Hospitality has more KPIs than any operator needs. This module sorts the essential from the merely available — the metrics that guide decisions from those that just decorate dashboards.
The Uniform System of Accounts lists dozens of recognized KPIs. PMS dashboards typically display sixty or more. Owner reports cycle through twenty. Most managers can recall maybe five and probably use three. This is not a failure of education — it's a failure of curation. The industry has produced metrics faster than it has explained which ones matter for which decisions.
The discipline of this module is not to memorize more KPIs. It is to know which question each KPI answers, and to reach for the right one when that question comes up. Three questions cover the vast majority of operational decisions:
How full are we, and at what price? Rooms KPIs answer this — Occupancy, ADR, RevPAR. How efficiently are we converting revenue into profit? The "PAR" family answers this — RevPAR, TRevPAR, GOPPAR. How well is each business inside the property performing? Department-specific KPIs answer this — RevPASH, capture rate, cost percentages.
If you can pick the right question, the right KPI follows automatically. If you reach for the KPI first, you usually end up looking at the wrong number.
Three numbers govern the entire conversation about Rooms performance. Together they tell you what's happening with volume, with price, and with the yield from combining the two. Every other Rooms metric is a refinement of these three.
Pure volume. Tells you how full you are, nothing about price. Useful for capacity planning, labor scheduling, and operational decisions like which floors to close.
Average Daily Rate. Pure price. Tells you what you're charging, nothing about volume. Improving ADR is harder than improving occupancy but lands more profit on the bottom line.
Revenue Per Available Room. Combines volume and price into a single number. The most-quoted hospitality metric in the world. Useful, but easy to game by discounting heavily to fill rooms.
Where your price sits versus the market. Above 100 means premium positioning. Below 100 means discounting. Movements in rate index tell you whether you're winning or losing pricing battles.
F&B doesn't have a RevPAR equivalent that has caught on globally. What it does have is a small set of metrics that capture the two things that matter most: how full are the seats, and what's the margin on each sale.
The F&B equivalent of occupancy. Counts heads. Tells you how busy the outlet was, nothing about ticket size or margin.
The F&B equivalent of ADR. What each guest spent on average. Improvements come from menu engineering, upselling, and beverage attachment.
Revenue Per Available Seat Hour. The F&B equivalent of RevPAR. Combines covers and check into a single yield metric, normalized for outlet capacity and operating hours.
Food cost typically runs 28–35%. Beverage cost runs 22–28%. Movements of 1–2 percentage points are material. The most-watched F&B numbers in any operation.
The metrics above measure parts of the business. Owners care about the whole. Total-property KPIs roll everything into single numbers that capture the property's overall yield. They are increasingly preferred to RevPAR because they can't be gamed by discounting rooms to win RevPAR while losing profit.
Total Revenue Per Available Room. Captures rooms, F&B, and ancillary revenue together. Important for resorts and full-service properties where non-rooms revenue is significant.
The metric increasingly preferred by owners and asset managers. Captures revenue performance AND cost discipline in a single number. Cannot be gamed by selling cheap rooms.
The asset-level metric. What each key generates in cash flow annually. Lets owners compare hotels of different sizes on a normalized basis.
Now formalized in USALI 12. Captures what's left of rooms revenue after the cost of acquiring that revenue (commissions, marketing, loyalty). CAC averages 15–25% of rooms revenue.
One way to internalize all of this: match the audience to the metric. Different people in the property's ecosystem care about different rungs on the same ladder.
Pull last month's STR report (or its equivalent), your PMS dashboard, and your F&B reports. Calculate each of the metrics below for your own property. Many will already be displayed; the goal is to know the formula behind them, and to spot the gaps.
KPIs feel objective on paper. In practice, every property emphasizes different ones for different reasons — and the choices reveal a lot about how the property is managed. Come prepared to discuss:
If the answer is "RevPAR" and the property is a resort with substantial F&B, the answer is no. The owner question reveals the owner's mental model.
The gap between RevPAR performance and GOPPAR performance is the most diagnostic comparison in hospitality. It shows where revenue is happening at the cost of margin, or where margin is being protected at the cost of volume.
For most properties, a 3-point CAC reduction is the single largest profit opportunity available without changing anything operational. The exercise of imagining it forces the question of what's driving CAC in the first place.