Revenue blog · 11 min read · 30 May 2026
What is STLY Pickup and How to Read Same-Time-Last-Year Properly
The first slide in the first owner deck I wrote opened with a single line: STLY +9 percent. The room counted it as a win. The owner asked one question — same-time-last-year on which axis? — and the room stopped counting. I had compared a Friday in 2024 to a Friday in 2023 on calendar date, not days-out. The underlying number was flat. The slide was wrong. STLY pickup hotel reporting is the daily same-time-last-year comparison most desks read on the wrong axis, and across a year the cost of that misread is a number nobody in the room ever sees. This piece is how I read it now.
What STLY pickup actually means in 2026
STLY stands for same-time-last-year. The phrase is older than most of us in the industry and it has drifted into shorthand. In its proper operating sense, STLY pickup is the comparison of today's on-the-books position for a future date against the on-the-books position for that same future date at the same days-out point last year. The two anchors are the future date and the days-out point. Hold those constant and the comparison is honest. Move either one and the comparison is noise dressed as a number.
The reason it matters: the booking window is not a smooth ramp. It is a staggered, segment-driven curve with corporate and group activity loading early, leisure transient loading late, and OTA filling whatever shape is left. A pace number that ignores days-out is a pace number that has averaged across the curve. The headline reads on-trend while the underlying shape has already drifted.
STLY pickup sits inside the broader pickup-and-pace ritual covered in hotel pickup and pace explained. Pickup is the 24-hour delta. Pace is the cumulative position against a reference. STLY pickup is the specific case where the reference is last year on a like-for-like booking-window basis. It is the most defensible of the three reference choices when the prior year was a normal year, and the most misleading when it was not.
The STLY pickup formula and the worked example
The formula is one line. The discipline is in the inputs.
STLY pickup for date D = rooms-on-the-books for date D today, minus rooms-on-the-books for the equivalent date last year as recorded at the same days-out point.
The equivalent date last year is rarely the same calendar date. Friday 30 May 2026 is 51 weeks from Friday 27 June 2025 — close, but not the same day-of-week if you measured against 26 June 2025, which was a Thursday. The right comparable is the Friday closest to the same point in the seasonal calendar. For most properties that is the equivalent week-of-year, same day-of-week. For event-led properties it is the calendar week that contained the equivalent event last year.
A worked example on a 120-room urban property. Today is Tuesday 30 May 2026. The future date is Friday 30 May 2026. Days-out from today is 46. On-the-books for that Friday today reads 67 rooms.
The reference is the equivalent Friday in 2025 — Friday 27 June 2025 — as recorded 46 days out from that date, which was Wednesday 12 May 2025. Pulling the snapshot from that day reads 52 rooms-on-the-books for the equivalent Friday. STLY pickup is 67 minus 52, which is +15 rooms, or roughly +29 percent. That is decision-useful in a way that a same-calendar-date comparison would not be.
Run the same calculation for every future date in the next 90 and the demand calendar starts writing itself. Red where STLY is behind, amber where it is flat, green where it is ahead. The shape is the working surface. The shape is also the place where the next pricing decision lives.
Days-out STLY versus calendar-date STLY
The single most common misread of STLY pickup is to compare today's on-the-books for a future date to last year's on-the-books for the same calendar date measured today. Same future date, but a different days-out distance — because the day-of-week and the calendar may have shifted, and because the prior-year reference has had a full year of post-snapshot bookings layered on top of it.
A small comparison table to keep the two straight:
| Calendar-date STLY | Days-out STLY | |
|---|---|---|
| Future-date anchor | Same calendar date last year | Equivalent week-of-year, same day-of-week |
| Reference snapshot | Today's date in the prior year | The day in the prior year that was the same days-out from the equivalent future date |
| Day-of-week noise | Often misaligned | Aligned by construction |
| Booking-window noise | Distorted by post-snapshot bookings | Removed by holding days-out constant |
| Useful when | Rarely — and only with caveats | Default operating choice |
Days-out STLY is the harder report to build because the prior-year snapshots have to be stored at every days-out point, not just at month-end. The reward is a comparison that holds up under operator review. Calendar-date STLY is the easier report to build and the easier one to be wrong with.
Where STLY pickup breaks down
Four failure modes I see repeatedly. None of them are flaws in the metric. They are flaws in how the metric is read.
1 — the prior year was not a normal year. Refurbishment closure, a one-off citywide event, a single large contract that has since lapsed or arrived, a school-holiday calendar shift. In those windows the STLY anchor is comparing different markets. A two-year or three-year STLY blend is the cleaner read, or in the worst cases a budget-pace overlay that ignores last year altogether.
2 — segmentation is missing. A +15 STLY headline on a Friday in June can be entirely a one-off corporate group that the property landed for that week. The transient segment underneath might be flat or behind. STLY should always be read by segment and by channel, never as a single headline number.
3 — the reference includes pricing context the current year does not. If last year's rate strategy on that date was a $40 lower rate floor, last year's on-the-books at the same days-out is partly a function of that rate. A +5 STLY at today's $40-higher floor is a healthier signal than the headline number suggests. The full segmentation by rate plan starts to matter. The metric stack covered in ADR vs RevPAR vs GOPPAR exists for the same reason.
4 — extrapolating STLY as a forecast. STLY is a baseline comparison, not a forecast. The expected final on-the-books for a future date is not last year's final plus the current STLY variance. The booking curve has its own shape, the segment mix has its own progression, and any same-store growth assumption needs to be added on top. The forecast methodology covered in hotel demand forecasting remains the primary working surface. STLY is an input to it, not a substitute for it.
