glossary: S

Hotel search engine marketing (SEM) is the practice of using paid ads to get your hotel to rank higher in search engine results. With Google averaging 90 billion visits per month, with A strong paid Search Engine Marketing (SEM), strategy and having your hotel rank in the top search results can drive major visibility and … Continued

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process to optimize and improve the ranking of a hotel website on search engines (like Google, Yahoo, and Bing) result pages (SERP) to boost visibility in search engine rankings, with the aim of drive traffic to hotel website, strengthen online presence, attracting more guests from Google searches and enhance … Continued

Social, Military, Educational, Religious and Fraternal (SMERF) is an acronym for Social, Military, Educational, Religious and Fraternal groups, and often also includes sports, entertainment, and recreational groups like high school sports teams, fall into this category too. Common SMERF events include weddings, family reunions, religious seminars, and meetings for organizations. SMERF groups book event space, … Continued

Settle on Departure is the process of settling guest account upon check out for all charges incurred during the guest stay at the hotel. Traditionally at checkout guest is presented a final copy of his/her account folio for review and settlement. Front Office Assistant should confirm how the guest intends to settle the account. Guest … Continued

Spa Revenue Per Occupied Room (SRevPOR) is a KPI specific to hotel spa operations for analyzing a hotel’s strategic marketing plan. It allows managers to measure the amount of spa revenue being generated per occupied room in the hotel, as well as identify trends based on seasonal demand, promotions, and other factors. It helps both … Continued

Smith Travel Research (STR) is a global provider of competitive benchmarking, information services and research to the hotel industry that tracks supply and demand data for the hotel industry to evaluate a hotel’s performance against its competitive set so they can compare their KPIs. STR reports provide participating property performance data compared to its competitive … Continued

Spa Utilization Ratio (SUR) is a hotel spa KPI that signals how effective a spa is in selling its treatment hours to evaluate how efficiently a spa is managing time and utilizing open hours. It is very similar to how Occupancy Rate evaluates how many rooms are filled in a hotel for a given period, … Continued

Sabre Global Distribution System, owned by Sabre Corporation, is a travel reservation system used by travel agents and companies to search, price, book, and ticket travel services provided by airlines, hotels, car rental companies, rail providers and tour operators. Originally developed by American Airlines with the assistance of IBM in 1960, the booking service became … Continued

A safe deposit box is a small box, offer by the hotel to their customers for temporary use during their stay in which guest can store valuable objects. These facilities may be located behind the reception desk, or securely anchored within private guest rooms for privacy.

A search engine is a software program that helps people find the information they are looking for online using keywords or phrases and return results quickly—even with millions of websites online—by scanning the Internet continuously and indexing every page they find. When a user enters a search term, the search engine receives a query and looks … Continued