AI answer engines read it reliably; they are much weaker at running the JavaScript, so a price that only appears afterwards may never be seen.
Something still unclear?
If a word on this site sent you here and it is still not obvious, that is a fault in the writing, not in you. Tell me which one and I will fix the page it appeared on.