What to do about it — the five-step STLY pickup ritual
The morning sequence I run on every property that has at least one full year of clean snapshot history. Twenty minutes when the data is clean, forty when it is not. The ritual sits inside the broader pickup-and-pace habit.
- Confirm the prior-year reference is days-out. Pull the prior-year snapshot at the same days-out distance as today's snapshot from the future date. If the data warehouse only stores month-end snapshots, the STLY reference is calendar-date and the rest of the ritual is approximate.
- Compute STLY pickup by future date for the next 90 days, segmented by market and channel. One row per future date. One column per segment. A colour scale of red, amber, green on the variance against last year. The shape across the matrix is the working surface.
- Read the four STLY pace windows: 14, 30, 60 and 90 days. A widening gap between the 14-day STLY and the 90-day STLY signals a booking-window shift. Tightening means demand has compressed forward. Widening means it has pushed back. Both are signals, neither is automatically a problem.
- Flag the three dates with the largest STLY behind and the three with the largest STLY ahead. Behind earns a check on rate, restrictions, and channel availability. Ahead earns a check on whether the rate strategy is leaving margin on the table. Same six dates as the broader pickup-and-pace queue, read through the STLY lens.
- Write one line per override. The override note records the date, the STLY signal, the action taken, and the expected outcome. Reviewed at month-end against actuals. Across a year the override log is the most honest record of which signals the property reads accurately and which it does not.
A real scenario: 110-key regional, soft-shoulder April
A 110-key regional property, late 2024. April was tracking on STLY for the headline window — plus four percent at the 30-day point, plus six percent at the 90-day point. The owner deck had a green line. The forward calendar looked on-trend.
The shape underneath told a different story. STLY at the 14-day window was minus two percent. The four shoulder Tuesdays of April were minus eight, minus eleven, minus six, and minus nine percent on a days-out basis. The plus-four headline was being held up by two specific Fridays loaded with one-off corporate group business that had landed late. Once those Fridays were stripped out, the underlying same-store STLY was minus three percent and softening.
The override was a 7 percent rate reduction on the four shoulder Tuesdays plus opening one shoulder-rate channel that had been held closed. Pickup on those four dates over the following ten days was +21 rooms across the four. Roughly A$5,400 of incremental revenue across the four dates that the headline STLY would never have surfaced. Across a year of disciplined STLY reading on the same property, the same shape of override produced a recurring lift of two to three points of annual occupancy.
How STLY pickup fits the rest of the stack
STLY pickup is the most defensible reference point inside a broader forecasting habit, and the least useful number if it is read in isolation. The 14-day STLY informs today's rate moves. The 90-day STLY informs the rolling-quarter posture. The segment STLY informs which channels and contracts need a closer read. None of the three replaces the disciplined comparison stack laid out in hotel revenue management strategies for 2026.
Macro context still matters. The Australian Bureau of Statistics short-term visitor arrivals and the Tourism Research Australia domestic outlook frame whether STLY softness is property-specific or market-wide.
FAQ — STLY pickup for hotels
What is STLY pickup in a hotel?
The comparison of today's on-the-books position for a future date against the on-the-books position for the same future date at the same days-out point last year. Read as a room-count delta and a percentage, segmented by market and channel.
What does same-time-last-year mean for a hotel?
A like-for-like comparison anchored on days-out, not calendar date. If today is 46 days out from a Friday, the same-time-last-year reference is the equivalent Friday in the prior year measured 46 days out from that date. Day-of-week and event-calendar alignment matter more than the calendar number.
How do I calculate STLY pickup?
STLY pickup for a future date is today's rooms-on-the-books for that date, minus the rooms-on-the-books recorded for the equivalent date last year at the same days-out point. Expressed in rooms and as a percentage. Forty today versus 32 at the same point last year is plus 8 rooms, roughly +25 percent.
Why is STLY pickup days-out rather than calendar-date?
Hotel demand patterns rotate by day-of-week and event calendar year on year. A calendar-date STLY compares a 2026 Friday to a 2025 Saturday in some cases, which introduces noise that has nothing to do with demand. Days-out STLY holds the booking-window position constant and produces the cleaner signal.
What is a healthy STLY pickup variance?
There is no universal target. A plus three to plus seven percent STLY at the 30 to 90-day window is usually treated as on-trend in a stable market. Anything wider than plus or minus ten percent earns a closer read for the segment and channel mix underneath. The variance is a prompt, not a verdict.
When does STLY pickup stop being useful?
When the prior year was an anomaly — refurbishment closure, one-off citywide event, a lapsed or newly arrived large contract, a school-holiday shift. In those windows a two-year or three-year STLY blend or a budget-pace overlay produces a cleaner read than the raw STLY comparison.
How often should STLY pickup be reviewed?
Daily for the 14-day window, weekly for the 30 to 90-day window. Properties with a heavy short-window segment mix should review STLY pickup daily across the next 21 days. The 14-day window is where the override decisions actually pay back, so it earns the most frequent read.
A note on what this is for
STLY pickup is one of the cheapest comparisons available to a property with at least one full year of clean snapshot history. No licence required, no module required, no consultant required — a stored days-out snapshot history and a disciplined daily read. Done properly, it makes the rest of the pricing and forecasting habit easier. Done poorly, it produces a green headline that flatters a softening trajectory.
That discipline is what we built RevPerfect for: a daily STLY pickup view that compares on a days-out basis by construction, segments by channel and market automatically, ranks the dates with the largest STLY deviation, and keeps the override notes alongside the numbers so the comparison compounds month over month. One input into the broader forecasting habit covered in hotel demand forecasting, but STLY pickup is where most desks get the most immediate value because the comparison pays back on day one. Try RevPerfect free → or book a 20-minute walkthrough.