RevPAC

RevPAC stands for Revenue Per Available Customer, sometimes given as Revenue Per Attributable Customer. It measures the total revenue a property earns from a guest across everything they spend, not just the room.

Where RevPAR asks "how much did this room earn?", RevPAC asks "how much did this guest earn us?" That includes the room rate plus food and beverage, spa, parking, late checkout, activities, retail and any other on-property spend attributed to that guest.

Why operators are using it

RevPAR has a known blind spot: it rewards filling rooms at a rate, and says nothing about whether the guest in the room spends anything else. Two properties with identical RevPAR can be very different businesses if one has a busy restaurant and the other does not.

RevPAC is more useful in exactly the situations where RevPAR misleads:

• Resorts and properties with real ancillary revenue, where the room is a minority of the bill.
• Short-term rental and serviced apartment portfolios, where upsells, mid-stay cleans and experiences carry the margin.
• Segment and channel decisions, where a lower-rate booking from a guest who spends on property can beat a higher-rate booking from one who does not.

The catch

RevPAC is only as good as your ability to attribute spend to a guest. That requires the PMS, the POS and any activity or spa system to share a guest identity, which is precisely the integration work most properties have not finished. A RevPAC figure drawn from a PMS that cannot see restaurant covers is really just RevPAR with extra steps.

There is also no single agreed definition, so when a vendor reports RevPAC in a dashboard, check which revenue streams are included and how the guest is identified before comparing it to anything.