Hotel metrics have a vocabulary problem: the abbreviations sound interchangeable, and every dashboard shows a dozen of them. In practice, a small property can steer with three primary numbers and four or five supporting ones — as long as everyone agrees on what they mean and they come from one closed, consistent day (that is the night audit’s job).
In short
- Occupancy measures volume, ADR measures price, RevPAR combines both — read them together, never alone.
- RevPAR = occupancy × ADR. It is the single best one-line summary of room revenue performance.
- Add GOPPAR or TRevPAR once rooms-only numbers stop telling the whole story.
The big three
Occupancy — the share of available rooms you sold.
Occupancy = rooms sold ÷ rooms available. A 12-room hotel that sells 10 rooms tonight runs at 83% occupancy. High occupancy feels like success, but on its own it says nothing about price — you can fill every room by undercharging for all of them.
ADR (average daily rate) — the average price of the rooms you did sell.
ADR = room revenue ÷ rooms sold. If those 10 rooms brought in $2,900, ADR is $290. ADR alone has the opposite blind spot: a spectacular rate on a nearly empty house is still a bad night.
RevPAR (revenue per available room) — what every room, sold or not, earned.
RevPAR = room revenue ÷ rooms available, or equivalently occupancy × ADR. Our example hotel: $2,900 ÷ 12 = $241.67. RevPAR is the number to trend over time, because it punishes both empty rooms and underpricing. When you experiment with rates (see revenue management for small hotels), RevPAR is the scoreboard.
Beyond the big three
- TRevPAR — total revenue (rooms, restaurant, extras) per available room. The first number that notices your restaurant.
- GOPPAR — gross operating profit per available room. Revenue is vanity; GOPPAR knows what the revenue cost you.
- ALOS — average length of stay. Longer stays mean fewer turnovers and cheaper occupancy.
- Direct-booking share — every point moved from OTA to direct is commission recovered.
- Cancellation and no-show rate — the leak in every forecast; see our guide on cutting them.
Which number to watch when
- Daily: occupancy and pace for the next 14 days — these you can still act on.
- Weekly: RevPAR against the same week last year, and your cancellation rate.
- Monthly: TRevPAR and GOPPAR — the profit story ownership actually cares about.
Getting the numbers without the spreadsheet
Every KPI here is arithmetic on data your systems already hold. The only hard part is getting rooms, restaurant and finance to agree on the inputs — which is a systems problem, not a math problem. If assembling last month’s RevPAR takes an afternoon of exports, the fix is not a better spreadsheet; it is software that shares one data model.