Room types and rooms: how your inventory is organised

Accommador organises what you rent out on two levels. A room type is the kind of thing you sell; a room is a physical space a guest sleeps in. Grasp the split once and pricing, availability and the calendar all make sense.

Room types: what you sell

A room type is what a guest sees and books — “Queen Ensuite”, “Two-Bedroom Houseboat”. It carries a name, what it sleeps, and what a night costs. Prices live at this level: you price the kind once, and every room of that kind sells at it. On your booking page and on booking sites, guests book the type — nobody out there chooses room 7 by number.

Rooms: what you have

A room is one actual, physical space — a room, a unit, a boat — attached to the type it belongs to. The number of rooms attached to a type is exactly how many of that type exist to sell: availability for any night is worked out as the rooms of that kind, minus the bookings that overlap it. Add a room and you've genuinely got one more to sell; take one away and you haven't.

Every booking joins the two

Every booking belongs to a room type, and each booking is then assigned a specific room — sometimes automatically, when the choice is obvious, otherwise by you on the calendar, where unplaced bookings wait on their own row until you place them. The mechanics are in How rooms are assigned.

Why the split matters

• Price once, sell many. Five identical queen rooms are one type with one price and five rooms. Change the price in one place and it's changed everywhere.
• Sell the kind, keep the freedom. Guests buy “a queen room”; which physical room they get stays your call right up to arrival, so you can shuffle around maintenance and long stays without touching the sale.
• Each job on the right level. Selling and pricing are questions about types; cleaning and readiness are questions about physical rooms. The two-level model keeps each screen about the right one.

When every unit is unique

The model still fits a property where nothing repeats. Give each one-of-a-kind unit its own type with a single room attached: three different houseboats are three types, one boat each, each with its own price. You lose nothing — and if you later add a second identical boat, it just becomes a second room on an existing type.

Where to go next

Add and manage room types and rooms covers the screens; Your booking window covers the dates they're sellable for; and How availability works follows the counts out to your booking page and booking sites.