Revenue management by hotel type: what changes from a guesthouse to a holiday village

Revenue management, deciding which unit to sell, to whom, at what price and on what terms, changes in five ways by hotel type: the unit sold, the booking window, the main channel, the second income line and who sets the price. The arithmetic stays the same; the inputs and the rhythm differ.

You open a revenue management guide and by the second page it is describing a 200-room city hotel with a revenue manager, a daily pickup report and four channels. You run twelve rooms, or a holiday village that closes in November. Half of the advice does not apply, and the other half arrives without the part that tells you what to do on a Tuesday. This article maps what actually changes by property type, so you can keep the parts that fit and drop the rest.

Which five questions decide how a property earns?#

Five questions separate one property type from another: what one sale is, how far ahead guests book, which channel brings them, what else they buy, and who is allowed to change the price. Answer them for your own property before borrowing any technique.

The unit sold sets the denominator of every number you will track, so it comes first and should never change mid-year. The booking window sets how much of the calendar you can still influence, and therefore when price decisions must be made. The main channel decides what you can see: a direct booking gives you the guest's history, an intermediary gives you a confirmation and little else.

The second income line decides whether the room rate is the whole business or only the entry ticket. Decision rights and available time decide which method survives contact with a real week: a rule you can keep beats a model you cannot. Generic advice assumes a large city hotel with a revenue manager, daily data and a wide channel mix; strip those assumptions out and the routine still works, the dashboard usually does not.

If you want the general routine first, read the general revenue management guide for independent hotels; the rest of this article tells you how to adapt it to your type.

What is actually being sold: a room, a bed, a person or a whole unit?#

The unit sold is the first thing that changes by type, and it decides what a price even means. Until that is written down, every comparison with another property is guesswork.

A city, boutique or thermal hotel usually sells a room for a night, so the room is the unit and the rate is per room. A pension may sell per person, sometimes per bed in a shared room; a room half full is not the same as a room sold, and the two must not be mixed in one report. A holiday village sells a person on a board package for a number of nights, so the room is a container and the price covers food, pools and facilities.

An apart hotel sells the whole unit, often with a minimum stay, and the cost base includes cleaning, linen and utilities between guests. A bungalow property sells a whole unit too, but with few units and a higher cost per unit, so one unsold night costs more than it does in a large building. If your property sells board packages, the definitions behind the price matter as much as the price: see hotel board types from room only to ultra all-inclusive.

The practical rule: define your unit in one sentence, keep it constant across years, and never compare your revenue-per-room figure with a property that sells per person.

How far ahead do guests book, and through which channel?#

Booking window and channel move together with property type, and together they decide how much of your calendar you can still price. A long window means early decisions; a short window means late ones.

Season-bound properties such as holiday villages and ski hotels take bookings months ahead, so the price is set long before the guest arrives and the main risk is discounting demand you would have had anyway. City and airport hotels take bookings in the last days and weeks, so the lever is the last unsold room rather than the season. An airport hotel lives on single nights and arrival-driven demand, which makes cancellation and no-show handling part of revenue management, not an administrative afterthought.

Thermal hotels often run on repeat guests and longer stays, which shifts the work toward keeping a guest relationship and filling the shoulder months. Channel follows the same pattern: direct and repeat for small and thermal properties, intermediaries for discovery, agencies and group organizers for long-haul and seasonal volume. For the small-property end of that spectrum, which channels a small hotel should open first covers the order to work through.

We know of no public benchmark for pickup, pace or cancellation rates, so measure your own. The number of bookings on the books for a given date, compared with the same point last year, is enough to start.

Where does the second income line come from?#

The second income line differs by type: board for resorts, spa and pools for thermal hotels, meetings and food for city hotels, cleaning and long stays for apart hotels. It changes what the room rate has to cover.

In an all-inclusive or full-board property, food and drink costs sit inside the room price, so a rising room rate can hide a falling margin. A thermal hotel earns from treatments and pool access, and those lines also create demand in months when rooms alone would not sell. A city hotel can sell meetings, day use and restaurant seats to people who never stay the night.

A pension adds breakfast, packed lunches, transfers and small retail, all of which are easy to count and easy to forget. An apart hotel adds cleaning fees, extra nights, parking and laundry, and these belong in the comparison between a short and a long stay. Whatever the line, count only revenue you can attribute to a room or a unit; otherwise the total looks healthy and tells you nothing about which decision worked. The measure that handles this properly is TRevPAR, total revenue per available room, and what to count in it.

Who sets the price, and how much time do they have?#

In most independent properties one person sets prices between other duties, and that constraint shapes the method more than any technique does. Design the routine around the person, not the other way round.

Owner-set prices with manager input are common in pensions and small hotels; the risk is a price list written once a year and never revisited. A written band, with a floor and a ceiling approved by the owner, lets a manager act on a Tuesday without a phone call.

Time budget is real: a twelve-room pension may have an hour a week, a holiday village may have a full-time person, and the routine must fit the hours that exist. Choose a cadence you can keep: a weekly review of a short list of dates beats a daily dashboard nobody opens. Write down who may go below the floor, who must be told afterwards, and what happens when the person is on leave.

Record what you already have: bookings on the books, cancellations, length of stay and the source of each booking. That is enough to review, and it needs no new software.

How do the types compare side by side?#

The table below puts the five questions against nine property types. Read your own row first, then the row of the type you compete with for the same guest.

Use the table as a checklist, not as a rulebook: your own booking records override any general pattern. Two properties of the same type in different locations can sit in different columns, for example a city hotel that also takes long summer leisure stays. If your row does not fit, the unit sold is usually the reason; go back to that question first. The last column matters most in practice: a type whose price is set once a year cannot respond to a short booking window.

What do the official figures say about the stock by type?#

The Ministry of Culture and Tourism's 2025 annual bulletin counts 4,180 hotels, 2,446 pensions, 454 apart hotels and 112 boutique hotels holding a tourism operation certificate at 31 December 2025, and publishes an occupancy rate by type whose calculation it does not state.

The same bulletin counts 4,180 hotels, 2,446 pensions, 454 apart hotels and 112 boutique hotels holding a tourism operation certificate at 31 December 2025. A further 455 facilities held a tourism investment certificate, which means capacity still being built (Ministry of Culture and Tourism, certified facility statistics, 2025 annual bulletin (opens in a new tab)).

The occupancy rate in Ministry-certified (İşletme and Basit) facilities was 49.54% in 2025; by type and class it was 61.01% for five-star hotels, 68.16% for holiday villages, 40.70% for thermal hotels, 42.29% for boutique hotels, 37.86% for apart hotels and 35.11% for pensions (Ministry of Culture and Tourism, accommodation statistics 2025 annual bulletin (opens in a new tab)).

The bulletin does not state whether the rate counts beds or rooms, so treat it as a published average and not as a definition you can copy into your own reporting. These are averages across certified accommodation, not hotels only, and not a target for one property: a twelve-room pension in a seasonal town is not the national average and should not be measured against it. Use the figures for context, for example when judging how much of the market is small-scale, and use your own records for decisions.

What to do next#

Write one sentence defining what a single sale is at your property, then fix a review day and a price band that fit the hours you actually have. Everything else in this cluster, board types, channels, total revenue, the economics of a small guesthouse, hangs off those two decisions. If you want a second pair of eyes on how your property sells today, OtelCiro, the ecosystem's hotel growth and consultancy arm, works with paying hotel clients today; you can reach the team through https://ai-otel.com/ecosystem/otelciro or at info@ai-otel.com.