Cover (hospitality)


Cover is a unit of measurement in the hospitality industry. It can refer to a meal, or a customer for whom the meal is served. It is used for the purpose of business forecasting.

Cover per Occupied Room

Cover per Occupied Room is one statistic which can be used in forecasting.

Average cover

This is statistic whereby the average spent per individual customer is calculated. This can be calculated separately for each member of the serving staff.

Capture Ratio

Polansky and McCool argue that the capture ratio, given by the ratio of "Meal Period Covers Served" divided by the "Number of Persons Available to Eat that Meal".

Man-Hours per Cover

This is another statistic which can be used to calculate the allocation of staff, based on the number of predicted covers required.