Revenue Management
Wash / Wash Factor
The share of blocked or group rooms expected not to materialise.
Academic definition
Wash, or the wash factor, is the proportion of blocked or contracted rooms expected not to materialise into actual occupied rooms. It applies most commonly to group and event blocks, where a contracted allotment is rarely picked up in full, but the concept extends to the broader pattern of cancellations and no-shows that cause booked rooms to fall away before arrival. The wash factor is calculated from historical data as the share of blocked rooms released or unrealised relative to rooms blocked, and is used to inform how much of a block to hold, how much to release back to general sale, and how aggressively to overbook. Accurate wash estimation prevents a hotel from holding inventory for demand that will not appear, which would otherwise sit unsold, while avoiding the opposite error of releasing rooms a group will ultimately need.
Rooms Released / Not Materialised = blocked rooms that fall away · Rooms Blocked = total rooms held in the block
Worked example
A group blocks 200 rooms but releases 20, giving a wash of 20 ÷ 200 × 100 = 10% — rooms a hotel could have resold to transient demand had it forecast the wash and released them in time.
The ProfitPAR™ lens
Wash is the gap between rooms promised and rooms paid for, and that gap is pure exposure. Every room held in a group block for demand that washes away is a room the hotel could have sold to transient demand and did not — an opportunity cost that never shows up as a line item but quietly drains profit. ProfitPAR™ treats the wash factor as a forecasting input with direct margin consequences: estimate it accurately and you release washed rooms back to higher-value transient sale in time to fill them. Under-estimate wash and you hoard empty inventory; over-estimate it and you walk a group you needed. Either error is paid for in profit per available room.
Every washed room you held instead of resold is profit that quietly evaporated.
Measure what each room actually keeps.
ProfitPAR is offered as a private revenue practice, by invitation. Tell us about your hotel to begin.
Request an InvitationWorked examples use illustrative figures in Indian Rupee (₹) with lakh/crore conventions. They are composite and representative, not drawn from any single property. ProfitPAR™ is a trademark of Sibasish Misra.