In recent years, you’ve probably heard it again and again in the hospitality world: “The market changes too fast—it’s impossible to predict demand.”

But is that really true? Sure, competition has increased and traveler behavior has become less predictable. Yet there’s a tool that lets you keep your finger on the pulse of the market at all times—and it’s right in front of you.

It’s called the Pickup, and it’s one of the most powerful indicators you can track to understand how demand is moving in real time and how the market reacts to your prices, your competitors’ moves, or external factors like trade fairs, holidays, and even the weather.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at what Pickup means, how to analyze it, and how to use it to guide your revenue strategy.

What is pickup and why it matters for your hotel

Pickup refers to the number of new bookings and cancellations received during a specific time period for future stay dates.
In other words, it answers the question: “How many rooms moved today compared to yesterday—or this week compared to last week?”

Think of Pickup like the speedometer of your hotel’s demand: by checking it regularly, you can see how fast your bookings are moving at any given moment.

Monitoring Pickup is crucial for several reasons:

• Adjusting your rates: When bookings come in quickly, demand is “hot” and you can safely push rates higher. When they slow down, it’s a sign the market is cooling and your strategy needs rethinking.
• Forecasting demand: By observing booking pace, you can more accurately estimate high and low demand periods, compare actual data with forecasts, and refine your revenue goals.
• Supporting marketing and operations: Pickup data also helps you decide when to run promotions and how to plan your staffing levels based on peaks and troughs in arrivals.

How to analyze pickup in 4 steps

To make sense of your Pickup, you’ll need to build a Pickup Report—a simple table that you update daily to visualize booking trends and turn them into decisions.

If you don’t have an automated Pickup Report, you can easily create one in Excel. Here’s how to do it in four steps:

1. Collect data from your PMS

Export all data for future stay dates: new bookings, cancellations, and total rooms sold. Add them to your spreadsheet, organized by date, so you have a clear and trackable base.

2. Define your analysis period

Decide whether you’ll monitor Pickup daily, weekly, or monthly. A daily view helps you spot short-term shifts immediately, while weekly or monthly views highlight broader trends.

3. Calculate the variations (Pickup)

Compare today’s data with that of the previous day (or week/month). This gives you the net number of rooms that moved. You can create dedicated columns for new bookings, cancellations, and net change.

4. Interpret the results

Once you’ve calculated your Pickup, the most important step is understanding what it means.

• If booking pace is accelerating, it indicates strong demand. In this case, you can raise your rates, limit promotions, or even introduce restrictions such as a minimum stay.
• If, on the other hand, new bookings slow down or cancellations increase, the market is tightening. That’s your signal to adjust your strategy—for example, by slightly lowering prices, opening availability on more channels, or launching targeted promotions.
• Always remember to compare Pickup trends with external factors (such as local events, holidays, or weather conditions). This will help you determine whether the trend is temporary or structural.

Manual pickup analysis: a practical example

Let’s say you want to monitor current demand pressure for January 2026.

• Step 1: Start with yesterday’s data
  Yesterday, you had 10 rooms sold out of 310 total available for that month.
• Step 2: Check today’s updated data
  Today, the number of rooms sold for January has increased to 20.
• Step 3: Calculate the Pickup
  That means you received 10 new room nights booked for January—in just one day.
• Step 4: Keep monitoring and act accordingly
  If this pace (+10 per day) continues, demand is clearly rising. You can slightly increase rates or remove discounts.

If, however, the pace slows and bookings stop coming in, the market is cooling. In that case, it’s better to review your pricing strategy, lower rates a bit, or activate special offers.

Of course, for Pickup analysis to be truly effective, you should update your Excel file daily. Only then can you spot demand signals in real time and respond immediately.

The downside? Doing it manually takes time and consistency.

The good news is that there are now tools that automate the process and generate ready-to-use Pickup Reports for you. One of these tools is Smartpricing, the dynamic pricing software by Smartness.

How to create a Pickup Report with Smartpricing

With Smartpricing, you can simply open the Pickup Report section and select the dates you want to monitor.
The software will automatically display the booking pace for that period—and more. You can also compare your current Pickup with the same period last year.

This year-over-year comparison makes a real difference. It allows you to better understand the market situation and, most importantly, adds valuable context beyond your On the Books (OTB) data alone.

Example

Let’s look at how analyzing both On the Books and Pickup data gives you a more complete picture.

Returning to our January example, you now want to see whether January 2026 is performing better or worse than January 2025.

To do this, you’ll compare your current forecast for January 2026 with what you had on the same date last year for January 2025.

Start with the On the Books analysis:

Inside Smartpricing’s dashboard, set your comparison dates. You’ll instantly see On the Books data for both 2025 and 2026, as shown in the example below.

Looking at the data on Revenue, Occupancy, Average Daily Rate (ADR), and RevPAR in the upper section, you can see that the forecasted Revenue and Occupancy for January 2026 (shown in purple) are slightly behind the forecast we had last year for January 2025 (shown in yellow).

Before making any pricing decisions, let’s analyze the Pickup to verify whether there’s actually a slowdown in bookings.

In the Pickup Report section of Smartpricing, simply set the following parameters:

• Room types you want to include in the analysis
• Pickup period (in this case, the last 7 days)
• Stay period (January 2026)
• Granularity (for this example, we’ll use a monthly view)

As shown in the sample screenshot below, the software instantly displays both the current data and the previous year’s data.

When reviewing the Pickup Report for January 2026, you’ll notice that over the last 7 days:

• There have been many more new bookings (23) compared to last year (11).
• No cancellations have occurred. In fact, the Pickup for January 2026 is +13 nights, while in 2025 it was –4 nights.

How to use Pickup analysis to shape your strategy

As this example shows, Pickup analysis is essential for gaining a real and complete picture of your performance.

If we had relied only on On-the-Books data, the instinctive reaction might have been to lower prices to stimulate demand and boost occupancy.

But by looking at the Pickup, we discovered that bookings for January 2026 are:

• More solid (no cancellations)
• More profitable (higher average rate)
• Faster (booking pace is accelerating)

What does this tell us?

That the market is performing well: bookings are coming in steadily and at better rates. In this situation, lowering prices wouldn’t just be unnecessary—it could actually hurt your revenue.

In short, Pickup helps you separate gut reactions from data-driven decisions—and that’s exactly what sets market leaders apart from those who are always reacting.

The best part? Smartpricing not only allows you to analyze your data in depth and in minutes, but its algorithm already takes into account key variables like Pickup trends and market occupancy to automatically calculate your optimal rates.

This means you can count on a dynamic pricing strategy that’s always up-to-date and personalized, while still keeping full control to adjust it based on your own business goals.

Want to see how it works in practice?