The hotel fact sheet: what agencies and tour operators expect on one page

A hotel fact sheet is a one-page summary an agency, tour operator or reservation team can quote from without calling the hotel: location and distances, rooms and capacity, board types and service hours, pools and beach, what is free and what is charged, children's facilities, accessibility and certificate details. Every page carries a date and a version.

An agency product manager has your PDF open next to a client's request and one question: does the family room take two adults and two children, and is the safe free? If the answer is not on the page, the request goes to the hotel that put it there. This article gives you the field list agencies expect, the order they read it in, the compliance check against your Ministry certificate, and a versioning method that keeps every language and season saying the same thing.

What is a hotel fact sheet, and who reads it?#

A hotel fact sheet is a one-page reference that lets someone sell your hotel without calling you. It is written for the trade, not for guests.

Hotels routinely confuse three documents. The guest-facing brochure sells a feeling. The fact sheet answers operational questions on one page. The fact book, often a contract annex, carries allotments, rates and cancellation terms. The fact sheet sits between them: shorter than the fact book, more precise than the brochure.

The readers are specific people. An agency product manager building a package wants fit and season. A tour operator's contract team wants capacity and certificate details. A reservation agent answering a client wants exact occupancy and what is included. A transfer or destination-management planner wants minutes to the airport. An AI assistant may read your public text and repeat it to a traveler. Each reader asks a different question, and the sheet must answer all of them without a phone call.

One page is a discipline, not a limit. Core fields go on page one; detail goes into annexes that carry the same version number. Say what it is not: not a rate sheet, because rates belong to the contract; not a photo gallery; not a place for claims you cannot support.

Give the document an owner. Sales owns it, operations and the front office sign off the fields they answer for, and one person approves each release. This is the same ownership question you solve when setting up a hotel sales department.

Which fields do agencies look for, and in what order?#

Agencies read in a fixed order: where the hotel is, what the rooms hold, what the guest gets, and what costs extra. Put those four first and the rest after them.

The location block carries the address, distance and driving time to the nearest airport, walking minutes to the beach, distance to the center, and the transfer points the operator uses. Say whether a distance is on foot, by road or straight line, because a planner quoting a transfer price needs to know which it is.

The rooms block lists each room type under the name used in the contract, with size in square meters, bedding, maximum adults and children, extra bed policy, and the count of connecting and accessible units. The board block gives each board type with the hours it covers and what it includes, for example breakfast 07:00 to 10:00 and dinner without drinks. A board name alone is not a description.

Then come facilities, children's facilities, accessibility and the commercial block. For pools, mark indoor or outdoor and the season. For the beach, state sand or pebble, and private or public. For accessibility, write what exists, a step-free route from the entrance, adapted rooms, lift size, pool access, rather than the word accessible alone.

Does your fact sheet match your Ministry certificate?#

In Türkiye it has to. The Regulation on the Qualifications of Tourism Facilities requires a facility's promotion to match its Ministry certificate and to give accurate information, and it bans symbols that suggest a star class outside the certified one (T.C. Cumhurbaşkanlığı Mevzuat Bilgi Sistemi, Turizm Tesislerinin Niteliklerine İlişkin Yönetmelik, consolidated text, Article 16, 2026-11-01 (opens in a new tab)).

The practical translation is simple. Copy the certified class, the certified facility type and the certified room count from the certificate itself, not from memory and not from last season's PDF. Run the name check: if the name or the sheet says suite, villa or resort, the facility must actually have those units, because the same regulation bans terms in the facility's name for units it does not have.

Do not decorate a four-star certificate with five stars, and avoid star-like graphics that imply a class the certificate does not give. Keep the certificate and the current fact sheet in the same folder, so the next revision starts from the official document rather than from a design file. Confirm dates, penalties and your own case with a legal adviser before you publish.

Paid or free: which line causes most complaints?#

The line between included and charged services is a frequent source of complaints, because the guest reads it as a promise and the bill reads it as a price list.

Apply one rule: every service named anywhere in the sheet carries one of two marks, included or charged, and a charged service carries a currency and amount or the words price on site. Write the all-inclusive scope out: which meals, which drinks and until what hour, which snacks, and whether the minibar is restocked.

List the items guests most often assume are free: the safe, beach towels, sunbeds and umbrellas, parking, the shuttle, late check-out, the room service tray charge, the crib. State deposits: whether one is taken at check-in, how much, and when it is returned. Keep the wording identical to the contract annex and to what the front desk tells guests, because a difference between the sheet and the desk becomes a claim. When a claim does arrive, the dated fact sheet is your record of what was promised, alongside the records a hotel needs to answer a tour operator complaint claim.

How do room types and capacity stay aligned with the contract and the system?#

The room block on the fact sheet must equal the contract and the hotel's own reservation system, room type by room type, or the agency will sell a room you cannot give.

Use one name per room type across the contract, the fact sheet, the reservation system and the website. A family room in one document and a quad in another is a complaint waiting to happen. If you are unsure how the standard names differ, start from how double, twin, triple, family and connecting rooms differ.

State maximum occupancy as adults and children separately, with the extra bed rule and the age limit for a child sleeping in an existing bed. Give size in square meters and the bedding setup, so an agent can match a family's request without calling. Count connecting and adjacent rooms and publish the number, rather than writing available on request with no figure behind it.

Check the arithmetic. The sum of the room types equals the total room count, and the total equals the certified figure. When the contract changes mid-season, the fact sheet changes the same day and the version number moves.

How do you version a fact sheet by season and language, and keep one source?#

Keep one master file, date and number every page, and generate the season and language versions from it. Anything else drifts.

Every page carries the version number, the date and the season it applies to, including the annexes and the file name itself. Translate from the master, never from another translation: a translation of a translation loses the distinction between included and charged, which is the distinction that matters most. Keep a short change log recording what changed, when, and who approved it.

Withdraw old files actively. Ask the agencies to replace the copies they hold, and keep only the current file where the sales team can reach it. Season versions should differ only where they must: pool dates, beach service, children's club hours, restaurant opening. Mark the differences instead of rewriting the whole sheet.

Write the fields as plain sentences as well as a designed page. The website, the booking sites and the AI assistants travelers now ask repeat what they can read, and a fact sheet that exists only as a PDF cannot be reused. The same idea, applied field by field, is behind writing a hotel fact sheet that AI assistants can read.

What to do next#

The single next step is a comparison, not a redesign. Open last season's fact sheet, put the Ministry certificate and the current contract beside it, and mark every field that disagrees. Then rebuild the document as one dated master with an owner, a change log and a version number on every page. From that point the same fields serve the agency, the tour operator, the website, the booking sites and the AI assistants travelers ask, and the hotel stops being described three different ways.