Occupancy, ADR and RevPAR, explained for a six-room inn

Every hotel article tells you to watch three numbers. Most of them are written for someone with a revenue manager and a spreadsheet habit. If you run six rooms in San Ignacio and you also do the breakfast, the three numbers still matter — they just need explaining in terms of your actual weekend.

The three numbers, with six rooms and two nights

Occupancy is rooms sold divided by rooms available. Six rooms over a Friday and a Saturday gives you twelve room-nights to sell. Sell nine of them and you ran three-quarters full.

ADR — average daily rate — is room revenue divided by rooms sold. It is the average of what you actually charged, after the discounts, the walk-in deal, the long-stay rate your cousin negotiated.

RevPAR — revenue per available room — is room revenue divided by rooms available. It is the same as occupancy multiplied by ADR. Every room counts, whether or not anyone slept in it.

Now the weekend. On Friday all six rooms go at your standard rate. On Saturday only three sell, but it's a busy weekend in town and the rate is double.

Friday: full house, ADR at the standard rate. Saturday: half full, ADR twice as high. Two nights that look nothing alike.

But the revenue is identical. Six rooms at the rate, or three rooms at twice the rate — same money in the drawer. And RevPAR, which divides that money by the same six available rooms, comes out the same on both nights.

When two of them argue, listen to RevPAR

That is the whole point of RevPAR. Occupancy and ADR pull against each other, and on their own each one can be made to look good.

Drop your rate for a slow week in Corozal and occupancy climbs while ADR falls. Hold firm through a quiet Placencia September and ADR holds while occupancy sags. In both cases somebody can tell you the week went well. RevPAR settles it, because it is the only one of the three that accounts for the rooms you didn't sell.

Occupancy tells you how busy you were. ADR tells you what you charged. RevPAR tells you what the building earned.

One caution. RevPAR knows nothing about cost. A full house of heavily discounted rooms is more laundry, more water, more breakfast and more hours from your housekeeper than a half-full house at a strong rate. The same admin that counts your RevPAR creates the cleaning jobs from each departure, so you can see both sides of a busy week.

On rate, the research is consistent: hotels that adjust rates to demand report RevPAR 15–20% higher than those that don't, and static pricing is estimated to leave 15–25% of revenue on the table. That doesn't mean prices should move by themselves. The market intel page tracks competitor rates daily from Booking.com in BZ$, shows occupancy and pace and a local events calendar, and suggests prices — one by one, for a person to approve or ignore.

The six numbers underneath the three

Occupancy, ADR and RevPAR tell you what happened. The rest of the analytics page tells you why, and what to do next week.

• Channel mix. Which booking sites brought which stays. Useful because two bookings at the same ADR are not worth the same money: OTAs typically keep 15–18% of the nightly rate, with Booking.com's standard commission around 15% and Expedia's running 18–22%, both rising if you join a visibility programme.
• Direct share. The slice that came through your own site. The OTAs earn their commission on guests who would never have found you otherwise — that is a fair trade. The commission worth removing is the one you pay on the guest who already knows your name and typed it into Google.
• Cancellations. A rising cancellation rate on one channel, or on one rate plan, usually means the terms are doing something you didn't intend.
• Lead time. How far ahead people book. In Hopkins and Placencia the Christmas and Easter lead time is long and the September lead time is short; knowing the difference tells you when to stop waiting and start promoting.
• Length of stay. Caye Caulker two-nighters and Punta Gorda four-nighters are different businesses, with different cleaning costs per room-night.
• Repeat guests. The clearest sign that the pre-arrival messages, the review requests and the post-stay follow-up are doing their job.

All of it is calculated from the bookings already sitting in your admin — the direct ones and the ones that arrived through the channel manager from Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb, Vrbo and Google. Nothing is typed into a spreadsheet at month end, so nothing is missed at month end either.

The same page in a 25-room hotel

A larger property reads the identical page, with one addition: room type. A 25-room hotel in San Pedro can see that its sea-view rooms run a high ADR at modest occupancy while its garden rooms run full at a lower rate — and decide whether to move rates, move inventory between types, or leave well alone.

The system underneath is the same one the six-room inn uses. What changes is how many staff logins are in use and what each one may see. Plans run 1–6 rooms, 7–14 and 15–25, and the permissions matrix lets you give the front desk the booking pages without the revenue pages, and give your accountant a read-only login. Larger properties are set up individually; the pricing page shows where each band sits.

What to do with it on a Monday

Read the page once a month, not once a day. Look at RevPAR against the same month last year, then look at direct share and cancellations for the reason. Make one decision — a rate for a shoulder week, a cancellation policy on one channel, an email to past guests before Easter — and leave the rest alone until next month.

Three numbers is not many. Knowing which one is telling the truth is most of the work.