Stay-Over
A stay-over is a room that is occupied on a given night by a guest who arrived on an earlier date and is not departing the following morning — in other words, a guest continuing an existing reservation rather than checking in or out that day. Stay-overs are one of the core daily room states used in front-office and housekeeping operations, alongside arrivals (check-ins), departures (check-outs), and vacant rooms.
The distinction matters operationally because a stay-over room is serviced differently from a departure: it receives a lighter "stay-over clean" rather than a full turnover, and it is not available for resale that day.
Formula
A property's house count for any night can be expressed as:
Occupied Rooms = Stay-Overs + Arrivals − Departures
Where stay-overs are the rooms carried over from the prior night that remain occupied.
Example
A 100-room hotel begins the day with 70 rooms occupied. 15 of those guests check out (departures) and 25 new guests arrive. The 55 rooms whose guests are neither arriving nor departing are stay-overs, and the night's occupancy is:
55 stay-overs + 25 arrivals = 80 occupied rooms
Why it matters
Stay-overs give revenue and operations teams a base of committed occupancy before any new arrivals are counted, which stabilizes forecasting and informs how aggressively remaining inventory should be priced or restricted. A high stay-over base on a given night reduces reliance on same-day pickup and supports length-of-stay strategies that protect high-demand dates. For housekeeping, accurately separating stay-overs from departures drives labor planning, since departures require full turnovers while stay-overs do not.
Related
- House Count — the total occupied-rooms figure that stay-overs feed into
- Pickup — net new rooms sold, distinct from the carried-over stay-over base
- Walk-in and No-show — other front-office room states
- MinLOS / MaxLOS — restrictions that influence how many guests become stay-overs