The host problem
You’re booked most of the month. RevPAR looks reasonable. But after
cleaning fees, supplies, and the time it takes to turn the unit, the
math feels thin. The problem might not be your rate. It might be how
many times guests are coming and going.
What ALOS is
ALOS stands for Average Length of Stay. It measures the average
number of nights per booking.
Formula: ALOS = Live Booked Nights ÷ Live
Bookings
If you had 10 bookings last month covering 32 nights, your ALOS is
3.2 nights per booking.
Live bookings means surviving reservations only. Canceled
reservations do not count.
Why ALOS
controls more than it looks like it does
Every booking triggers a turnover: cleaning, laundry, consumables,
and the coordination cost of resetting the unit. Those costs do not care
whether the guest stayed 1 night or 7 nights.
A host with 16 bookings covering 32 nights (ALOS of 2) runs 16
turnovers. A host with 8 bookings covering 32 nights (ALOS of 4) runs 8
turnovers. Both hosts booked the same number of nights. But the first
host absorbed twice the turnover cost.
That gap shows up in your bottom line even when RevPAR looks
identical.
Small example
You had 15 bookings last month covering 30 booked nights. ALOS = 30 ÷
15 = 2 nights per booking.
Your turnover cost is $100 per booking. Total turnover cost: $1,500
across 15 bookings.
Spread across 30 booked nights, that’s $50 in turnover drag per
occupied night.
Now imagine the same 30 booked nights across 8 reservations. ALOS =
30 ÷ 8 = 3.75 nights per booking.
Turnover cost drops to $800 total — $26.67 per occupied night. Same
booked-night count. Much lower turnover drag.
A half-night or one-night improvement in ALOS can lift your effective
profit without requiring a single rate increase.
How ALOS connects to booking
shape
ALOS is the output of booking shape decisions: minimum stay settings,
pricing differentials across night count, and how you price Thursday and
Sunday relative to the core weekend.
If Thursdays are cheap, guests skip them and book Friday through
Sunday — keeping ALOS at 2 nights. If you price Thursday to pull guests
into a stay, some guests extend to 3 nights instead. That one shift
improves ALOS without raising your headline Friday rate.
Sunday pricing works the same way. A slightly lower Sunday rate
encourages guests to check out Monday rather than Sunday, adding a night
and improving ALOS across the booking set.
When ALOS signals a problem
ALOS signals a problem when:
- Your RevPAR is reasonable but your effective take-home feels weak
after cleaning costs. - You’re running a high volume of 1–2 night bookings without a
meaningful rate premium for the short stay. - Net RevPAR (RevPAR minus turnover drag per occupied night) runs
significantly below raw RevPAR.
A high churn strategy — lots of short stays — only works if the rate
premium on those stays offsets the extra turnover cost. Most of the
time, that math does not favor the host.
What to do this week
- Count your bookings from last month.
- Count the total nights those bookings covered.
- Divide nights by bookings. That’s your ALOS.
- Estimate your cleaning and turnover cost per booking and multiply by
your booking count. Compare that to what ALOS improvement would have
saved.