You can track many indicators to assess your strategies to improve your hotel business. Hotel occupancy rate remains a go-to indicator for hoteliers around the world. Why? There is no better indicator to look at if you want to assess your hotel performance quickly.
Today, we will put it under our scope to see what it is and what it is used for. Plus, you’ll get to discover how to use a hotel occupancy rate calculator to streamline your calculations.
Number of rooms
at your property:
Number of room nights booked
for your property over 30 days:
Number of room nights booked for your property over 30 days:
Your Occupancy Rate
Please note this is an estimation only.
How to use the calculator?
Now it would be a shame if you had to calculate the hotel occupancy rate over and over again manually. Fortunately, here you can use our hotel occupancy calculator for free.
Using the calculator is simple. All you have to do is enter the “Number of rooms at your property” and “Number of room nights booked for your property over 30 days”. The calculator automatically does all the work in the background and instantly returns the “Your Occupancy Rate %” results.
Use case examples of how to use the calculator
Before you start using the hotel occupancy rate calculator, you need some reference points. It’s recommended to use two of them.
First, you should look at average monthly hotel occupancy rates worldwide for your region. And secondly, you should have your own Excel sheet where you will write down your hotel occupancy rate for every month. It will help you compare your current occupancy rate with historical performance data.
Let’s say you have 50 available rooms at your property, and you had 1150 room nights booked for your property over 30 days. You enter those values into the calculator.
The calculator will return the value of your occupancy rate. In this example, it is 76%. You can do it every month. The process is the same. With a tool such as this one, you will effortlessly calculate the occupancy rate and record it for every month.
The hotel occupancy rate is an important performance indicator. Finally, you no longer have to worry about knowing the formula by heart and doing manual calculations with an online occupancy calculator. Now, you can calculate and record it almost on auto-pilot and save tons of time.
What is the hotel occupancy rate?
The hotel occupancy rate is a hotel performance indicator. When it comes to importance, it’s up there with Average Daily Rate (ADR) and Revenue per Available Room (RevPAR).
Hotel occupancy rate is the ratio of occupied hotel rooms to the total number of available rooms. It is expressed as a percentage, so some people refer to it as a share of occupied rooms during a specific time frame.
What is it used for?
Hotel occupancy rate can help you:
- Assess your hotel’s performance against its competitors
- Compare your hotel’s to the average occupancy rate in the market
- Assess your hotel’s position against its own historical data
- Plan future capital expenditures
How is the hotel occupancy rate calculated?
There are two ways to calculate the occupancy rate. If you already have RevPAR and ADR, you can do it by reversing the RevPar formula. Plus, since most hotels base their offer on double occupancy, you don’t have to worry about bed count or bed occupancy.
RevPAR = ADR * Occupancy Rate -> Occupancy Rate = RevPAR / ADR
Or, you can do it old fashion style with the percentage formula:
Occupancy Rate = (Total Number of Occupied Rooms / Total Number of Available Rooms) * 100
The average occupancy rate by season
Here are average occupancy rates by season and by region in 2018 so that you can assess the performance of your hotel.
Low season (January, February, March, November, and December)
- Asia Pacific – 69.86%
- Americas – 59.96%
- Europe – 65.74%
- The Middle East and Africa – 66.46%
Middle season (April, May, and October)
- Asia Pacific – 71.5%
- Americas – 68.06%
- Europe – 75%
- The Middle East and Africa – 62.87%
High season (June, July, August, and September)
- Asia Pacific – 72%
- Americas – 71.33%
- Europe – 79.13%
- The Middle East and Africa – 59.48%
Most common problems of occupancy
While there are a number of factors that can lead to suboptimal occupancy rates, there are a couple of problems commonly found across hotels. The most common one perhaps is overbooking. It happens because hotels tend to overbook their rooms inventory during busy periods given the fact that some guests decide not to check-in (no-show).
It can backfire as the hotel might end up having to turn away a guest even though the guest has a confirmed reservation. The other reasons include low online visibility, poor marketing plan, no attractive local partnerships, or flawed inventory optimization.
Importance of inventory optimization
Inventory control in the hospitality industry is very important because it’s another name for processes aimed to increase demand and maximize returns. Optimizing room inventory can give you a competitive advantage thanks to a couple of perks it offers.
First, you will be able to improve your distribution strategy. Secondly, you will be able to accurately forecast room demands. And lastly, you will be able to segment your target markets. Upstay, the cutting-edge automated premium inventory optimization solution for hotels, provides a couple of ideas on how to achieve next-level inventory optimization.
Graduated from Standford University, Arielle has over 5 years of experience in the Hospitality industry. She holds an MBA in business administration from the IDC Herzliya, Israel. She currently works as Account Manager at UpStay, building and maintaining strong, long-lasting customer relationships. She is deeply passionate about helping hoteliers unlock significant new revenue streams from unsold premium inventory.
