Tape chart

The grid view in a property management system that shows every unit or room down one axis and dates across the other, with each reservation drawn as a bar spanning the nights it occupies.

It is the screen most front desk and reservations staff work from, because it answers the two questions that come up on every call at once: what is free, and what is next to it. Dragging a bar moves a reservation to another unit or another set of dates, which is how overbookings, maintenance blocks and room changes get resolved in practice.

Vacation rental and campground systems use the same idea for units, sites and pitches. Some vendors call it a calendar view, a grid, or a planner, but the function is the same.

The reason it matters commercially is friction. Any workflow that forces an agent to leave what they are doing, open the tape chart to check availability, and then come back has introduced a place where a booking can be lost. Vendors increasingly bring availability and rate lookup into the quote, the lead or the enquiry so the tape chart becomes somewhere you fix things rather than somewhere you have to visit.