How to read an STR report: occupancy, ADR, and RevPAR index

The STR report shows up on schedule — weekly for some properties, monthly for others — gets a ten-second skim, and gets filed away: relief if the top line is green, low-grade anxiety if it's red, no real change in behavior either way. That's a waste of data you're often already paying to receive. Learning how to read an STR report properly means getting past the top-line number to the three index scores underneath it, because two hotels can post the identical RevPAR for completely different reasons — and only one of those reasons is actually a problem.

What does an STR report actually measure?

An STR report — also called a STAR report, short for Smith Travel Accommodations Report — is the hotel industry's standard tool for comparing a property's performance against a set of similar competitors, not just against its own history. It comes from STR, a company that started in 1985 as Smith Travel Research and now operates as a CoStar Group brand; the first STAR report launched in 1988, built on a simple premise that still holds: hotels share performance data anonymously so every participant can see how it stacks up against the rest.

That pool is large enough to matter. As of August 2026, CoStar's hotel performance sample covered about 95,000 properties and 12.2 million rooms worldwide. When your report says you underperformed the market this month, "the market" is a real, sizable sample, not a guess dressed up as data.

Every report is built around a competitive set, or compset: a group of nearby, similar hotels you choose to represent your real competition, within STR's rules — which require at least four participating properties besides your own. The compset is what turns a raw number into a comparison, which is the entire point. It's the difference between "occupancy dropped" and "occupancy dropped less than everyone else's, because a highway closure hit the whole submarket."

How to read an STR report's three headline numbers

Before any index score, three raw metrics anchor every report:

• Occupancy is the percentage of your available rooms that were sold: rooms sold divided by rooms available.
• ADR (average daily rate) is the average revenue earned per room actually sold. It ignores empty rooms entirely, so a hotel can raise ADR while occupancy falls and still come out ahead — or behind.
• RevPAR (revenue per available room) is occupancy multiplied by ADR. It's the one number that accounts for your whole inventory, sold and unsold alike, which is why it's the metric most owners check first.

These three describe your hotel on its own. They don't yet say anything about your market. For that, you need the index scores.

What do MPI, ARI, and RGI actually mean?

Every index in an STR report follows the same formula: your number divided by your compset's number, multiplied by 100. A score of 100 means parity — you captured exactly your fair share. Above 100 means you outperformed your compset by that percentage; below 100 means you gave up share to it.

Three named indices apply that formula to the three headline numbers:

• MPI (Market Penetration Index) indexes occupancy. It answers whether you're capturing your fair share of room-night demand. A hotel running 72% occupancy against a compset averaging 80% posts an MPI of 90 — it captured 90% of its fair share of demand, no more.
• ARI (Average Rate Index) indexes your rate against the compset's. It answers a different question than MPI entirely: not "are people booking me," but "am I charging what this market will actually bear."
• RGI (Revenue Generation Index) indexes RevPAR — the blended answer. An RGI of 115 means you generated 15% more revenue per available room than your compset's average; an RGI of 88 means you generated 12% less.

The number worth tracking isn't any single period's score. It's the trend across several periods — and, just as importantly, the relationship between the three scores, not any one of them in isolation.

Read MPI against ARI, not just RGI alone

RGI is the number most owners check first, and it's the one most likely to mislead them on its own, because two hotels can post the same RGI for opposite reasons. The read we'd actually run: put MPI and ARI side by side for the same period, and look at the pair, not just the blend.

• MPI up, ARI up. You're winning share and rate — the strongest position on the board. Don't get complacent, and look for room to test rate further before assuming you're maxed out.
• MPI up, ARI down. You're winning occupancy by discounting. That's fine if you're chasing genuinely scarce demand toward a full house; if you're not close to full, it's margin left on the table for volume you may not have needed to buy.
• MPI down, ARI up. You're protecting rate and losing bodies. Before you touch pricing, check whether your compset changed — a newly renovated or upscale comparable can make your held rate look out of step even though nothing about your own hotel did.
• MPI down, ARI down. You're losing on both, the one combination that deserves an immediate look rather than a quarterly one. Confirm the compset is still accurate first, then treat it as a real competitive problem, not a pricing tweak.

Do this today: pull your last three reporting periods, write MPI and ARI next to each other instead of skimming straight to RGI, and note which of the four boxes you land in. That's a fifteen-minute exercise, and it tells you more about what to actually do next than a green or red RevPAR number ever will on its own.

Check your compset before you trust the number

Every index in the report is only as good as the compset behind it, and compsets go stale quietly. A new hotel opens two blocks away and never gets added. A longtime comparable renovates, rebrands, or changes ownership and stops being a fair peer. Your own property repositions — new amenities, a renovation, a different rate strategy — and the group you were benchmarked against no longer resembles who you're actually competing with for the same guest.

A poor competitive set produces a misleading benchmark no matter how carefully you read the rest of the report, so treat this as a standing check, not a one-time setup: revisit who's actually in your market at least once a year, and the moment you hear about a new property nearby. If you're building or auditing a compset for the first time, how to build a hotel comp set walks through the criteria worth using and when it's time to swap a member out.

Where does a daily read fit around a monthly report?

An STR report is deliberately backward-looking and comparative: it tells you, days or weeks after the fact, how you did relative to a named set of peers. It won't tell you why a comp's ADR moved this week, that a new property broke ground down the street, or that a local employer just announced a hiring wave headed for your submarket months before that shows up in anyone's occupancy numbers. That's a different kind of information — daily, forward-looking, and specific to your market rather than the industry at large.

The Intel Club is built for that gap: a daily briefing that watches your competitors and your local market and opens with a recommended action, so the report you get monthly isn't the only signal you have between now and the next one. Membership is $99/month with a 7-day trial. See what a daily briefing covers for hotels, or read how a boutique hotel uses its daily intelligence briefing for a sense of the habit day to day.

Read the three numbers, then the three indices, then the pair that actually explains them. That's the whole report — and it takes less time than the monthly worry about the top line ever did.