Pickup: the rooms you sold for a coming night since you last looked

Pickup is always about one night of stay and one stretch of time. For each night ahead you take the rooms already sold for it, the rooms on the books, and see how many more there are than on an earlier day: yesterday, a week ago or a month ago.

• Count rooms for the night, not bookings: a booking for three rooms adds three to that night's pickup.
• Count by the night of the stay, not the day the booking was made. A booking made today for three nights adds one room to each of the three nights.
• Take off cancellations. STR, which gathers hotels' figures for its forward reports, counts any cancelled room as negative pickup, so a night can lose rooms over a week.
• Keep the stretch of time the same whenever you compare: one day's pickup against another day's, a week's against a week's.
• Count every way rooms are sold: your website, the phone, walk-ins, travel agents and every booking site. A booking site's own report counts only its own bookings.

1. 1Each morning, before the day's bookings come in, write down the rooms on the books for each coming night: the next 90 nights is a good start, and further ahead for festivals and weddings.
2. 2Count the rooms sold for each night across every channel, as one figure, with cancellations already taken off.
3. 3For each night, take away the figure you wrote down yesterday. The difference is that night's pickup over one day.
4. 4Once a week, take away the figure from seven days earlier as well. A week's pickup smooths out an unusually quiet or busy day.
5. 5Beside each night, write what the matching night picked up at the same point last year, matched by day of the week and by festival rather than by date.

A spreadsheet does this well for a small hotel. A property management system or channel manager with a pickup report does it for you, from the same bookings, as long as every booking goes into it.

EHL Hospitality Business School calls the daily pickup report a revenue manager's most immediate tool: it shows the bookings that came in overnight and how they compare with the same point last year. A useful one has a row for each coming night and these columns:

• The night and its day of the week, and any festival, wedding date or event that falls on it.
• Rooms on the books, and rooms left to sell.
• Pickup since yesterday, and over the past seven days.
• The matching night last year: its rooms on the books at the same point, and how many it finished with.
• Your price for the night, and what the hotels around you charge for it.

Read across a row to judge one night, and down the pickup column to see which nights moved. A night that picks up fast weeks ahead is telling you its price is low for the demand. A night that picks up nothing while the nights around it fill is telling you something else is wrong: its price, a minimum stay, or a site where it isn't on sale.

• Booking.com: in the extranet's “Analytics” tab, the “Pace Report” page keeps track of your bookings with stay dates in the future and compares them with previous years. It counts only bookings made on Booking.com.
• Expedia Group: the “Data and insights” page in Partner Central shows net room nights among its priority metrics, with this year beside last year and filters for time frames and stay dates.
• Agoda: the Analytics Center in its Partner Portal shows net room nights, net revenue and average daily rate, compared with the previous year or with the hotels you compete with.
• Your property management system or channel manager: the only place that adds up every channel, if every booking goes into it.

Each booking site's figures leave out the rooms you sold elsewhere. Read them for that site's share, and keep your own count for the whole hotel.

• A night picking up faster than last year: raise its price a step, and look again in a day or two. EHL Hospitality Business School says dates well ahead of their usual pace can often take a higher rate.
• A night picking up fast and nearly full: close the cheapest rate plans first, and think about a minimum stay so the last rooms bring a longer booking.
• A night picking up slowly: check what the hotels around you charge for it, and whether your room shows on every site at the price you set, before you lower your own.
• Still slow close to the date: EHL says dates falling behind may need a promotion or a change in where you sell. A last-minute offer on a booking site, or an email to the companies and travel agents who send guests on those days, can fill it.
• Negative pickup: find out why. A group or a wedding that gave back rooms is a different problem from guests cancelling one by one.
• Don't act on one day's pickup alone. A quiet Monday morning can follow a busy Sunday; read the week's figure too.

• Counting bookings instead of rooms, so a booking for five rooms looks like one.
• Counting by the day a booking was made, so a long stay shows on one night only.
• Leaving out cancellations, so a night looks fuller than it is.
• Comparing with the same date last year when a festival has moved. Diwali, Holi and Eid fall on different dates each year: compare festival with festival.
• Reading one booking site's report as if it were the whole hotel.
• Counting rooms held for a group that hasn't confirmed as if they were sold. Keep them apart until they are booked.