Client sent me her dashboard: ADR $210, RevPAR $89. Which number is the real one?

Question

I run turnovers for a handful of owners and one of them keeps forwarding me screenshots of her numbers because she thinks I know what they mean. Her cabin shows an average daily rate of $210, occupancy 43%, and RevPAR $89. She wants to know why I schedule cleaners the way I do and honestly I'd like to be able to talk about her numbers without nodding along.

Somewhere I read that you should chase RevPAR growth and ignore ADR, because you can raise your rate right up until nobody books. That made sense for about a day. Then another owner told me RevPAR is a hotel number and doesn't apply to a one-unit cabin at all, since there's no room count to divide by. So now I've got two people telling me different things and a spreadsheet I can't read. What do these three actually measure, and is $89 a bad number or a fine one?

Rena Guide · Accepted Answer

All three describe the same revenue from different angles, and none of them is wrong.

ADR, average daily rate, is booking revenue divided by the nights that were actually booked. Her guests paid an average of $210 for each night they stayed. Occupancy is booked nights divided by nights the place was available, so 43% means roughly 13 nights out of 30. RevPAR is revenue per available night, which is ADR multiplied by occupancy. $210 times 0.43 gives you about $89. It's telling you that across every night of the calendar, booked or empty, the cabin earned an average of $89.

The hotel objection is half right. RevPAR came out of hotels, where it's revenue per available room, and a room count of one makes the math simple rather than meaningless. It still works fine for a single cabin.

The part worth being careful about is what counts as "available." The strict version counts every night in the period. A lot of hosts and some dashboards just drop nights the owner blocked for personal use or maintenance, which raises both occupancy and RevPAR without a single extra dollar coming in. When someone quotes you a market RevPAR, ask which nights are in the denominator.

And $89 isn't good or bad on its own, because RevPAR is a top-line number. It doesn't know that you charge her a cleaning fee per turnover. At 13 stays a month, a $110 clean is $1,430 out of roughly $2,700 of revenue. Two owners with identical RevPAR can have very different months depending on average length of stay.

Client sent me her dashboard: ADR $210, RevPAR $89. Which number is the real one?

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