A hotel can run 80% occupancy for twelve months straight and still be losing ground. If your competitors are running 88% while charging more per room, strong absolute numbers are masking a weak competitive position.
That gap is exactly what STR reports are designed to reveal. Smith Travel Research (now operating under CoStar) built the STR report to give hoteliers a reliable, standardized way to measure performance not just in isolation, but relative to the market.
Today it's the benchmarking tool that owners, lenders, and management companies reach for first. This guide walks you through what's in an STR report, how to read one, and how to actually put the data to work.
A Quick TL;DR
STR reports are standardized benchmarking tools that compare your hotel's performance, specifically occupancy, ADR, and RevPAR, against a defined group of competitors called a comp set.
Published weekly, monthly, and annually, they're used by hotel managers, owners, asset managers, and investors to track competitive position, spot trends, set pricing strategy, and guide budget decisions.
The key metrics are reported both as raw numbers and as index scores, where 100 represents your fair share of the market.
What Is a STAR Report for Hotels?
Smith Travel Research was founded in 1985 with a pretty simple premise: if hotels could pool their performance data anonymously, everyone in the pool would gain access to competitive insights that none of them could generate on their own. It worked.
The company grew into the dominant source of lodging industry data and was eventually acquired by CoStar Group in 2019.
Today, the STR report, sometimes called a STAR report (Smith Travel Accommodations Report), is distributed to participating hotels on a weekly, monthly, and annual basis. To receive benchmarking data, your property needs to submit its own performance figures to STR.
That data gets anonymized and aggregated, so no individual hotel's numbers are ever exposed to competitors. In exchange, you get a report showing exactly where you stand relative to the market.
The users of these reports span the entire hospitality ecosystem. General managers use them to make pricing decisions. Revenue managers track them week to week.
Ownership groups use them to evaluate asset performance. Lenders and investors use them to underwrite deals and measure returns. If money flows through a hotel, someone nearby is reading an STR report.
Key Metrics Explained
There are 3 metrics that sit at the heart of every STR report, and understanding them is non-negotiable.
Occupancy Rate is simply the percentage of available rooms that were actually sold during a given period. If you have 100 rooms and sold 72 of them on a given night, your occupancy is 72%. It's a measure of demand, but on its own it doesn't tell you much about revenue performance.
ADR (Average Daily Rate) is the average revenue earned per sold room. It tells you the pricing side of the equation. A hotel can post strong occupancy but weak ADR if it's filling rooms by discounting aggressively, which is rarely a winning long-term strategy.
RevPAR (Revenue Per Available Room) is the headline metric and the one most people in the industry care about most. It combines occupancy and rate into a single figure by multiplying the two together (or by dividing total room revenue by total available rooms).
RevPAR captures both how full you are and how much you're charging, making it the cleanest snapshot of overall room revenue performance.
The report also includes supply and demand data at the market level, which gives context to your property-level numbers. If your RevPAR is down but the whole market is down, that's a very different conversation than if your RevPAR is down while competitors are up.
Understanding the Competitive Set (Comp Set)
Your comp set is the group of hotels you're being benchmarked against, and choosing it correctly might be the single most important decision you make in relation to your STR report.
A good comp set includes hotels that compete with you directly for the same guests. That means similar location, similar price point, similar product type (full-service vs. select-service, for example), and similar demand generators. Most comp sets consist of five to ten properties. STR recommends a minimum of five to ensure the anonymization of data holds up.
The danger of a poorly chosen comp set is very real. If you benchmark yourself against hotels that are cheaper, older, or in a less desirable location, you'll look like a superstar on paper while missing the actual competitive picture.
Conversely, comparing yourself to luxury flagships when you're running a mid-scale property will produce discouraging index scores that don't reflect your actual position in the market. Review your comp set at least annually and update it if the market changes: new hotel openings, repositioned competitors, or a shift in your own brand or pricing tier are all reasons to revisit it.
How to Read STAR Reports
The STR report gives you two lenses for looking at performance: absolute numbers and index scores. Both matter, and they tell you different things.
The absolute numbers, that is, your occupancy percentage, your ADR, your RevPAR, tell you what actually happened at your property. The index scores tell you how you performed relative to your comp set. This is where the STR report gets particularly powerful.
The three index scores are MPI (Market Penetration Index for occupancy), ARI (Average Rate Index for ADR), and RGI (Revenue Generation Index for RevPAR). Each index is calculated by dividing your metric by the comp set average and multiplying by 100.
An index of 100 means you're capturing exactly your fair share of that metric. An index above 100 means you're outperforming your fair share. An index below 100 means you're leaving something on the table.
For example, if your RGI is 112, your hotel is generating 12% more RevPAR than the average hotel in your comp set. If it's 88, you're underperforming by 12%.
These scores are particularly useful because they adjust for market conditions. If the whole market tanked during a slow period, a high index tells you that you held up better than your competitors, even if your raw numbers look ugly.
