Hotel revenue management, for a property this size
Not a discipline for a 200-room chain with a dedicated analyst. The same handful of numbers, read honestly, at a scale that fits a ten-room guesthouse.
Revenue management sounds like something a chain hotel does with a dedicated analyst and a forecasting model. At the size most Philippine properties actually operate — ten to fifty rooms, one or two people making the pricing decisions — it means something smaller and more useful: knowing your own numbers well enough to price with intent instead of habit.
This guide is the map, not the whole territory. Every section below links to a page that goes deeper — a feature, a glossary definition with a worked example, a calculator, or a full article. Read this straight through for the shape of the subject, or jump to whichever piece you actually need right now.
The three numbers everyone starts with
Occupancy, ADR (average daily rate) and RevPAR (revenue per available room) are the three figures that show up in every revenue conversation, and they answer three different questions: how full were you, what did a sold room actually earn, and what did every room in the building earn whether it sold or not. Watching only occupancy is the most common mistake — a fully booked month at a discounted rate can earn less than a half-full month at a rate that held its value.
Which of the three deserves the most attention changes month to month, and the honest answer is usually 'whichever one moved the most since last month' rather than a single number you check forever.
Beyond RevPAR: the numbers that count more than rooms
RevPAR only counts room revenue. A property running a restaurant, a bar, or selling tours and transfers is leaving real money out of the picture if it stops there — GOPPAR (gross operating profit per available room) and TrevPAR (total revenue per available room) pull the rest of the business into the same figure. Cost per occupied room answers a different question: what did it actually cost you to service the room someone slept in, separate from what it earned.
None of these replace RevPAR. They sit alongside it, and which one matters most depends on how much of your revenue actually comes from somewhere other than the room rate.
Pricing for a season that doesn't hold still
A flat rate all year is the single most common pricing mistake at this size — not because it's simple, but because it leaves real money on the table in peak weeks and prices you out of bookings in the quiet ones. A base rate for the year with named month overrides for the periods that are genuinely different — Holy Week, a regional festival, the dry season, the habagat months — handles this without anyone repricing by hand every time the calendar turns.
The specifics differ by region more than most operators expect: Puerto Galera's year runs on dive season, Holy Week and a genuinely quiet habagat stretch; Palawan's Amihan-to-habagat swing is sharper; Cebu carries one enormous dated spike in Sinulog week; Boracay's Amihan season and its own festival pull work differently again. Pricing copied from a different region's calendar gets the timing wrong.
Revenue is not profit — the distinction that catches everyone once
A record month on the booking sheet and a disappointing bank balance at the end of it are not a contradiction. They're the normal result of watching revenue and never getting as far as costs — payroll, utilities, cost of goods, maintenance, all the things that turn a top-line number into what a property actually keeps. Net profit margin is the figure that closes that gap, and it's worth checking at least as often as occupancy.
A full profit-and-loss statement, department by department — rooms and F&B judged separately where a restaurant is involved — is what turns 'we had a great month' from an impression into a number you can actually defend.
Payroll: usually the largest cost, and the least watched
Payroll is typically the single biggest line item a small hotel carries, and it's also the one most likely to be buried inside a general expenses total rather than tracked as its own ratio against revenue. For a Philippine property with a restaurant, somewhere in the mid-twenties to low thirties as a percentage of revenue is normal — meaningfully below it usually means understaffing that shows up in reviews before it shows up in the numbers; meaningfully above it means the roster is carrying the season rather than the other way round.
What software costs, and why per-room pricing compounds
Most vendors selling into this market won't publish a price at all, and the ones that do often charge per room — which quietly turns your software bill into a partner in your own expansion, rising every time you add a room whether or not you asked it to. Understanding the real market and the two pricing models before signing anything is worth the twenty minutes it takes to read.
Where to actually start
If you've never tracked any of this beyond a monthly bank balance, start with occupancy, ADR and RevPAR — three numbers, checked monthly, is a real improvement over checking nothing. If you already watch those and want the next layer, GOPPAR and a proper departmental P&L are where the real answers about profitability live, especially for a property with a restaurant or bar. And if pricing has been the same flat rate since opening, the seasonal-pricing section above is very likely the single highest-leverage change on this whole page — it costs nothing to set up and it's the one lever that directly changes what you earn on the same rooms you already have.
None of this needs a finance background to use well. It needs the numbers to actually exist somewhere you can look at them, and a habit of looking on a schedule rather than only when something feels wrong.
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