NEW YORK— New to this years NYU Conference was a panel designed to “Look Beyond RevPAR” and formulate alternative ways to measure industry performance. During the panel, several new ideas were presented to use as new industry models. Mark Lomanno of Smith Travel Research suggested the hotel industry shift to a Share Pace Index (SPI), which would compare a hotels RevPAR to the pace at which it is growing and to that of its competitive set. Steve Adler of Hotel RevMAX presented a metric highly publicized by Laurence Gellar of Strategic Hotel Capital, called Net RevPAR, which would deduct distribution, sales and marketing costs from total room revenue to truly determine the value of a brand to a hotel owner. Julian Sparkes from Accenture, suggested a more abstract industry metric, coined RevPAC, which measures revenue per available customer by analyzing a hotel guests total spend at the property. “We want to ultimately get everyone to think around the customer, and focus on how to get revenue from the customer rather than the room itself,” said Sparkes.
