Dear WuBookers, setting room rates is one of the most delicate and important operations in the hotel business. Especially for those who choose dynamic pricing, there are numerous parameters to take into account. Among these is pickup: essential data for adjusting prices and internal organization. Let’s take a look at what it is and why it is so important.

Hotel pickup: the definition

Pickup is the number of rooms sold or reservations received in a certain past period towards a specific future period. This data can be expressed in numbers or as a percentage. Hotel pickup allows you to analyze the pressure of demand on the property and check whether or not it matches forecasts, adapting your strategy and resources accordingly.

Let’s take a practical example. It is Monday, December 28, and a hotelier wants to know how many rooms were sold the previous week (i.e., from Monday, November 21, to Sunday, November 27) for the Christmas period, let’s say from November 23 to January 1. Well, the pickup report expresses exactly this trend and can be done for any time period (a day, a week, or months). It is also possible to compare the performance of different periods: for example, next Christmas with the previous one – always according to the same pickup dates – to understand whether demand is moving in a similar way to the past and what variations there are.

Why is it useful to know the hotel pickup?

Hotel pickup is very useful for defining and improving your rates, especially if you decide to adopt a dynamic or automatic pricing method. In the hospitality sector, there are three types of pricing:

• static: this is now an outdated approach, as it involves setting prices for the whole year and not changing them, regardless of actual demand or market trends;
• automatic: changes are made by specific software based on rules predetermined by the hotelier and algorithms.
• dynamic: thanks to the analysis of certain data (including pickup, seasonality, availability, and other parameters), the hotelier continuously adjusts prices in a semi-automatic way.

In the latter case, the pickup report is essential for understanding occupancy and availability, and trying to increase hotel revenue. Knowing this data has many advantages.

Be prepared and act promptly

Despite accurate forecasts, demand analysis tools, and experience, things may not go as we expect, either positively or negatively. For example, it may happen that, suddenly, a certain date receives a large number of unexpected reservations. This may be the effect of an event that we may not have considered or other dynamics unknown to us. Monitoring pickup weekly or monthly allows us to promptly record these events and act accordingly, without wasting time and working ahead of the competition.

Move prices in an informed manner

Noticing that a certain period is performing rather well or, conversely, rather poorly compared to forecasts or a previous period is important for adjusting the offer. When demand is high, the hotelier may decide, for example, to increase sales prices to earn more. If, on the other hand, reservations are scarce, it may be necessary to lower rates or offer promotions and special packages to encourage demand.

Optimize occupancy and resource management

Selling rooms not only means increasing revenue, but also improving occupancy and, consequently, optimizing operating costs. We know that even unsold rooms are a potential source of expense (for cleaning, heating, etc.), so it is essential to try to maximize sales in order to reduce “unproductive” costs.

Evaluate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns (and related investments)

Hotel pickup also provides indirect information about the performance of our marketing campaigns. If, for example, we have launched an online promotional campaign with the aim of selling certain dates, we can check how it is progressing by checking the reservation received for those dates during the campaign period.

This is indirect information because only the tracking of individual reservations can give an accurate overview of the effectiveness of the campaign, but any increase is still a useful indicator to understand whether the investments made are paying off or not.

How to calculate pickup

Although it is possible to calculate it manually using fairly advanced Excel spreadsheets, it is much more convenient and immediate to use dedicated software to calculate hotel pickup. One such software is the Revenue Management System: a comprehensive system that allows you to set prices and rates in a profitable way.

However, not all properties are equipped with this solution, while most are more likely to use a PMS, a hotel management software. If you use Zak, the accommodation software from WuBook, monitoring pickup is very simple.

Monitor hotel pickup with Zak by WuBook

Zak’s statistics are one of the most developed and flexible areas of the software and allow for very sophisticated queries. The pickup logic can be easily applied to different data sets: just set a filter for the date of stay (the day or time period you want to analyze) and one for the date the reservation was created (the day or period). At this point, Zak returns a complete report with all the KPIs related to reservations collected in real time from the software itself, for example: confirmed reservations, standby reservations, canceled reservations, and no shows.

It is also possible to go into detail about room types, sales channels (OTA, metasearch, website, agencies, companies, etc.), daily arrivals, beds sold (so-called occupancy), available and average occupancy, average length of stay, number of unique guests, booking window (i.e., how far in advance the reservation was made); and view all revenue-related data such as total revenue and room-only revenue, RevPAR, ADR, and so on.

Not only that, but with a simple filter, Zak allows you to set up a comparison with a past period of your choice, from one month ago to five years ago!

This allows you to get a realistic and informed picture of your property’s performance. For example, we might notice that for the Christmas 2025 period, we sold fewer rooms in November this year than we did last year. The level of analysis provided by Zak helps to better narrow down this information and act accordingly: we may discover, for example, that last year we hosted groups, or that we had a lower ADR than this year, or that we worked particularly well with a certain portal.

Pickup alone is not enough: it is always necessary to contextualize and interpret, and Zak is the right tool for this!