If I had to pick the three numbers I look at first, every single week, with every client — boutique hotel or short-term rental portfolio — they're always the same: ATR, ADR and ALOS. Three acronyms, three habits, and almost every revenue conversation worth having starts there.
Occupancy is the metric every owner already knows. It feels good when it's high. The problem is that occupancy alone tells you almost nothing about the health of the business. A hotel at 90% occupancy selling at the wrong rate is a hotel slowly losing money. A short-term rental at 85% with three-night minimums and a $40 cleaning fee absorbed into ADR is a portfolio that looks great on paper and bleeds on Sundays.
ATR — Average Transient Rate
ATR is the rate paid by your transient demand: the leisure guest who books a few weeks or a few days out, without a contracted discount. It's the cleanest signal of real market price. If your ATR is flat while your competitive set is up 6%, you're already losing ground — even if your overall ADR looks fine because of group or wholesale mix.
I look at ATR by week, by length of stay, and by channel. When ATR softens on midweek dates 30–45 days out, that's where pricing decisions need to happen — not after the month closes.
ADR — Average Daily Rate
ADR is the headline number — average daily rate across everything. It's the one most owners track, and the one that gets misread the most. ADR moves for three different reasons: real pricing power, mix shift (more suites, fewer entry-level rooms), and channel mix (more direct, less third-party).
Treat them separately. If ADR is up 8% because mix shifted toward suites but ATR is flat, you didn't gain pricing power — you got lucky with what sold. Without that distinction, next year's forecast will be wrong.
ALOS — Average Length of Stay
ALOS is the quietest of the three and often the most expensive when ignored. Every additional night per booking is the cheapest revenue in the business: no extra acquisition cost, no extra check-in friction, no extra channel commission on the next night.
For STR portfolios this is huge. Moving ALOS from 2.6 to 3.4 nights typically wipes out a 5-point occupancy drop and improves margin at the same time — because turnover days, cleaning costs and gap nights all go down. For hotels, ALOS moves with the right minimum-stay rules on peak dates, and with how you price the marginal night (the 3rd, 4th, 5th).
The weekly habit
None of this requires fancy software. It requires the discipline to look at the three numbers every week, against last week and against the same week last year, and to ask one question: what are we going to do this week because of what we see?
That weekly cadence — pricing, distribution, inventory — is the core of how I work with clients. You can read the full method on the Approach page, and you can see what those numbers actually did for a boutique hotel and an STR portfolio in the Case Studies.
If you'd rather skip ahead and see whether this is a fit for your property, the Pricing page lays out engagement sizes and starting points by property type.