RevPAR, ADR and occupancy: which number to fix first
Three metrics, one of which is usually lying to you.
Occupancy is the easiest number to move and the least useful on its own. You can fill a hotel tonight by pricing it wrongly. Average daily rate tells you what you charged, but not what you left empty. RevPAR combines both and is the only one worth putting on a wall.
Read them in pairs
Rising occupancy with falling ADR usually means you are discounting into demand you already had. Rising ADR with falling occupancy is only a win if RevPAR went up. Look at the pair, always, and look at it by segment rather than for the hotel as a whole.
Then look at cost per channel
RevPAR ignores what each booking costs to acquire. Two hotels with identical RevPAR can have very different results if one sells seventy per cent through OTAs and the other sells forty. Net RevPAR, after commission and payment fees, is the number that pays your staff.