What does pickup mean in a hotel?
Occupancy tells you where you are; pickup tells you where you are heading. It is the metric that separates looking at the past from being able to do something about it.
How pickup is calculated
- Formula: new bookings − cancellations, over a period, for a given stay date or range.
- Example: if on Monday you had 40 rooms sold for 15 August and by the following Sunday you have 47, your weekly pickup for that date is +7.
It is always read against a reference: the same point last year, or the average of the last few weeks. A pickup of +7 says nothing on its own; +7 when the normal figure is +3 says that date is going to do well.
What it is for
- Spotting demand before it shows: if a date picks up pace, you raise the rate while there is still inventory left.
- Spotting the gap in time: if pickup stalls, you have weeks to react instead of finding out the day before.
- Measuring the effect of an action: the pickup in the days after a campaign tells you whether it worked.
Production and pickup
They are two readings of the same data and it is worth not confusing them. Production looks by stay date: how much you are going to bill in August. Pickup looks by booking date: how much you have sold this week. The first answers “how is August going”; the second, “how is the business going right now”.