STR Report Explained: Metrics, Cost, and How to Read One

If you work anywhere near hotel revenue, someone has asked you about the STR report.
An owner wants to know why the RevPAR index dropped, a lender wants last quarter's numbers, or a new revenue manager keeps quoting "the STAR" in Monday meetings.
This guide explains what an STR report actually contains, how to read the index numbers, what it costs, and what it can't tell you.
One disambiguation up front: STR here means Smith Travel Research, the hotel benchmarking company.
It has nothing to do with short-term rentals, which unhelpfully share the acronym.

Key Takeaways

• An STR report benchmarks your hotel against a competitive set. Participating hotels submit real performance data; everyone gets back comp-set averages to compare against.
• Three metrics carry the whole report. Occupancy, ADR (average daily rate), and RevPAR (revenue per available room), each paired with an index against your comp set.
• An index of 100 means fair share. Above 100 you're outperforming your comp set on that metric; below 100 you're losing share.
• Access requires participation. You submit your hotel's actuals to STR, and pricing is quote-based subscription, typically on weekly and monthly cadences.
• STR data is backward-looking averages. It shows nothing about competitors' current selling rates, future pricing, or guest sentiment; live OTA data covers that side.

What Is an STR Report?

An STR report is a benchmarking report that compares your hotel's performance against a competitive set of similar hotels, produced by STR (Smith Travel Research, part of CoStar Group).
STR aggregates performance data from roughly 94,000 hotels worldwide, which makes it the de facto standard for hotel benchmarking.
The mechanics are a data co-op:
1. Your hotel submits its actual daily performance data (rooms sold, room revenue) to STR.
2. You define a competitive set, usually 4-10 comparable hotels in your market.
3. STR aggregates the comp set's submitted data into averages and sends you the comparison.
You never see an individual competitor's numbers.
The comp set must be large enough that no single hotel's data can be reverse-engineered, which is why a comp set has a minimum size and composition rules.
You'll also hear "STAR report" (Smith Travel Accommodations Report).
Same thing: STAR is the name of the specific recurring report most hotels receive, STR is the company, and in practice the terms get used interchangeably.

The Metrics Inside: What STR Data Shows

STR data for hotels boils down to three core metrics:

Metric	Formula	Example
Occupancy	Rooms sold ÷ rooms available	68%
ADR (average daily rate)	Room revenue ÷ rooms sold	$150
RevPAR (revenue per available room)	ADR × occupancy	$102

RevPAR is the headline number because it punishes both failure modes: empty rooms and underpriced rooms.
The report then pairs each metric with an index against your comp set:

Index	Compares	Reading
MPI (Market Penetration Index)	Your occupancy vs. comp set	100 = fair share of demand
ARI (Average Rate Index)	Your ADR vs. comp set	100 = priced at market
RGI (Revenue Generation Index)	Your RevPAR vs. comp set	100 = fair share of revenue

Each index is your number divided by the comp set's number, times 100.
That one convention (100 = fair share) is the key to reading the entire report.

How to Read an STR Report

A worked example.
Your 120-room hotel posts these numbers against its comp set:

Metric	You	Comp set	Index
Occupancy	68%	72.3%	MPI 94.0
ADR	$150	$145	ARI 103.4
RevPAR	$102	$104.84	RGI 97.3

The story these three numbers tell: you're priced about 3% above market (ARI 103.4), but you're filling 6% fewer rooms than fair share (MPI 94.0), and the rate premium doesn't cover the occupancy gap, so you're losing revenue share overall (RGI 97.3).
That's the diagnostic pattern: read ARI and MPI together, then let RGI settle the argument.
High ARI with low MPI usually means you're priced out of part of your demand.
High MPI with low ARI means you're buying occupancy with cheap rates.
Both patterns can produce the same mediocre RGI for opposite reasons, which is why the index trio matters more than any single number.
One caution: an index only means what your comp set lets it mean.
A weak comp set (aspirational hotels you don't actually compete with, or laggards that flatter you) quietly corrupts every index on the page.

How to Get an STR Report and What It Costs

Getting access follows from the co-op model:
1. Your hotel starts submitting daily or monthly performance data to STR.
2. You propose a competitive set that meets STR's composition rules.
3. You subscribe to the report package you want, typically weekly and monthly STAR reports.
Pricing is quote-based rather than published, and depends on the report package, cadence, and number of properties.
Independent hotels pay per property; brands and management companies negotiate portfolio deals.
Two practical constraints to know before you commit.
You can't benchmark without contributing: hotels that don't submit data don't get reports.
And you can't pick a comp set freely: competitors must agree to the co-op rules too, and sets that would expose any single hotel's data get rejected.

