RevPAR — revenue per available room — became the industry standard for good reasons. It combines rate and occupancy into one number, it is comparable across properties and markets, and it is genuinely hard to game.
Its limitation is structural rather than technical: it can only see room revenue. A property that sells a room and nothing else, and one that sells a room plus two dinners and a spa treatment, post identical RevPAR.
The metrics that pick up where RevPAR stops
| Metric | Calculation | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| RevPAR | Room revenue ÷ available rooms | Rate and occupancy in one figure |
| TRevPAR | Total revenue ÷ available rooms | Brings ancillary revenue into view |
| RevPAG | Total revenue ÷ guests | Normalises by people rather than keys |
| Capture rate | Guests using an outlet ÷ guests on property | Whether an outlet is trading at all |
| F&B per occupied room | F&B revenue ÷ occupied rooms | Strips occupancy out of F&B trend |
| Spend per cover | Outlet revenue ÷ covers | Separates menu and service performance |
Why per-guest beats per-room for F&B
TRevPAR is a real improvement on RevPAR and it is still normalised per room. On a resort, a family of four and a solo business traveller occupy one room each and generate completely different F&B demand.
Rooms revenue scales with keys. F&B revenue scales with people. If you are trying to manage F&B, dividing by guests tells you something dividing by rooms cannot.
Capture rate is the one to add first
If you adopt a single new metric, make it capture rate per outlet. It answers a question none of the revenue metrics do: of the guests who were physically on the property, what share used this outlet at all?
A restaurant with a healthy average check and a 25% dinner capture rate does not have a pricing problem. It has three quarters of its potential guests eating somewhere else, and no revenue metric expressed per room will ever surface that.
Watch the relationships, not the absolutes
Absolute values vary too much by market and property type to benchmark usefully. The relationships are what matter: RevPAR up while RevPAG is flat means you sold rooms better and did nothing with the guests. Capture rate up while spend per cover is down means you won volume and lost mix. Both are actionable; neither is visible from RevPAR alone.