Methodology: Hotel Operating Metrics
What these figures are
The Operating Metrics card on a hotel company’s stock page shows the operating statistics the company reports in its own quarterly earnings release — the SEC Form 8-K exhibit filed alongside the results. These are the numbers the lodging industry uses to describe how full the hotels were, how much each room fetched, and how profitable the properties were. Oxford Ledge reads them directly from the as-filed exhibit and normalizes the labels so you can compare a company to itself over time.
They are an Oxford Ledge Signal: our reading of a public filing, not a re-audit of the company’s books and not a licensed data-vendor feed. Every value on the card carries its filing as-of date and links back to the SEC source.
The metrics, in plain English
| Metric | What it measures |
|---|---|
| RevPAR | Revenue per available room — room revenue divided by all available room-nights. The single most important hotel metric; it equals occupancy times average daily rate. |
| ADR | Average daily rate — the average price charged per occupied room. The pricing half of RevPAR and the read on pricing power. |
| Occupancy | The share of available rooms actually occupied — the volume half of RevPAR. |
| Hotel EBITDA margin | Property-level operating profitability as a percentage of revenue. |
Why operators and REITs are never pooled
This is the defining honesty rule of the hotel surface. A hotel operator (a brand company like the big franchisors) reports systemwide RevPAR — an average across the thousands of hotels flying its flags, most of which it does not own. A hotel REIT reports comparable RevPAR — a fixed pool of the specific hotels it actually owns. These are fundamentally different measures: one is a brand-wide franchise average, the other an owned-portfolio figure. Placing an operator’s systemwide RevPAR next to a REIT’s comparable RevPAR in the same column would be a category error. So the peer table is split by scope family (Operators — systemwide, REITs — comparable), and you pick one; on a single company’s card, we show its own family’s figure and badge which one it is. There is deliberately no single “hotel RevPAR” ranking.
How we read and normalize it
For each company we fetch the most recent quarterly earnings 8-K exhibit from SEC EDGAR, locate the operating table, and read each value verbatim from the reported column — never a prior-year or year-to-date column standing in for the quarter. We bind the scope family (systemwide vs comparable vs owned) from the table’s own labels, and we verify the internal identity that RevPAR equals occupancy times ADR to guard against picking up the wrong column. A constant-currency RevPAR is badged as such.
The reading is checked against a hand-verified golden set for each company before any figure is allowed to publish; a value whose scope family the extractor cannot confidently determine is withheld rather than shown.
What we deliberately do not do
- We do not re-audit. The figures are as reported by the issuer under regulatory convention. We normalize labels; we do not restate the company’s numbers.
- We do not pool operator-systemwide with REIT-comparable RevPAR. The two scope families are separate comparable series.
- We do not show a value we are unsure of. Any reading our extractor flags is dropped from the display, never shown greyed or asterisked. Honest or absent.
- We do not treat these as forecasts, ratings, or advice. They are historical operating results a company disclosed, presented for study.
Freshness
The stock page is cached at the edge, so a brand-new filing’s figures can lag up to a day on the cached page. Each value is stamped with the filing it came from, so the as-of date always tells you exactly how current the number is.