Beyond the Room: Why Hotel Parking Deserves a Revenue Strategy

For years, hotel revenue strategy centered on one primary asset: the guest room. But as operators look for new ways to strengthen margins, the opportunity increasingly extends beyond the room itself.

The latest HotelData figures point to that shift. Across the HotelData sample, TRevPAR, or total revenue per available room, increased 9.2% in the first half of 2026, from $173.41 to $189.30. That was slightly ahead of the 8.9% increase in RevPAR.

The gap may appear small, but it matters. It suggests revenue growth was not confined to guestrooms. Hotels also generated more from the wider property.

For hotel leaders, that raises a useful question: What other assets are sitting inside the business with untapped revenue potential? Increasingly, parking deserves a place in that conversation.

Parking as a profit center

During a recent Actabl discussion about ancillary revenue, Lance Suksiriwong, Executive Vice President at Naples Hotel Group, described parking as one of the clearest opportunities available to some hotels.

“If your hotels are in an area where you can do this, [the] low-hanging fruit for me is parking revenue,” he said. “There’s not a lot of expenses that go along with that.”

That cost structure is important.

Unlike a new restaurant concept, spa service, or event offering, monetizing existing parking may require little incremental physical investment. The underlying asset already exists. The challenge is deciding how much inventory can be sold, when to sell it, and what the market will pay.

Paul Mengacci, Chief Financial Officer at Desert Hospitality Management, sees a similar opportunity.

“Parking is a great opportunity, especially if the lot or the parking space is part of the existing real estate of the hotel,” Mengacci said. “There's not a lease or commission or other type of structure in place that would dip into the profit. You can really bring a lot of that [revenue] to the bottom line.”

That distinction between revenue and profitable revenue should guide the ancillary strategy.

A hotel can sell more, but every additional revenue stream has a different margin profile. Mengacci noted that even within food and beverage, banquet and catering operations tend to generate different returns from outlets, while beverage can deliver different margins from food. Whereas parking introduces another potential revenue stream, often without the same staffing, inventory, and service requirements.

Look beyond hotel guests

The opportunity also extends beyond charging overnight guests to park. A hotel near an airport, business district, sports venue, convention center, hospital, or entertainment destination may have valuable parking inventory at times when its own guests don't need it. That changes the revenue question.

Instead of asking, “What should we charge guests for parking?” operators can ask, “How do we maximize the yield of every available parking space while protecting capacity for our guests?”

This is where technology can help turn parking from a static fee into a managed revenue stream.

Ocra joined the Actabl Partner Network in June 2026, bringing a platform designed to help hotels manage parking rates and inventory and distribute unused spaces through digital parking marketplaces. Ocra describes the model as a way to capture incremental, non-guest demand while protecting existing guest parking revenue.

The partnership gives Actabl customers another way to consider total property performance alongside rooms, labor, operations, and other revenue sources, without making parking another manual task for hotel teams.

According to Ocra, its technology dynamically manages pricing and inventory allocation, while hotels retain control over how much parking capacity they make available.

“Hotels have spent decades refining how they yield a perishable room, but many have another perishable asset sitting just outside the building. The opportunity is to treat parking with the same commercial discipline: understand demand, protect the guest experience, and make every available space work harder for the property,” said James Hansen, Head of Partnerships, Ocra.

Ancillary revenue needs visibility

Parking is only one part of a broader shift in hotel revenue management.

Lance Suksiriwong also pointed to meetings and events and F&B as areas where operators should challenge long-held assumptions. Function space, for example, disappears as an opportunity once a date passes.

“Once that day ends, you can’t get it back,” he said, arguing that hotels need to see F&B as “a revenue generator rather than an amenity.”

The same principle applies to parking. An empty parking space yesterday cannot be sold today. Like a hotel room or unused meeting room, its value expires. That makes visibility important. Operators need to understand which revenue streams are growing, which carry the strongest margins, and where unused capacity exists. Looking only at RevPAR can leave part of that story hidden.

TRevPAR provides a wider lens. HotelData found that the metric remained above prior-year levels throughout the first half of 2026, with Luxury TRevPAR up 15.1%, Upscale up 4.8%, Independent up 3.6%, and Upper Midscale up 3.5%.

Make the whole property work harder

For hotel owners and operators, the next phase of revenue optimization may involve taking a broader inventory of the assets they already have. Rooms matter. So do restaurants, bars, meeting spaces, upgrades, destination fees, and parking lots.

The goal is not to introduce fees for the sake of fees. It is to understand where genuine demand exists, price assets intelligently, and identify opportunities that can contribute meaningful revenue without creating unnecessary operational complexity.

Parking will not suit every property. Location, guest demand, available capacity, local competition, and ownership structures all matter. But where those conditions align, a space that once sat empty could become one of the simplest ways to grow revenue beyond the room.

As TRevPAR gives hotel leaders a fuller view of property performance, parking offers a useful reminder: sometimes the next revenue opportunity isn't something a hotel needs to build. It is something it already owns.