STR

STR is a hospitality data and benchmarking company headquartered in Hendersonville, Tennessee, that supplies the hotel industry with the performance measurements by which it judges itself. Founded in 1985 as Smith Travel Research, the company collects operating data directly from hotels and returns it to them as comparative reports, allowing an individual property, a management company or an entire market to see how occupancy, room rates and revenue are moving against competitors. Listed in this directory with Hendersonville, Tennessee, as its location and str.com as its official website, STR operates as a subsidiary of CoStar Group and maintains an international headquarters in London and an Asia Pacific headquarters in Singapore.

The scale of the operation explains its influence. At the time of its acquisition by CoStar Group in October 2019, STR aggregated data from more than 65,000 hotels representing nearly nine million guest rooms in more than 180 countries, and its flagship STAR reports were being distributed at a rate of more than 1.2 million per month. Because so much of the industry reports into the same system, STR figures have become the common language of hotel performance, quoted in earnings calls, development pitches, lending decisions and the weekly and monthly news coverage of the lodging business.

Founding and Early History

STR was founded in 1985 by Randy Smith and his wife Carolyn Smith. The company began in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where the Smiths started the business from their kitchen table, and it relocated to Tennessee in 1987. The original concept was comparatively modest: to build a complete census of hotel properties in the United States and provide that supply information to the suppliers and service companies that sold to hotels, helping them organise sales territories and understand where the industry's room inventory actually stood.

That census work developed in 1988 into the STAR program, the benchmarking system that would define the company. Rather than simply counting hotels, STR began collecting their operating results and returning standardised comparisons, so that a property could measure itself against a self-selected competitive set rather than against guesswork. The program grew into a family of daily, weekly and monthly reports and became, over the following decades, the definitive source of benchmarking information for hotel chains, management companies, lenders, appraisers, consultants and developers.

Ownership and the CoStar Acquisition

STR remained an independent, family-founded company for more than three decades, an unusually long run for a data business of its importance. That changed in October 2019, when CoStar Group, the commercial real estate information and online marketplaces company, acquired STR in a cash transaction valued at approximately 450 million dollars. The sale, which closed on 22 October 2019, was described at the time as the largest hotel industry transaction of that year and involved STR subsidiaries across countries including England, Germany, China, Singapore, Scotland, Australia and Spain.

Under CoStar ownership, STR has continued to operate under its own name and from its Hendersonville base, functioning as the hospitality data arm of a much larger real estate information group. The fit was a natural one: CoStar's core business is property-level data and analytics for commercial real estate, and STR brought the same discipline to the lodging sector, along with a subscriber base and a historical database that would have been extremely difficult to build from scratch.

What STR Measures

The company's reporting rests on three core metrics that structure nearly all hotel performance discussion. Occupancy records the share of available rooms sold. Average daily rate, or ADR, records the average price achieved for those rooms. Revenue per available room, or RevPAR, combines the two into a single figure that captures both demand and pricing power. STR reports these measures for individual hotels, competitive sets, market segments, chains scales and geographic markets, in daily, weekly and monthly cycles, and tracks them against prior periods and against recovery benchmarks.

Beyond performance, STR maintains supply and development data, including a hotel pipeline database that follows projects through planning and construction. That forward-looking view makes its releases useful not only to operators managing existing hotels but also to developers deciding where to build, brands deciding where to expand and lenders assessing whether a market can absorb new rooms.

Products and the STAR Report

The STAR report remains the flagship product. Participating hotels submit their figures and receive back a comparison of their own performance against their competitive set and market, delivered on daily, weekly and monthly schedules. Around that core, STR offers additional reporting for owners, asset managers, management companies and corporate and regional teams, as well as customised data sets and analytics for clients who need the underlying numbers rather than a standard report.

The company also publishes regular public-facing analysis. Its weekly and monthly United States lodging results, its market-level releases for major cities and its pipeline summaries are distributed as news releases and are a primary source for trade and business journalism about hotels. When news reports state that occupancy rose or that room rates set a record in a given month, the figures behind the statement are very frequently STR's.

Geographic Scope

Although STR began as a United States business, its coverage is global. The company maintains a presence in around 15 countries, with its corporate headquarters in Hendersonville, an international headquarters in London and an Asia Pacific headquarters in Singapore, alongside offices in locations including Italy, Dubai, Brazil, Tokyo, Jakarta, Sydney and Beijing. Its database spans more than 180 countries, covering the major hotel markets of North America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific and Latin America.

The international expansion was accelerated in 2008, when STR brought together Deloitte's HotelBenchmark business and The Bench to form STR Global, extending standardised benchmarking well beyond North America. The result is a single measurement framework applied across markets that otherwise report in different currencies, languages and local conventions.

Clients and Subscriber Base

STR's clients cover effectively the whole lodging economy. Hotel brands and major chains use its data to monitor franchise and managed portfolios. Owners and asset managers use it to hold operators accountable. Management companies use it to demonstrate performance to owners. Developers, brokers, lenders, appraisers and consultants use it to underwrite deals and value assets. Government tourism bodies, universities and journalists use its published aggregates to describe the health of travel markets.

The relationship is reciprocal in a way that distinguishes STR from a conventional publisher: its clients are also its sources. Hotels supply confidential operating data because the comparative product they receive in return is worth more than the information they give up, and the confidentiality of individual property figures is protected by reporting them only in aggregate and within competitive sets.

Hotel News Now and Industry Events

Alongside its data business, STR has been associated with Hotel News Now, a trade news website covering the hotel industry, and it sponsors the Hotel Data Conference, an annual gathering built around the interpretation of lodging data. These activities place the company in an editorial as well as an analytical role: it does not merely sell numbers to the industry, it also convenes the conversations in which those numbers are explained and debated.

That combination matters for a directory of news and information services. STR's releases set the factual baseline for a large share of hotel journalism, and its analysts are routinely quoted as expert sources explaining what movements in occupancy or rate actually mean for owners, workers and travellers.

Digital Presence

STR's digital presence is centred on str.com, where clients access reporting products and where the company publishes its press releases, market summaries and research commentary. Its parent, CoStar Group, also distributes STR findings through its own news and data channels, widening the audience for the company's monthly and weekly releases. STR maintains an active professional presence aimed at the hospitality trade rather than the general public, reflecting a business-to-business model in which the audience is the industry itself.

Significance

STR's significance lies in standardisation. Before systematic benchmarking existed, hotel performance was largely anecdotal, and owners had limited means of knowing whether a property's results reflected management quality or simply market conditions. By persuading thousands of competing hotels to report into a shared, confidential system, Randy and Carolyn Smith's company created the measurement infrastructure on which modern hotel management, valuation and development now depend, and its three core metrics have become so embedded that they are used even by people who have never heard the company's name.