When reviewing the report, always look at trends over time rather than any single data point. A one-week dip in occupancy index might be noise. A consistent three-month slide is a signal worth investigating.
How Hotels Use STAR Reports in Practice
The most common day-to-day use of STR data is in revenue management. If your occupancy index is high but your ARI is lagging, you may be filling rooms too cheaply, leaving rate on the table that the market is willing to absorb.
If your ARI is strong but occupancy is suffering, your pricing might be outpacing demand or your distribution strategy may need attention.
At the ownership and asset management level, STR reports are the primary tool for evaluating whether a property is being managed well. Owners who see a sustained decline in RGI relative to the comp set will start asking hard questions of hotel management.
On the flip side, consistently strong index performance is one of the clearest ways a management team can demonstrate its value.
For budget and forecasting purposes, STR data gives you a market-based anchor. Rather than simply projecting forward from last year's numbers, you can factor in what the overall market is doing, where supply is heading, and whether demand trends are working in your favor or against you.
STR Report Limitations to Keep in Mind
STR reports are powerful, but they're not a complete picture of your hotel's business. A few limitations are worth keeping in mind.
First, the report only covers room revenue. Food and beverage, spa, parking, meeting room rentals, and other ancillary income are not captured. For full-service hotels where these revenue streams are significant, the STR report alone can paint an incomplete picture of total hotel performance.
Second, there's an inherent lag in the data. Weekly reports typically arrive a week or more after the period closes, and there can be gaps if some comp set hotels aren't submitting their data consistently. A comp set with incomplete participation will produce less reliable benchmark figures.
Finally, as mentioned earlier, the report is only as useful as the comp set it's built around. Getting that right is an ongoing responsibility, not a one-time setup task.
Frequently Asked Questions
If you're new to STR reports, the mechanics can feel a little opaque at first. Below are the questions most hoteliers ask when they're getting up to speed, covering everything from pricing and participation to what the numbers actually mean.
In case something isn't covered here, CoStar's support team is the best next stop. They can walk you through setup and subscription options specific to your property.
What is STR in the hotel industry?
STR stands for Smith Travel Research, the company founded in 1985 that originally developed the hotel benchmarking report that now bears its name.
The abbreviation has become so embedded in hospitality that most people in the industry use "STR" to refer to the report itself, not just the company. Since CoStar acquired Smith Travel Research in 2019, the platform has operated under new ownership, but the STR name stuck.
How often are STR reports published?
STR reports are available weekly, monthly, and annually. Most active revenue managers review the weekly report as a regular habit, using monthly and annual data for broader trend analysis and planning.
How much does an STR report cost?
Pricing varies depending on the property size and the type of subscription. Hotels need to contact CoStar (which acquired STR in 2019) directly for a quote. In many cases, participating in STR's data collection is a condition of receiving the benchmark report, so costs are often bundled together.
Can any hotel participate in STR reporting?
Yes. Hotels of all sizes and categories can participate by submitting their performance data to STR. Participation is generally required to receive benchmarking reports in return, since the system relies on mutual data sharing to function.
Is my hotel's data kept confidential?
Yes. STR anonymizes and aggregates all submitted data before it's used in benchmarking reports. No individual property's figures are identifiable to competitors. This confidentiality is what makes broad participation possible in the first place.
What's the difference between STR and a comp set report?
STR is the data provider and the underlying platform. A comp set report, also called a STAR report, is the specific benchmarking output that compares your hotel against the competitive set you've defined. Think of STR as the system and the comp set report as the output you work with.
What does an index score of 110 mean?
It means your hotel is capturing 10% more than its fair share of that particular metric relative to the comp set. If your RGI is 110, for instance, you're generating 10% more RevPAR than the average hotel in your comp set, adjusted for relative size and availability.
Do STR reports include online reputation or guest review data?
No. STR reports focus exclusively on operational performance metrics: occupancy, rate, and revenue. Guest review data and reputation scores come from separate tools such as ReviewPro, TrustYou, or direct OTA platform analytics. Some operators use these tools alongside STR data to get a more complete picture of competitive positioning.
STR Reports: In Summary
STR reports aren't complicated once you understand the framework. Three core metrics, an index system that tells you whether you're ahead or behind your fair share, and a competitive set that anchors everything to the right reference point. That's the whole model.
What separates hotels that use STR data well from those that don't is consistency and follow-through. The numbers are only valuable if someone is reviewing them regularly, asking the right questions, and making decisions based on what the data actually shows.
Whether you're a GM, a revenue manager, or an ownership group keeping an eye on your assets, building a habit around your STR report is one of the most straightforward ways to stay competitive.
If you're not already subscribed, reach out to CoStar to get set up. And if you are subscribed but haven't looked critically at your comp set lately, that's the best place to start.
