Gurita 2.5 in Review: Six Months of New Features for Dive Resorts & Liveaboards
The first half of 2026 was the most productive stretch in the history of Gurita, our flagship property-management system. Between mid-January and July — the road from version 2.3.897 to 2.5 — the team touched nearly every corner of the product: how bookings are managed, how money is invoiced, how the bar rings up a mojito, and how guests hear from you. This recap walks through the highlights and, more importantly, what each of them changes in the daily life of a dive resort, liveaboard or dive centre.
A calendar you can finally touch
The single biggest change is the new timeline calendar. Instead of flipping between months and lists, the front desk now sees the entire property on one screen: rooms as rows, days as columns, and every booking drawn as a bar in between.
What makes it more than a pretty chart is that the bars are alive. Need to move a family to a bigger bungalow? Drag their booking onto the other row. A guest extends by two nights? Pull the edge of the bar. The calendar zooms from a bird's-eye view of the whole resort down to a comfortable close-up, searches as you type, jumps to any month, and has a fullscreen mode made for the monitor behind the reception desk. It works on phones and tablets as well, and teams that prefer the classic calendar can keep using it — the old view stays one click away.
Invoicing that matches how groups actually pay
Anyone who has hosted a dive group knows the moment: the agency pays the rooms, the company pays for meals, and every guest wants their own bar tab. Gurita 2.5 answers this with folios — separate folders inside one booking that you fill by dragging charges where they belong. Each folio turns into its own invoice, the totals are guaranteed to add up to the booking total, and an issued folio is locked for good: once the invoice has left the house, nothing can quietly change underneath it.
The finance picture got sharper on the reporting side too. A new Profit & Loss report puts revenue and costs side by side, and finished months can be closed with period locking, so the numbers you reported in March are still the numbers in July. On top of that, a nightly-updated KPI dashboard tracks the metrics hoteliers steer by — occupancy, average daily rate (ADR), revenue per available room (RevPAR), length of stay, booking lead time and cancellation rate — per property and over time.
The bar and restaurant got a new till
The point of sale wasn't tweaked — it was rebuilt from the ground up for speed and touch screens. The new counter starts with a floor plan: your locations and tables, with seats, colors and reservations. Bills stick to their table, so the colleague taking over the evening shift sees exactly what the afternoon shift left open. Splitting a bill for guests who pay separately takes seconds, items and whole bills can hop between tables, and discounts apply per item or per bill. Settling up was redesigned as well: the new payment dialog takes a bill in as many parts as the table needs — some cash, the rest on a card — and keeps a running balance with the change due updating as each amount goes in. If a card carries a surcharge, the total shows it before anyone confirms.
The feature dive operations will love most: charge to room. One tap moves a bar bill onto the guest's booking, where it shows up automatically on the final invoice. Daily reports with export live right inside the POS, and — like the calendar — the redesigned counter is optional while your team settles in.
Behind the counter, Gurita now runs a proper kitchen and bar inventory. Ingredients are tracked in batches with expiry dates, first-in-first-out, complete with allergens, storage locations, suppliers and preparation loss. Cocktails and dishes are defined once as recipe products: sell the mojito and the rum, mint and lime book themselves out of stock. The POS even checks live availability — when the kitchen runs out of what a dish needs, the button simply stops selling it. Consumption reports show what's actually being used, which makes purchasing a calculation instead of a guess.
Transfers off the whiteboard
Airport pickups, jetty shuttles, day trips — for most operations this planning lives on a whiteboard next to reception. Gurita 2.5 moves it into the system: vehicles with seat capacities, pickup locations, multi-stop routes and reusable route templates. Guests are added straight from their bookings, drivers and staff get assigned, and every guest carries a pickup status. The planner warns about conflicts — a double-booked minibus, overlapping runs — before they happen, overlapping transfers can be merged into one run, and the driver gets a printable PDF manifest for the dashboard.
Talking to guests where they actually read
Guest communication grew in several directions at once:
- A new notification center gives you precise control over which automatic messages go out and to whom — guest, team or both — with a live preview before anything is saved.
- WhatsApp messaging joins email: booking confirmations and updates now reach guests on the channel most of them actually check.
- Four fresh email designs (Classic, Bold, Dark, Editorial) carry your logo and colors without any template surgery.
- Fillable PDF forms attach official paperwork — registration cards, dive-association forms — that pre-fill themselves from booking data instead of being typed out at check-in.
Built for the dive deck, not just the front desk
Several additions speak directly to dive operations. The boat maintenance and fuel log records fuel and engine hours per boat, tracks service intervals per component — engine, compressor and so on — and raises a reminder when a service comes due, with a fleet overview and cost statistics that export to Excel. Diving itself became measurable too: a new dive statistics report tallies how many dives ran over any date range, grouped and totalled across your resort, boats and dive centre, so the logbook stops being a stack of paper and turns into numbers you can steer by — the busy stretches, the quiet ones, and how this season compares to the last. And the online shop widget puts courses, gear and packages directly on your own website, with a shopping basket and customer accounts, so direct sales no longer require a separate webshop project.
One shop for every connection
Integrations moved into a single Plugin Shop, where every connection — channel managers, payment providers, accounting — shows a clear "connected / needs attention" status. The half-year also brought new names to the list: WooCommerce order sync, HighLevel CRM for automatic guest and stay-history sync into marketing campaigns, and a LittleHotelier import that brings bookings and guest lists over via CSV for teams switching to Gurita. The Xero accounting connection became more reliable and more secure, and credit cards from channel bookings are now viewed through a secured vault page — the card data never touches Gurita itself.
A related change is the new Active Modules page: every part of Gurita can be switched on or off, so a small dive centre isn't navigating menus built for a 60-room resort.
Your numbers, now answerable by AI
The most forward-looking addition of the half-year connects Gurita to the AI assistants teams are already leaning on. Through a new, read-only link built on the open Model Context Protocol (MCP), an assistant like Claude can be pointed at your Gurita instance and asked in plain language — how was occupancy last month?, which boat logged the most dives in June?, what's still outstanding on invoices? — and it answers from your live figures, across occupancy, sales, finance and the new dive statistics alike.
It is built to be safe by default. The link is read-only, so an assistant can look but never change anything; access runs through per-user tokens you can revoke at any moment; and the whole feature stays switched off until you deliberately turn it on. Because it rides the same permissions your team already works under, an assistant sees only what its user is allowed to — and card details, which live in a secured vault, are never in the picture at all.
More languages, less friction
Gurita added Spanish, Chinese and Indonesian this half-year and refreshed its French and Italian translations — because a PMS works best when every crew member reads it in their own language. Dozens of smaller conveniences landed alongside: multi-file uploads with built-in image cropping, group pricing that steps down as the group grows, blackout dates for offers, sortable product lists, a per-user display currency, and proper no-show handling that frees the room in your occupancy view while keeping the booking and its billing intact.
And under the hood
The least visible work may matter most. New database indexes and faster availability checks make everyday clicks noticeably snappier. Security saw two dedicated hardening rounds — a full code audit in May and a patch series in July — plus stricter verification of incoming payment and channel notifications and IP restrictions for channel connections. Dozens of bugs were fixed along the way.
Six months, one message: Gurita is becoming the operating system for the whole property — front desk, restaurant, boats, back office. The Gurita team now publishes an update every two weeks on the Gurita blog, and you can explore the product itself at gurita.app.
Curious what Gurita 2.5 would look like for your operation? Talk to us — we answer every inquiry within 24 hours on business days.