What Is Hotel Occupancy? Room and Bed Occupancy Explained

How full was the hotel? The answer is occupancy, one of the oldest metrics in the hotel industry. It is easy to calculate and yet often misunderstood, because it comes in two versions and because a high figure does not automatically mean a good result.

Room occupancy: the hotel metric

Room occupancy compares the room nights sold with those available. An example: a hotel with 40 rooms has 1,200 room nights available over the 30 days of June. If 900 of them were sold, room occupancy is 900 divided by 1,200, or 75 per cent.

According to the industry report by the German Hotel Association (IHA), average room occupancy in 2025 was 68.1 per cent, 0.9 percentage points higher than the previous year. In total, the German accommodation sector recorded 497.4 million overnight stays, more than ever before.¹

Bed occupancy: the metric of official statistics

Germany’s Federal Statistical Office measures the occupancy of beds offered. It divides overnight stays by available bed-days, that is, the number of beds multiplied by the days on which the establishment was open.² For 2025, the statistics show average occupancy of 37.8 per cent for all accommodation establishments with ten or more beds, including pitches on campsites.³

Bed occupancy is almost always well below room occupancy. If a business traveller sleeps alone in a double room, the room is fully occupied but only one of its two beds is. The official figure also covers holiday flats, guesthouses and campsites. The two figures therefore cannot be compared directly.

Why occupancy alone says little

High occupancy is reassuring. But it says nothing about the price at which the rooms were sold. A hotel can be 90 per cent full and still leave money on the table if its rates have not been adjusted for years. Conversely, slightly lower occupancy at higher rates can bring in more revenue.

The industry figures for 2025 illustrate this: while room occupancy rose, the average net room rate fell by 2.8 per cent to 109 euros, according to the IHA.¹ That is why hotels usually look at occupancy together with the average daily rate (ADR) and revenue per available room (RevPAR).

What hoteliers should look for

More in the magazine

Why a longer season should not be judged by occupancy alone is the subject of our article "Hotel Low Season: Does Staying Open Longer Pay Off?" about the Weihrerhof in South Tyrol. Which figures hoteliers should know besides occupancy is shown in "Digitalised – and still flying blind?". Why Das Walchsee in Tyrol plans its shoulder-season opening weekends around occupancy of about 55 per cent is shown in "Das Walchsee in Tyrol opens only at weekends in the shoulder season".