Occupancy Calculation for Conference Rooms

Conference benchmarking is new for most of us and all the statistics that are coming out are still quite difficult to translate into actions as there is not yet a year of historical data in place to see long term trends and year on year statistics. Still, the trends are clear and the indications are very interesting to follow. You should always ask yourself, does my venue follow the trend or lead it?

Our focus is to make conference benchmarking to work for as many venues as possible; so we need to KEEP IT SIMPLE. With this in mind, there are venues with Delphi or Opera that can easily get all possible statistics out, but there are many with simple homemade systems, old systems, and yes even simple excel spread sheets for keeping track of their business.
We have made a really nice start and we are now looking at improving the Occupancy benchmarking part of our system as that is highly requested from several of our users.
After sending out a request for feedback to the larger venues and our main contacts, we do unfortunately have even more grey hairs now than before as this has proven not to be easy at all.
Right now we have around 10 different ways of calculation Occupancy for conference:

This is what we have today:
Anytime sold no matter how long or how many time during 24h = 100%
Below please find some example on our feedback:
- 2 parts a day – Morning + Afternoon = 100%
- 2 parts a day – Day + Evening = 100%
- 3 parts a day – Morning+Afternoon+Evening = 100%
- 3 parts a day - Morning+Afternoon+Evening = 300%
- 3 parts a day - Morning+Afternoon+Evening = 150%
- 3 meal periods a day = 100%
- Min 5 hours per day = 100%
- Depending what type of conference room; meeting room 2 parts, Banqueting room 3 pars, board room 2 parts etc.
- Define the number of hours your space can be sold for, determine the number of hours in use and the percentage of that

Still our conclusion is to make sure this is simple and no further effort to input data is needed. We will keep the dialogue with many of you and hope to develop the Occupancy later this year.

On the above feedback examples, are there any other you have in mind that is not mention, please let us know.

What do you think? Is conference space occupany a relic left over from rooms measurement? Or is it still a relevant way of measuring performance? Ideally we would like to try and set an industry standard, so that there is an easy way for all to get a good understanding of what constitutes good performance. Please comment below!