The Company That Tells Hotels How They're Doing Has Never Run a Hotel.
Every Monday morning, somewhere in the world, a GM is nervously pulling up the STAR report.
The owner is on the call. The comp set nobody questions. The metric that decides whether you're winning or losing.
All of it owned by CoStar. A commercial real estate company.
Not a hospitality company. A real estate data business whose core clients are property investors, lenders and developers.
Here's what's interesting.
CoStar measures office buildings by rent per square foot. Industrial properties by lease rates per square foot. Retail by price per square foot. Every asset class normalised for space. Every comparison built around how hard every square meter of that asset is working.
For hotels they use RevPAR.
Revenue per available room. Regardless of whether that room is 20 square meters or 90. Regardless of whether it's a standard room or a villa.
A real estate company that measures everything else by the square foot gave hotels a metric that ignores space entirely.
The part that's hard to explain.
In 2012 - seven years before CoStar acquired STR - an article published on STR's own platform recommended revenue per square foot as a hotel performance metric. Written by industry professionals. Endorsed by an advisory board including executives from IHG, Hyatt, Wyndham and Fairmont.
That was fourteen years ago.
The STAR report still runs on RevPAR, ADR and occupancy.
STR recommended their own evolution in 2012.
You can't say they didn't know.
Make of that what you will.
xoxo, Bored Hotelier 😉
Curious about what better hotel benchmarking actually looks like? Start here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is RGI a good metric for measuring hotel performance? RGI tells you one thing - how your RevPAR compares to a group of competitor hotels. That's useful context but a dangerously incomplete picture. A hotel can outperform a flawed comp set and still be losing money. A hotel can have RGI below 100 and be running a far more profitable operation than its competitors. Used in isolation RGI tells you how you're doing relative to others - not whether you're actually doing well. That's a very different question.
Who owns STR? STR (originally founded as Smith Travel Research in 1985) was acquired by CoStar Group in 2019 for $450 million. It now operates as part of CoStar's benchmarking division under the brand name Benchmark.
Who owns CoStar? CoStar Group is a publicly traded company listed on NASDAQ under the ticker CSGP. It was founded in 1986 and is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. Its core business is commercial real estate data, analytics and online marketplaces - serving property investors, lenders, brokers and developers across office, retail, industrial and multifamily sectors. Hotels, through STR, represent one part of a much larger real estate data empire.
How much is CoStar worth? As of April 2026 CoStar Group has a market capitalisation of approximately $16.5 billion and annual revenue of around $3.25 billion. They paid $450 million for STR in 2019. Make of those numbers what you will. 😄