Your busiest room might be your worst earner

Four people in a room that seats eight is a full slot and a thin one at the same time. Your occupancy report calls both of those a sale.

Which number actually matters?

Take what a slot earned rather than whether it sold. Then split it three ways.

Did it sell at all. How many people were in it. What each of them paid.

Multiply those and you get what that slot was worth. And when a room has a bad month you can see which of the three moved, which matters because they need completely different responses. Fewer bookings is a marketing problem. Smaller groups is a packaging problem. Less per head is a pricing or discounting problem.

Most software hands you one number and leaves you guessing which.

Count fairly

If a room was blocked for a private event, closed for maintenance, or you were shut that day, that time was never on sale. Counting it as empty makes your week look worse than it was and sends you chasing something that is not there.

Only count what you were actually offering.

Where it usually leaks

Work a version through on your own numbers. Take your best-performing room by occupancy and your worst. For each, divide the revenue by the number of slots you actually offered, and check the average party size.

It is common for a room that sells out to be filling with small groups at a discounted rate, and for one that looks half empty to be taking private buyouts at full price. Occupancy ranks them one way. Money ranks them the other.

The discounting one catches most people. A code goes out for a school holiday promotion, never gets switched off, and eight months later it is still taking a slice of every family booking. Your top line looks fine the whole time. What each person paid has been sliding since March.

How to check it yourself

You can do a rough version in a spreadsheet.

Export a year of bookings. For each room, total the revenue and divide by the number of slots you actually offered. That is your revenue per slot. Then look at average party size per room, and average spend per head.

It takes an afternoon and it usually surprises people.

The same three-way split is what we are building into RevOps.