The hotel industry’s dominant performance metric does not include revenue made outside rooms. RevPAR reflects the long‑held belief that the real business of a hotel is selling rooms, and banks, REITs, and private equity still underwrite hotels primarily based on room revenue, with good reason.
Yet over the last fifteen years, lifestyle hotels, resorts, and mixed‑use developments have grown in importance, and many now generate 40 to 60 percent of their revenue outside rooms by selling experiences.
This article looks at one such hotel group that has re‑engineered its tech stack to maximise non‑room revenue and is increasingly leaning on RevPAG (revenue per available guest) as a key performance indicator.
Judi Blakeburn is the chief commercial officer for four UK leisure‑focused hotels: Watergate Bay Hotel and SeaSpace in Cornwall; Another Place, The Lake, in the Lake District; and the Machrie Hotel & Golf Links on the Isle of Islay, Scotland.
Immersive experiences
“These incredible destinations have so much to offer that it's allowed us to craft immersive experiences for our guests so that they make the very best use of their time,” she says.
Each hotel offers at least two restaurants, a spa, a range of sporting and active experiences, and Ofsted‑registered childcare so that children can enjoy their holidays away from their parents. Watergate Bay and Another Place also host outdoor events throughout the year and large winter ice rinks.
“With so much on offer, giving guests the ability to curate their stays and build that big, rich itinerary before they arrive is vital for their enjoyment - and for our very important secondary spend,” she says.
When Blakeburn joined the company in 2015, she found siloed technology systems and multiple incomplete guest profiles; Watergate Bay alone had three separate internet booking engines. Guests typically arrived having only booked their rooms, putting a lot of pressure on the front desk.
To find a solution, Blakeburn began conversations with potential tech suppliers by sketching a simple diagram: a circle with the guest at the centre, and arrows pointing to every system that needed to feed into a single guest profile.
One system, one screen
“We were either going to try and stitch together best‑in‑class systems, or take a resort‑style, fully integrated approach,” she recalls.
She chose the latter, adopting ResortSuite, a Canadian platform that unified room bookings, dining, childcare, spa treatments, and outdoor activities into a single record. ResortSuite was later acquired by Agilysys in 2022, evolving into the Agilysys Versa PMS.
“For the last ten years, we've worked to leverage the opportunity that a fully integrated system and single guest profile have given us,” she says. “Our sales teams will tell you they have one system and one screen.”
Guests are encouraged to book activities through guest apps or internet booking engines, while a centralised guest services team can view every itinerary, identify gaps, and make personalised pre‑arrival communications to encourage and secure additional bookings.
RevPAG and TrevPAR
How does Blakeburn measure the success of the technology? “It's a seamless user experience for our team, and we all understand how that reduces our costs and time spent. Having a single guest profile at the core of your systems is fundamental because of the insights and actionable data it gives you.”
She adds: “Of course, we're measuring KPIs like everyone else - occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, length of stay. But progressively, revenue per available guest (RevPAG) is becoming a key performance metric for us. Forty percent of our revenue is from non‑room sources.”
Several hospitality technology providers, including Agilysys, Little Hotelier, and Mews, now promote RevPAG through their PMS and analytics platforms. RevPAG offers a guest‑centric view of revenue contribution and is a useful internal optimisation tool for marketing and upselling.
Honest relationship
TrevPAR similarly encompasses all revenue, but because it remains room‑based, it is more useful for investors and asset managers comparing performance across portfolios. Guest counts are harder to standardise than rooms, which is why RevPAG has not been adopted by global benchmarking organisations like STR.
For owners and investors looking to technology to drive ancillary spend, Blakeburn emphasises that having “one source of truth about guests” is essential.
She also stresses the importance of a productive, honest relationship with technology partners: “to make sure that you are not letting your systems be used less, to make sure that you are leveraging them to do absolutely everything that they can do for you.”
Equally, suppliers must be transparent about what their systems can’t do, she adds, so both sides understand the steps needed to move forward.
Judi Blakeburn, CCO from Watergate hotels, was in conversation with Ben Curtis, managing director, EMEA for Agilisys at the Annual Hospitality Conference 2025 in Manchester