STR reports for small hotels: cost, alternatives, and value

Somebody at your last owners' meeting mentioned their STR number, and you nodded like you already knew what a good one looked like. You don't — not because you're behind, but because nobody ever handed you a report, and the one time you looked into getting one, the pricing page just said "contact us." Before you fill out that form, it's worth knowing what an STR report actually costs, what you're agreeing to in exchange for it, and whether a small or independent hotel needs the full version at all.

What is an STR report, exactly?

STR is Smith Travel Research, the hospitality data company now owned by CoStar Group, which acquired it in 2019. What most people call "an STR report" is really the STAR report — the Smith Travel Accommodations Report — a benchmark that compares your hotel's occupancy, ADR (average daily rate), and RevPAR (revenue per available room) against a competitive set: a handful of similar hotels, usually matched on location, price tier, and size, that you help choose when you enroll.

The report doesn't just hand you raw numbers next to theirs. It indexes your performance against the comp set's average and expresses it as a score around 100 — 100 means you're capturing your fair share of the market, above 100 means you're outperforming the set, and below 100 means the hotels around you are winning business you aren't. That index, more than any single dollar figure, is what STR is actually selling.

Reports arrive on a recurring cadence, not as a one-off snapshot, which matters more than it sounds like it should. A single week's dip against your comp set is noise — a slow property across the street closing for renovation, a citywide event that landed on their calendar and not yours. An eight-week slide in the same direction is a trend. The report is only as useful as the habit of actually opening it.

How much does an STR report actually cost?

Here's the part that sends small-hotel owners back to Google: STR doesn't publish subscription pricing. You contact them, describe your property, and get a quote. The one figure that circulates comes from third-party guides, not an STR price list, and it's for a narrower product: Engine's guide to STR reports lists a one-time Trend Analysis report at $600 — a market-level overview, not your hotel measured against your comp set. Confirm the current price with STR before you budget around it.

There's also a cost that isn't measured in dollars. To get the ongoing comp-set benchmark — not the one-off — you typically have to share your own hotel's performance data: occupancy, rate, and room revenue figures. STR's benchmark is built from participating hotels' data, so you pay in data as well as dollars. That's a reasonable deal if your property already tracks those numbers cleanly. If it doesn't, the real first cost of an STR report is building the reporting habit STR assumes you already have.

Is it worth it for a small or independent hotel?

The honest answer cuts both ways. For a hotel that has never measured itself against its market, a benchmark is the first outside view of where it actually stands — and for an independent property with no brand behind it, whether to buy that view is entirely the owner's call.

But benchmarking is only worth what you do with the number. If your real competitive set is four hotels you've watched for a decade and already know cold, a third-party index confirms an instinct you trust, at a price you can't see until after you've already called. A useful test: if you can't name your actual comp set in under 10 seconds, you need the discipline a report imposes. If you can name them but have never once written down what they charge and when, you need a system before you need an audit.

Market volatility changes the math too. A submarket with one dominant conference hotel and a handful of steady stayovers moves slowly enough that occasional attention is plenty. A submarket adding new supply, losing a major employer, or absorbing a wave of short-term rentals changes fast enough that you want to know within weeks, not at your next renewal date. The faster your market moves, the more a formal, recurring benchmark earns its cost back — and the more a one-time Trend Analysis report undersells what you actually need.

What are the alternatives to a full STR report?

Three tiers cover most small hotels, in order of how much precision you're paying for.

• Free, do-it-yourself tracking. Check the same handful of competitor rooms on the OTAs yourself, on a schedule, and write down what you see. It costs nothing but time, and it gives you direction rather than a certified score.
• Paid rate-shopping software. Tools built to check competitor sell rates automatically and flag changes. Lighthouse and SiteMinder top Hotel Tech Report's list of STR alternatives, which shows prices of $100 a month and $500 a month, respectively — get a quote for your own property before you budget. These answer what your competitors charge today, which is a narrower question than what STR answers: how your hotel is capturing demand relative to the market.
• The full STR Benchmark subscription from CoStar. The third-party index against a real comp set, at the cost and data-sharing described above. It earns its keep once you're negotiating financing, reporting to an ownership group, or making rate decisions large enough that "roughly right" isn't good enough.

Match the tier to the size of the decision, not to what the hotel down the road happens to subscribe to. For a closer look at what the software tier actually does day to day, see our breakdown of hotel rate-shopping tools and who needs one.

Build a comp-set tracking system this week

You don't need a vendor relationship to start acting like you have one. This takes about 25 minutes a week and nothing else.

1. Name your real comp set. Three to five hotels a guest would actually cross-shop against you — same submarket, similar price band and room count. Not the aspirational property across town; not the hotel three highway exits away that nobody actually compares you to.
2. Pick three fixed shop dates. Say, 14, 30, and 60 days out from today, one weekday night and one weekend night for each. Fixed dates matter more than which dates, because you're tracking change over time, not a single snapshot.
3. Check them every Monday. Look up the public rate for those dates on each comp hotel's own site or your preferred OTA. Five minutes a property, 25 minutes total.
4. Log one line per hotel per week. Date checked, rate, sold out or not. A comp hotel selling out 60 days from now is a stronger demand signal than any single price move.
5. After four weeks, read the pattern, not the week. Who moved first. Who sits consistently above or below you. Whose rate swings when a local event hits town.

If a week's check turns up nothing, write "no change" and move on — that's still a data point, and it's the discipline that makes the pattern visible later. This won't produce STR's index. It will produce the same underlying judgment the index exists to support — pricing decisions grounded in what's actually happening in your market, written down instead of remembered.

Where a daily briefing fits

None of this replaces an STR report's third-party index, and if your hotel already subscribes to one, that's not a reason to stop. What a daily briefing adds is the layer neither STR nor a rate-shopping tool is built for: the conference or festival that's about to sell out your submarket and everyone else's, and the reviews moving your score against the property down the street. The Intel Club delivers that each morning for a property like yours, with a recommended read on what to do about it, rather than a report you have to remember to log into. Membership is $99/month with a 7-day trial; the hotels industry page shows what a briefing covers for a property like yours, and how a boutique hotel uses a daily intelligence briefing shows what the morning habit looks like in practice. If you already have a report in hand and want help reading it, how to read an STR report line by line is the next stop.

Either way: know what the report costs before you request the quote, know what you're trading for it, and don't buy more precision than the decision in front of you actually needs.