What an STR Report Doesn't Show You

STR reports answer "how did we perform against the market?"
Four adjacent questions they leave open:

Gap	Why it matters
Backward-looking only	Last week's actuals, nothing about the next 90 days
Averages, not competitors	You see the comp-set blend, never which competitor moved
No selling rates	Submitted revenue actuals, never the prices competitors advertise on OTAs today
No guest signal	Nothing about review scores or sentiment driving the numbers

This is where hotel rate intelligence tools pick up: pulling the live prices your competitors are actually advertising on Booking.com, Expedia, and Google Hotels for any future date.
StayAPI is one example: a REST API that returns current OTA rates per competitor, per date, per room type.
Here's what a live rate check on one comp-set hotel looks like via the Booking.com hotel prices endpoint:

curl -X GET "https://api.stayapi.com/v1/booking/hotel/prices?hotel_id=346648&check_in=2026-04-01&check_out=2026-04-03&adults=2&rooms=1&currency=USD" \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY"

{
  "success": true,
  "hotel_id": "346648",
  "data": {
    "hotel": { "id": "346648", "name": "Angsana Laguna Phuket" },
    "pricing_summary": {
      "price_per_night": "$185",
      "total_price": "$370",
      "taxes_and_charges": "$50"
    },
    "rooms": [
      {
        "room_name": "Laguna Suite",
        "is_refundable": true,
        "breakfast_included": true,
        "price_per_night": "$185"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Run that across your comp set every morning and you have the forward-looking pricing view the STAR report structurally can't give you.

Building Your Own Market View

The two data sources answer different questions, so the honest comparison looks like this:

What you need	STR report	Live OTA data (StayAPI)
Competitor occupancy and ADR actuals	Yes, as comp-set averages	No, actuals aren't public
Forward-looking selling rates	No	Yes, any future date
Per-competitor, per-OTA detail	No	Yes
Review scores and guest sentiment	No	Yes
Freshness	Prior week or month	At request time

An API never replaces the STR report: competitors' realized occupancy and ADR exist nowhere in public data, and benchmarking against them is what STR uniquely does.
The pairing works the other way around: the STAR tells you that you lost share last week, and pricing intelligence data tells you what your comp set is charging next week so you can react before the next report.
Getting the live side running takes less setup than most teams expect.
City-level context is free to browse on StayAPI's hotel rates data pages, and prebuilt rates-to-Google-Sheets integrations turn the API into a living comp-set dashboard without a data team.
A hotel price tracker built on the same endpoints covers the daily-monitoring half of the workflow.

Getting Started

To add a live rate view next to your STAR report:
1. List your STR comp set, the same 4-10 hotels, and find each one's OTA hotel ID (a URL-to-ID lookup does this in one request per hotel).
2. Sign up at stayapi.com. Free tier, no credit card.
3. Pull rates for the comp set for the next 30 days and drop them into a sheet.
4. Schedule the pull daily via an N8N or Make.com flow, no code needed, and watch rate moves against your MPI/ARI trend.
5. For a guided walkthrough with your own comp set, book a demo.

FAQ

What is a hotel STR report?

A benchmarking report from STR (Smith Travel Research, part of CoStar) that compares a hotel's occupancy, ADR, and RevPAR against a self-selected competitive set.
Data comes from the hotels themselves, aggregated so no individual property is exposed.

How to get an STR report for hotels?

Participate: submit your hotel's performance data to STR, define a valid competitive set, and subscribe to a report package.
Hotels that don't contribute data can't receive comp-set reports.

How much does an STR report cost?

Pricing is quote-based and depends on report package, cadence, and property count.
Expect a recurring per-property subscription; portfolios negotiate group rates.

What does STR stand for in hotels?

Smith Travel Research, the company (now part of CoStar Group) that runs the industry's standard benchmarking program.
The recurring report itself is the STAR report: Smith Travel Accommodations Report.

Is STR data the same as short-term rental data?

No.
In hospitality, STR almost always means Smith Travel Research benchmarking data for hotels.
Short-term rental (Airbnb-style) market data is a separate category with its own providers and datasets.