RevPAR -- Revenue per Available Room

RevPAR -- Revenue per Available Room -- is rooms revenue per available room. It combines room rate and occupancy in a single figure.

That makes it valuable, and tricky. A hotel can raise its rate and still earn less. Specifically: rate goes from EUR 130 to EUR 146, a 12.5% lift, but RevPAR falls from EUR 104 to EUR 95, because occupancy drops from 80% to 65%. The hotel sells higher and fills less. The result goes backward, not forward.

What we see in practice: Many properties only compare RevPAR against their own prior-year number. That is not enough. A RevPAR of EUR 95 sounds solid until you realize the market in the same segment is at EUR 114. That is not a small gap. It is real money: at 80 available rooms and 365 days, that is over EUR 555,000 in annual potential left on the table. Reading RevPAR without a market comparison is like reading your bank statement without the bill that goes with it.

Anyone who takes revenue management seriously looks at both numbers, and at the gap between them.