STR report: what the STAR report shows, and how a hotel in India gets one

STR was founded in 1985 as Smith Travel Research, by Randell and Carolyn Smith. In 1988 it launched the Smith Travel Accommodations Report, STAR, a monthly report built from hotels' own figures that sets each hotel against a group of competitors it chooses. In October 2019 CoStar Group bought STR, and the reports are now part of CoStar.

HSMAI's glossary describes the STAR programme as benchmarking a hotel's performance against its competitors taken together and its local market, with monthly, weekly and daily data.

• Your occupancy, average room rate and RevPAR for the period.
• The same three for your competitors, as one group, never hotel by hotel.
• An index for each: the market penetration index for occupancy, the average rate index for room rate, and the revenue generation index for RevPAR. 100 is your fair share.
• How many rooms there were to sell in the wider market, and how many sold, which EHL Hospitality Business School calls supply and demand at the market level.
• Monthly, weekly and daily figures. EHL notes the weekly report usually arrives a week or more after the week closes.

What it leaves out: EHL notes that STAR reports cover room revenue only, not food and drink or the spa, and no reviews or ratings, which come from other tools.

1. 1If your hotel belongs to a chain or a management company, ask it first whether it already sends your figures to STR.
2. 2If you are independent, contact STR through CoStar and ask for a quote. EHL Hospitality Business School says hotels of any size or category can take part by sending their own figures, and that the price depends on the hotel's size and what it takes.
3. 3Before you agree, ask whether enough hotels near you send their figures to make a set of the hotels you really compete with. In a town where few do, the set may have to stretch to hotels guests don't compare you with.
4. 4Send your figures as STR asks, regularly and without gaps, so your report compares like with like.
5. 5Choose your competitors. EHL says STR recommends at least five hotels in a set, so that no one hotel's figures can be worked out from the group's.
6. 6Read the monthly report every month, and the weekly one if you take it, with whoever sets your prices.

The report is only as useful as the set. EHL Hospitality Business School says a good set is made of hotels that compete with you directly for the same guests, alike in location, price, kind of hotel and what brings guests to them, and advises reviewing it at least once a year.

• Choose the hotels a guest choosing you would also look at, not the ones you would like to be compared with.
• Don't fill the set with hotels you beat. The index looks good and tells you nothing.
• Change it when the market changes: a hotel opens nearby, one closes, or one is rebuilt and moves up in price.
• Keep it steady otherwise, so this year's indexes compare with last year's.

If your hotel doesn't send figures to STR, or too few hotels near you do to make a fair set, what a guest can see is still worth reading, and some of it a STAR report can't show.

• Your competitors' prices for each coming night on Google and the booking sites, beside yours. A STAR report is about nights already gone; these are the nights you still have to sell.
• The nights a competitor shows no price at all, which most likely means it is full: a rough guide to who fills first.
• Their ratings and how many reviews they gather, which say much about why guests choose them.
• Published surveys of the market, for the country and the big cities, to see whether your year moved with everyone else's.

OneHorizyn does the first three for you: every week it reads each competitor's lowest price on Google for each of the next 90 nights, marks the nights one looks sold, and sets your ratings on Google, Tripadvisor and Booking.com against each competitor's.

• Start with the three indexes, not the raw figures. EHL Hospitality Business School notes that the indexes allow for the market, so they show how you did even when the whole town had a bad month.
• Look at the trend over several months. EHL calls a steady three-month slide a signal worth looking into.
• A high occupancy index with a low rate index may mean you are filling rooms too cheaply, EHL says.
• A high rate index with a low occupancy index may mean your pricing is outpacing demand.
• Read the weekly figures by day of the week if you take them: weekends and weekdays often tell different stories.