The average price paid per occupied room on a given night or period.
ADR is the rate story ”” it tells you whether the revenue you collected reflects the rate environment you set. It sits alongside occupancy as the two levers revenue management lives inside. A rate increase that comes with an occupancy decline isn't automatically bad; the RevPAR math decides.
ADR includes all rooms revenue (transient, group, contract) divided by all occupied rooms. Complimentary rooms are excluded from both numerator and denominator. If a property's comp ratio shifts, ADR comparisons across periods can be misleading.
The percentage of available rooms that were sold on a given night or period.
Occupancy drives variable costs ”” every room sold adds housekeeping labor, amenities, laundry, and energy usage. High occupancy compresses rates and spends more per occupied room. Understanding the occupancy/rate tradeoff is core to revenue strategy. A 95% occupancy at $100 ADR versus 80% at $120 ADR will produce identical RevPAR ”” but the cost structures are different.
Rooms Available is the denominator ”” it excludes rooms out of order (OOO) or out of service (OOS). If a hotel is renovating a floor, available rooms drop and occupancy looks artificially higher. Clarify whether the comparison uses total rooms or available rooms when benchmarking across a portfolio during construction.
The combined effect of occupancy and rate ”” how much rooms revenue each available room produced, regardless of whether it was sold.
RevPAR is the standard top-line rooms performance metric. It collapses occupancy and rate into one number and is directly comparable across properties of different sizes. When RevPAR improves, you need to know whether it came from rate, occupancy, or both ”” the mix matters for cost and quality of revenue.
RevPAR measures rooms revenue only. A select-service hotel with no F&B and a full-service resort will both report RevPAR, but they're running fundamentally different businesses. Never use RevPAR as a cross-property profitability comparison without layering in GOP or EBITDA.
All revenue ”” rooms, F&B, parking, spa, resort fees, and other outlets ”” divided by available rooms.
TRevPAR is the right metric when comparing full-service hotels or resorts where F&B and ancillary revenue are material. A resort with strong food and beverage can post a lower RevPAR than a comp set hotel and still outperform it on total revenue capture. If you're managing a hotel with a restaurant, a pool bar, or meeting space ”” TRevPAR tells the fuller story.
STR-reported measures of a hotel's performance relative to its defined competitive set. A score of 100 = exactly fair share; above 100 = outperforming share; below 100 = losing share.
These tell you whether you're winning or losing relative to the people you're competing against ”” not whether you're up versus last year. A hotel can grow RevPAR 10% and still be losing share if the market grew 15%. For revenue management reviews, the RGI trend matters as much as the absolute RevPAR number. MPI and ARI let you decompose whether the share story is a rate problem or an occupancy problem.
Comp set selection is everything. A comp set that includes softer performers makes a hotel look better than it is. When a new comp joins the set or one drops off, the indices jump without any change in actual performance. Always note comp set changes in budget and bridge narratives.
Total Departmental Profit minus Total Undistributed (Overhead) Expenses. The primary profitability metric for hotel operators.
GOP is the operator's headline number. Everything above the GOP line is within the management team's day-to-day control ”” labor, cost of goods, overhead departments. Everything below it (management fees, property taxes, insurance, debt) sits in the ownership structure. Use GOP for operational budgets, bridge narratives, and incentive fee calculations. When something is off in operations, GOP is where it shows up.
Different ownership agreements draw the GOP line differently. Some strip out owner-paid costs (property taxes, reserves) before the management fee calculation. When comparing GOP across properties with different management agreements, confirm what's included above the line. "House Profit" and "GOP" refer to the same concept but may be calculated slightly differently in older agreements.
GOP minus management fees, property taxes, insurance, and the FF&E reserve. The asset-level profitability metric used for valuation and ownership-level comparisons.
EBITDA is the ownership and investment metric. Lenders underwrite on it. Cap rates are applied to it. Investors compare it across assets. For operators, it's important to understand but it's a noisy operational scorecard because it includes costs (property taxes, insurance) that the team can't control. An operations team that hits GOP budget but misses EBITDA due to a tax reassessment has still done their job.
EBITDA comparisons are only clean if the FF&E reserve treatment is consistent. Some properties report "EBITDA before reserve" and some deduct it. A 4% reserve on a $10M revenue hotel is $400K ”” enough to swing a comp meaningfully. Always confirm the convention before comparing across hotels or against industry benchmarks.
When revenue is UP versus the comparison period: the percentage of revenue upside that made it to GOP.
Flow tells you how efficiently revenue upside converted to profit. A 50% flow on a $200K revenue beat means $100K of that landed in GOP ”” costs ate the other half. A 100% flow means every dollar of revenue growth went straight to profit. Above 100% is possible (you grew revenue while cutting costs) but warrants scrutiny. A negative flow means revenue was up but GOP was down ”” costs outpaced revenue growth.
When revenue is DOWN versus the comparison period: how much of the revenue shortfall did the team absorb through cost management, rather than passing it through to the GOP line?
Flex is the cost management story in a down-revenue environment. A 60% flex means the team absorbed 60 cents of every dollar of lost revenue through cost cuts ”” only 40 cents fell to the GOP line. A 0% flex means every dollar of revenue shortfall fell straight through, with no cost response. Anything above 100% flex means the team actually grew GOP despite the revenue decline ”” they cut more than they lost.
