A STAR Report is STR's hotel benchmarking report comparing a property's Occupancy, ADR, and RevPAR against its competitive set, expressed via the MPI, ARI, and RGI indices.
The STAR Report (Smith Travel Accommodations Report) is a hotel performance benchmarking report produced by STR (a CoStar company). It compares a property's key metrics against an operator-defined competitive set and the broader market segment.
STAR reports are an industry standard for measuring how a hotel performs relative to its direct competitors, not just in absolute terms.
The report tracks Occupancy, Average Daily Rate (ADR), and Revenue Per Available Room (RevPAR), broken out by property, competitive set, and market.
It then converts these into three performance indices: Market Penetration Index (MPI) for occupancy, Average Rate Index (ARI) for ADR, and Revenue Generation Index (RGI) for RevPAR. An index of 100 means parity with the comp set; above 100 indicates outperformance.
Owners, asset managers, and revenue managers use STAR reports to validate pricing decisions, identify market share gaps, set budgets, and evaluate management performance. Year-over-year and rolling comparisons highlight trend changes that absolute revenue numbers can hide.
The accuracy of a STAR report depends entirely on the quality of the chosen competitive set. A poorly matched comp set produces misleading indices. Hotels should review their comp set periodically as the market evolves.
Participating hotels submit anonymized daily occupancy and revenue data to STR. STR aggregates that data with submissions from other properties in the chosen competitive set and market, and returns a report showing the subject hotel's performance side by side with the comp set average. The output includes raw metrics (Occ, ADR, RevPAR) and indexed comparisons (MPI, ARI, RGI), typically delivered weekly or monthly.
It tells revenue managers whether a change in their hotel's performance is driven by the property itself or by the broader market. If RevPAR drops 5% but the market drops 8%, the hotel is actually gaining share. Without the comp set context, that gain is invisible. STAR data is also used to inform pricing decisions, validate forecasts, and benchmark management performance against ownership expectations.
Most hotels feed STR directly from their PMS using automated data exports, ensuring daily occupancy, room nights, and revenue figures are accurate. Revenue management systems (RMS) often pull STAR index data back in to inform pricing models. Asset managers integrate STAR data into monthly performance reviews and ownership reports.
MPI (Market Penetration Index) compares your occupancy to the comp set's. ARI (Average Rate Index) compares your ADR. RGI (Revenue Generation Index) compares your RevPAR. All three are indexed to 100, where 100 equals parity. An MPI of 110 means you're capturing 10% more occupancy than the comp set average; an ARI of 95 means your rates are 5% below the average. RGI is generally the headline metric because it combines occupancy and rate.
A competitive set typically contains five to eight hotels with similar location, class, scale, brand positioning, and guest profile. The comp set should reflect properties guests realistically consider as alternatives. STR requires a minimum of three other properties in the set, and the subject hotel cannot represent more than 40% of the set's room count. Comp sets should be reviewed annually as new supply opens or properties reposition.
Yes. STR aggregates submitted data so that no individual property's numbers can be reverse-engineered from the report. Hotels see their own data plus aggregate figures for the comp set, but never the line-item performance of a specific competitor. This confidentiality is what enables broad participation and makes the dataset reliable.
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