RevPAN

RevPAN divides all revenue from a period by the number of nights the listing was available in that period. It is the short-term rental version of RevPAR, the figure hotels have used for decades, and it exists because neither of the two obvious measures survives comparison on its own.

Nightly rate ignores whether anyone booked. A host who raises their rate by thirty per cent and loses half their bookings has a better average nightly rate and less money. Occupancy has the opposite failure: it rewards underpricing, because the fastest way to fill a calendar is to be the cheapest listing in the market. RevPAN moves only when revenue moves, which is what makes it worth tracking week to week.

The denominator is the part people get wrong. Available nights are the nights the listing was actually open — not the nights in the month. Block a fortnight for your own stay and a naive calculation halves your RevPAN for a month in which nothing went wrong. Most channel managers report both, and the two figures diverge sharply for anyone who uses their own property.

RevPAN is a comparison tool rather than a profitability one. It says nothing about what a booking costs to service, so two listings with identical RevPAN can differ by thousands a year once turnover frequency is counted. For that question, contribution per night is the figure to reach for.