Don't use flow-through formula when revenue is down ”” the math inverts and produces misleading numbers. Use flex when revenue is negative. Some companies use a single "flow-through" formula for both directions; this is technically incorrect and will overstate performance in a down-revenue year.
A department's total expense divided by occupied rooms ”” expressing cost on a per-room-cleaned or per-room-sold basis.
CPOR normalizes costs across different occupancy levels, making budget-to-actual comparisons cleaner than raw dollar comparisons. If occupancy runs 5 points ahead of budget, raw Rooms expense will look over ”” CPOR adjusts for the additional rooms cleaned. It's useful for understanding cost efficiency at a department level, especially for rooms and housekeeping.
CPOR blends labor hours, wage rates, and productivity into a single number. When comparing CPOR across properties ”” or even across years at the same property ”” a change in any of those three inputs moves the number. A hotel that replaced agency housekeepers ($28/hr) with in-house staff ($18/hr) will show a better CPOR even if their productivity (hours per room) got worse. You can't tell which driver moved the metric. That's why labor benchmarking in housekeeping requires MPOR, not just CPOR.
Total housekeeping labor minutes divided by rooms cleaned ”” a pure productivity metric that isolates how long it takes to turn a room, regardless of what the labor costs.
HK Labor: $18/hr · 28 min/room
CPOR = $8.40 per occupied room. Labor is cheaper but rooms take longer to clean.
HK Labor: $28/hr · 18 min/room
CPOR = $8.40 per occupied room. Labor is more expensive but productivity is higher.
The two hotels above post identical CPOR, but their operational realities are completely different. Hotel A has a productivity problem ”” rooms take too long, which will create scheduling and staffing issues at high occupancy. Hotel B has a wage rate issue ”” it may be a high-cost market, a union property, or a contract labor situation. Those are two completely different management conversations. CPOR lumps them together and tells you nothing about which problem you're actually looking at.
MPOR isolates operational efficiency ”” the only component the housekeeping team and their supervisor can directly control. Wage rates are driven by market conditions, labor agreements, and staffing mix (in-house vs. contract). Management teams should be held accountable for MPOR, not CPOR, as their primary housekeeping productivity KPI.
MPOR requires accurate timekeeping data ”” labor hours by department from a time-and-attendance system, not just a payroll dollar total. Properties that run labor purely off payroll exports can calculate CPOR but can't calculate MPOR reliably. If a property uses a staffing agency and those hours don't flow through the same time system, MPOR will be understated. Always confirm whether contract labor hours are included in the minute count before benchmarking.
The cost of employer-side payroll taxes (FICA, FUTA, SUTA) plus employee benefit expenses (health insurance, 401k match, workers comp, paid leave) ”” expressed as a percentage of gross wages.
PTEB runs roughly 20”“28% of wages at most hotels, depending on benefit richness, state taxes, and workforce mix. It's a line item that moves in lock-step with wages, so it appears in every department that has labor. Budget teams often estimate PTEB as a fixed percentage of wages ”” but the actual rate varies by department because benefit election rates differ, turnover affects benefit cost, and contract labor carries no employer PTEB.
When a hotel shifts from in-house labor to contract staffing, wages fall and PTEB falls with them ”” but the savings aren't dollar-for-dollar because agency markups replace them. Comparing PTEB as a percentage of in-house wages (excluding contract) gives a cleaner picture of benefit cost efficiency than comparing it as a percent of total labor cost (wages + contract).
GOP divided by available rooms ”” expressing profit on a per-available-room basis, normalizing for property size.
GOPPAR lets you compare profitability across hotels of different sizes without the raw dollar amounts distorting the picture. A 300-room hotel generating $2M in GOP and a 100-room hotel generating $900K are difficult to compare on raw numbers alone ”” GOPPAR puts them on the same scale. It's the metric ownership groups use when ranking portfolio performance across dissimilar properties.
Two different denominators used to normalize hotel metrics ”” one based on all rooms the hotel has, the other based only on rooms actually sold.
Denominator = all rooms in inventory
Normalizes for property size. Used to compare properties of different scales. Revenue, costs, and profit expressed per available room produce a number that doesn't move with occupancy changes ”” useful for fixed costs like utilities, property taxes, and overhead.
Denominator = rooms actually sold
Normalizes for volume. Used to benchmark variable costs that scale with rooms cleaned or guests served. CPOR and MPOR are both POR metrics. Revenue metrics like ADR are inherently POR. Better for variable cost efficiency analysis.
Knowing which denominator a metric uses is critical before drawing conclusions from it. Fixed costs (utilities, property taxes, insurance) make more sense expressed PAR ”” they don't change whether the hotel is at 60% or 90% occupancy. Variable costs (HK labor, amenities, laundry) make more sense expressed POR ”” they scale with volume. When benchmarking utilities at $18 POR versus $18 PAR, the implications are completely different. A hotel at 70% occupancy with $18 POR utilities is spending $12.60 PAR; a hotel at 90% occupancy with $18 POR utilities is spending $16.20 PAR.
Related reference pages:
Hotel P&L Waterfall ”” where each of these metrics sits in the full P&L structure.
Practical USALI ”” department-by-department line items, common miscodings, and operator traps.