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.

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 ​

Two 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. 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.

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.