notitur.com October 21, 2026

Travel industry glossary

Your reference guide to hotel technology, distribution and marketing terms. For professionals who use them every day and for students still learning them. Each term comes with a clear definition and a concrete example. This is nobody's official glossary, it is how we at Notitur explain the concepts that show up in our analysis.

100 terms

Airlines

Handling

Handling refers to the ground services provided to aircraft at the airport: baggage loading and unloading, passenger boarding,...

Airlines

Hub and spoke

The hub and spoke model concentrates flights at a big connecting airport from which passengers fan out to other destinations. It...

AI and automation

Hyper-personalization

Hyper-personalization is tailoring the offer and the message to each customer using their data and behavior in real time. It goes...

Revenue

Lead time

Lead time is how many days before the stay a booking is made. A short lead time means people book last minute and forces playing...

Revenue

Length of stay

Length of stay is how many nights a guest stays on average. Longer stays lower the cleaning and turnover cost per night. Revenue...

AI and automation

LLM

A large language model is an AI trained on huge amounts of text that predicts the next word and with that writes, summarizes and...

Airlines

Load factor

Load factor is the percentage of seats sold out of those offered on a flight or across a network. It is to an airline what...

Airlines

Low cost

A low cost airline sells cheap flights by cutting everything non-essential: a single class, tightly used aircraft, secondary...

Marketing and CRO

Loyalty program

A loyalty program rewards repeat guests with points, member rates or perks so they come back and book direct. It is the chains'...

Destinations and demand

Luxury travel

Luxury tourism is the segment of high spending travellers who seek exclusivity, flawless service and tailored experiences, and...

AI and automation

Machine learning

Machine learning is the part of AI where the system improves by itself from data, without anyone coding every rule. It finds...

Distribution

Merchant model

In the merchant model, the OTA charges the guest upfront and then pays the hotel its net rate, keeping the difference. The hotel...

Distribution

Metasearch

A metasearch engine compares prices for the same hotel across several channels at once and sends the user to the one they pick....

Commercial

MICE

MICE covers meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions. It is a high value segment that fills hotels midweek and outside...

Revenue

MLOS

Minimum length of stay is a restriction that forces booking a number of nights to be allowed into a given date. It protects high...

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