Hotels & assets
RevPAR (Revenue Per Available Room)
Room revenue divided by rooms available. The industry’s headline metric — and blind to every cost and to all non-room revenue, which is why a hotel can grow RevPAR while its profit per room falls.
The mechanism is ordinary. Growth bought through occupancy drags housekeeping, laundry and a distribution commission along with it. Growth bought through rate does not. Same headline, opposite economics.
RevPAR is not a bad metric. It is a metric answering one narrow question, which becomes a bad metric the moment it is asked a different one — and a pack built around a single headline number is designed, structurally, to mislead the people who trust it.