How Santara is put together

Almost every question about “where does this live?” is answered by these six words. They are worth five minutes.

Workspace

Everything you see belongs to one workspace — your properties, your team, your billing, your booking site. If you manage two portfolios that must never mix, they are two workspaces, and you switch between them from the account menu.

Your login is separate from the workspace. One person can be an owner in their own workspace and a cleaner in someone else’s.

Property, then room

A property is a building or an address. A room is a bookable unit inside it.

What you sell	Property	Rooms
A whole villa, one listing	The villa	One room — the whole villa
A 3-bedroom villa let by the room	The villa	Three rooms
A small guesthouse, 8 units	The guesthouse	Eight rooms
Five apartments in one block, sold separately	Usually five properties	One room each

A workspace holds properties; a property holds rooms; each room carries its own rate plan and maps one-to-one to a channel listing.

The room is what guests book, and the room is what is billed. Prices, availability, photos, capacity and channel mappings all hang off the room. The property holds what they share: the address, wifi, the house rules, the cleaning group.

Some facts exist at both levels — wifi, door code, access notes. Set them on the property and every room inherits; set them on a room and that room wins. See Properties and rooms.

Rate plan

A rate plan is the price a room sells at, plus the rules attached to it: minimum stay, how many guests are included, what each extra guest costs, cancellation terms.

A room can have more than one rate plan (a flexible rate and a cheaper non-refundable one, for example). Imported rooms arrive with a rate plan built from what the channel had.

The nightly price on the calendar is the rate plan’s price for that night. Pricing rules change that number; they do not create new plans.

Listing and connection

A connection is one channel account you have linked — one Airbnb login, or one Booking.com property. You can have several, including several Airbnb accounts.

A listing is one thing on that channel that maps to one Santara room. Mapping is one-to-one: this Airbnb listing is that room. When a listing is mapped and the channel is active, that room’s availability and prices flow out, and its bookings and messages flow in.

A listing goes through these states, and the wording on screen matches:

State	Meaning
Not connected	The channel account is not linked yet
Linked — not mapped yet	We can see the listing; it points at no room
Mapped — awaiting activation	It points at a room, but the channel is not handing over yet
Live	Availability and rates sync out, bookings and messages sync in

Nothing moves from mapped to live on its own. See Going live.

Reservation, guest, thread

A reservation (also called a stay or booking) belongs to a room and a date range. A guest is a person, and the same person across two stays is one guest with a history. A thread is the conversation with that guest — one per reservation on most channels.

Capability, not job title

Access is not “cleaners see three screens”. Every screen and every API route asks for a named capability — stay.read, pricing.write, guest.message.send — and your role is a bundle of them, optionally narrowed to certain buildings. That is why a cleaner can see which building a job is in without being able to open your estate. See Team and roles.

Money words

• Revenue in Santara means net payout — what the channel actually pays you, after its commission. It is labelled on screen wherever it is shown, because gross and payout differ by 15% and mixing them up ruins a year of reporting.
• RevPAN is revenue per available night: revenue divided by every night you had to sell. It is the number the pricing engine is judged on, because ADR and occupancy each move on their own and neither alone tells you if you are winning.