What Is STLY in Hotels? Same Time Last Year Explained for Independent Hoteliers

Imagine seeing that your hotel achieved an ADR of €320 last August. Is that good or bad? The honest answer is: you cannot know without knowing what your ADR was in August the year before. That is precisely the logic behind STLY - and why it is arguably the most useful benchmarking concept any hotelier can apply to their booking data.

What STLY Means

STLY stands for Same Time Last Year. It refers to the practice of comparing a hotel's performance in a given period - a week, a month, a full season - against the exact same period twelve months prior.

In practice, this looks like:

• July 2025 ADR vs July 2024 ADR → STLY ADR comparison
• August 2025 occupancy vs August 2024 occupancy → STLY occupancy comparison
• 2025 cancellation rate vs 2024 cancellation rate → STLY cancellation benchmark

The rationale is grounded in how hospitality actually works: tourism is deeply seasonal. Comparing June to January of the same year tells you nothing useful. Comparing June 2025 to June 2024 tells you whether the same market, in the same conditions, performed better or worse - and gives you a foundation for understanding why.

Why STLY Is More Useful Than Raw Numbers

A surprisingly common mistake: hoteliers celebrating a "good" July without knowing whether it was better or worse than the previous year. If arrivals in your destination grew overall, a modest improvement on your end may actually mean you lost market share while believing you were growing.

STLY helps you distinguish between two very different situations:

Growth driven by the market: All hotels in your area performed better this season due to increased tourism demand. Your improvement simply rides the wave - valuable, but not a result of your strategy.

Growth driven by your decisions: Better pricing, improved channel mix, new source markets, stronger direct bookings. Your performance outpaces the market. This is what strategic decisions look like in the data.

Only STLY makes this distinction visible.

The 4 Metrics to Always Compare Year-Over-Year

A complete STLY analysis is not limited to one figure. It covers at least four dimensions simultaneously:

ADR year-over-year: Did your average rate increase? If it rose while occupancy held steady or improved, that is a strong positive signal. If it declined, investigate why - did your channel mix shift, or did your source market composition change?

Occupancy year-over-year: Are you filling more rooms this year or fewer? Occupancy rising alongside higher rates indicates robust demand. Occupancy falling despite lower rates suggests a structural problem - visibility, reputation, or distribution.

RevPAR year-over-year: The most comprehensive measure of all three. If RevPAR improved, your strategy is working. If RevPAR declined even while occupancy held, you have a pricing problem.

Cancellation rate year-over-year: Did cancellations increase? This often correlates with a shift in channel mix - specifically, more bookings coming through channels with free cancellation policies - rather than anything inherently wrong with the property itself.

Three STLY Warning Signs That Demand Immediate Attention

STLY analysis is not only about celebrating improvement. These three patterns should trigger immediate review:

If your ADR declined while the broader market improved, you are losing pricing power. You may be over-reliant on discounted channels, lack flexible rate structures, or are absorbing OTA commission into your net rate without realising it.

If your occupancy fell even though you lowered rates, the problem is on the demand side - your property may have lost visibility, suffered rating declines, or become less competitive in your key distribution channels.

If your cancellation rate increased significantly, examine which booking channel grew most this year. A shift toward OTA bookings with free cancellation policies will inflate your cancellation rate without the hotel doing anything differently.

How to Run a STLY Analysis Without Spending Hours in Spreadsheets

The traditional method: download two exports from your PMS - one for the current season and one for the same season last year - and build a pivot table in Excel. Achievable, but time-consuming, error-prone, and inaccessible to most independent hoteliers without technical spreadsheet skills.

The alternative: RevBuddy was built precisely for this workflow. Upload your two booking export files - current year and prior year - from Webhotelier, Booking.com, SynXis, or any other platform, and receive grouped bar charts, monthly YoY comparison tables, channel mix shifts, and country-level ADR comparisons automatically, with no formulas required and your data never leaving your browser.

Conclusion: Without STLY, You're Managing in the Dark

Numbers without context are just numbers. STLY provides the context that turns data into decisions. It tells you whether your performance is genuinely improving, whether you're simply riding a rising market, or whether quiet problems are hiding behind apparently encouraging figures.

Try it for free at rev-buddy.com - upload your two booking files and see your STLY comparison in minutes.