Engagement per Available Room (EPAR): A New Standard for Hotel Performance Benchmarking

Introduction

The hotel industry has long relied on financial metrics like RevPAR, ADR, and occupancy rate to measure success. These are critical, but they don’t capture one of the most important drivers of how you rank on review channels: guest engagement through online reviews.

Until now, there’s been no simple way to compare review performance between hotels of different sizes. A 10-room boutique property will naturally generate fewer reviews than a 300-room resort. That doesn’t mean it’s less engaging, it just means the scale is different.

To solve this, Martin Miller, COO of Guestasy, has developed a new metric: Engagement per Available Room (EPAR).

What is EPAR?

EPAR measures the number of online reviews a hotel receives per available room over a set period of time e.g. the last 30 days.

Formula:
Total Reviews in that time period ÷ Total Available Rooms = EPAR

• Engagement is defined as all reviews received, across Google, TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Expedia, Agoda, and all other active review channels in the chosen time period
• Only published reviews count — hotel responses are not included.
• Every review is weighted equally, regardless of the platform.

EPAR can be calculated by the last X days, monthly, quarterly, or annually, depending on your reporting cycle.

Why EPAR Matters

EPAR adjusts for hotel size, allowing for a fair comparison between properties.

Example:

• A boutique hotel with 10 rooms receives 20 reviews in one month.
  • 20 ÷ 10 = EPAR 2.0
• A resort with 200 rooms receives 100 reviews in the same month.
  • 100 ÷ 200 = EPAR 0.5

On raw review counts alone, the resort appears stronger. But with EPAR, we see the boutique hotel is actually driving far more guest engagement per room.

EPAR Benchmark Ranges

The following 30 Day EPAR benchmarks have been developed from Guestasy's large scale analysis of thousands of hotels, and make it easy to see where your property stands:

• Below 0.25 → Poor
• 0.25 – 0.66 → Fair / Average
• 0.66 – 0.87 → Good
• 0.87 – 1.61 → Very Good
• Above 1.61 → Excellent

This framework allows hoteliers, owners, and revenue managers to quickly spot top performers and underperformers in a portfolio or compare against other competitors.

How to Use EPAR

EPAR opens up new ways to understand and improve hotel performance:

• Benchmarking across properties: Compare hotels of different sizes on equal footing.
• Tracking performance over time: Monitor whether marketing, service improvements, or reputation initiatives are increasing engagement.
• Competitive insights: Compare EPAR with competitors in the same destination to see who is winning more guest trust.
• Seasonality checks: Track EPAR monthly or quarterly to spot trends in guest feedback and engagement.

Why EPAR is Timely

Guest reviews are now central to booking decisions. OTAs and Google highlight reviews in search results, and AI-powered search engines are leaning heavily on reviews to generate answers. With guest engagement being so critical, hotels need a clear, universal way to measure it.

EPAR provides that universal standard.

Guestasy’s Role

Calculating EPAR manually means tracking reviews across multiple OTAs, search platforms, and timeframes. Guestasy makes it effortless.

• Centralizes reviews from every major channel.
• Automatically calculates EPAR across all properties.
• Gives owners, GMs, and revenue managers the insights they need to benchmark and improve.

With Guestasy, EPAR is a practical tool for smarter hotel management.

Conclusion

Engagement per Available Room (EPAR) is a simple, powerful way to measure how effectively a hotel generates guest feedback online. By adjusting for room count, it levels the playing field and allows for fair, actionable benchmarking across any portfolio.

Hotels that start tracking EPAR today gain a clear advantage: the ability to see where they truly stand in guest engagement.

👉 Want to know your property’s EPAR score? Book a demo with Guestasy and see how easily it can be tracked across all your hotels.

About the author

I’m Martin Miller, COO at Guestasy. My focus: helping businesses manage their online reputation with a focus on responding to reviews quickly, clearly, and in the right voice. I've personally managed over 30,000 review responses since starting with Guestasy and have seen every complaint you could imagine, from snake attacks to haunted rooms. You name it, I've had to help a client respond.

Connect on LinkedIn → www.linkedin.com/in/martin-c-miller