Holiday rental glossary

The terms you come across when you rent out a holiday home, briefly explained.

ADR (average daily rate): Revenue from overnight stays divided by the number of rented nights. Tells you what a night earns on average, not how many nights you rent out.
Booking engine: The part of a website where the guest picks dates, sees the price and pays.
Cancellation policy: The rules about what the guest gets back when cancelling, depending on how long before arrival.
Channel manager: Software that keeps your home’s calendar and prices in sync between your own site and the platforms, so you never double-book.
Cleaning fee: A fixed amount per stay for the cleaning after departure, shown separately on the price. Usually part of the VAT base, not always of the tourist tax base.
Credit note: An invoice with a negative amount that reverses an earlier invoice in full or in part, for example on a refund.
Custom domain: Your own web address, such as www.yourhouse.com, connected to your booking site.
DAC7: EU directive under which platforms report hosts’ income to the tax authority every year.
Deposit: An amount the guest pays or has reserved in advance as security for damage, and gets back after departure.
Direct booking: A booking made directly with the host, through their own site or by email, without a platform like Airbnb in between. No commission, your own terms, your own guest details.
Double booking: Two guests for the same night, usually because calendars were out of sync. A channel manager prevents it.
Dynamic pricing: Prices per night that automatically move with demand, season, occupancy and how far ahead the booking is made.
Early-bird discount: A discount (or indeed a surcharge) for those who book far ahead. Gives certainty about occupancy in high season.
Gap nights (orphan nights): Single nights between two bookings that are hard to rent out. A discount or a lower minimum stay fills them.
Guest fee (service fee): The amount a platform charges the guest on top of the price. With a direct booking there is no guest fee.
Guest register: The legally required register in the Netherlands with the name, place of residence, arrival and departure of every guest.
Host-only fee: Commission model in which the platform charges everything to the host (on Airbnb usually 15 percent or more) and the guest sees no separate fee.
House rules: The agreements about numbers, quiet hours, smoking, pets and departure that the guest confirms at booking or check-in.
hreflang: A hint for search engines about which language versions of a page exist, so an English guest sees the English page.
iCal: A standard for sharing calendars through a link. Platforms read each other’s iCal link every few hours; slower than a direct connection, but available almost everywhere.
iDEAL: The Dutch payment method with which a guest pays straight from their bank account. Almost every Dutch guest expects it.
Journey (guest journey): The series of automatic messages around a stay: confirmation, check-in details, welcome, check-out and review request.
KOR (small-business VAT exemption): The Dutch VAT exemption for businesses with turnover below the threshold. You then charge no VAT and reclaim no VAT either.
Last-minute: A booking shortly before arrival. Often discounted, because an empty night earns nothing.
llms.txt: A text file on your site that tells AI assistants in plain language what you offer.
Marketplace: An overview of homes from several hosts, such as on houslr.com, where the guest searches and books with the host directly.
Minimum stay: The smallest number of nights a guest has to book. Higher in high season, lower for gap nights.
Occupancy rate: The share of rented nights out of all available nights in a period. 20 rented nights out of 30 available is 67 percent.
Online check-in: The guest fills in the details of all guests beforehand and confirms the house rules. Fills the guest register and speeds up arrival.
OTA (online travel agency): An online booking platform such as Airbnb, Booking.com or Vrbo that brings in guests for a commission.
Payment provider (PSP): The party that processes online payments, such as Mollie. Charges per transaction and pays out to your account.
PMS (property management system): The system in which you manage bookings, calendar, guests, payments and admin. Houslr is a PMS with its own booking site.
Revenue per available night: See RevPAR. The measure for comparing pricing strategies across periods.
RevPAR: Revenue per available night: ADR times occupancy rate. The best measure for comparing pricing strategies, because it combines price and occupancy.
Seasonal rate: A price per night for a period, such as the summer or the Christmas holidays, that replaces the standard price.
Self check-in: The guest gets in without meeting the host: with a code, a smart lock or a key safe.
Smart lock: An electronic lock that opens with a code, phone or app, and can get its own access per booking.
Structured data (schema.org): Details about your home in a fixed format on your site, so Google can show price, address and stars.
Tourist tax: Dutch municipal tax on overnight stays by non-residents. A fixed amount per person per night or a percentage; the host remits it.
VAT on short stays: In the Netherlands, short-stay rentals (holiday lets) fall under the reduced VAT rate of 9 percent, unless the KOR applies.
Webhook: A message one system sends immediately when something happens, for example a new booking from Airbnb to your PMS.
White-label: Software that runs under your name and branding, with no visible brand of the supplier.