A holiday apartment is intended to cover part of the financing through short-term letting. A high price per night alone is not sufficient as an assessment. For a useful first test you need the contribution remaining after occupancy-dependent expenses and a realistically justified number of actually paid nights.
Define the scope of consideration
The following case is entirely fictitious. It explicitly assumes that the legal and factual admissibility of the intended use has been clarified separately. It does not calculate permits, taxes, local charges or actual market prices. For a real project all relevant items must be added appropriately.
We assume €100 actually received by you per paid night before the variable costs recorded below. In the model these amount to €25 per night. Booking or other costs must not be deducted first before and then again after this receipt. The defined contribution of a paid night is therefore €75.
Calculate the necessary nights
In the year there are running payments of €6.000 recorded and full loan instalments of €7.200 to cover, independent of occupancy. The requirement is €13.200. Divided by the contribution of €75 this results in 176 paid nights.
That is the calculated occupancy to balance the defined payments. It contains no profit, no additional capital buffer and no remuneration for your own work. It also does not say whether 176 nights are achievable at the location.
If the variable expense in the example rises to €35, only €65 per night remain. €13.200 divided by €65 equals around 203,08. Because in this model whole nights are paid for, at least 204 are required; 203 nights would bring only €13.195.
Availability is not demand
After personal use and other assumed blocked periods, 220 nights are available for letting in the case. 176 required nights would correspond to 80 per cent of this time window. With 204 it would be about 92,7 per cent. None of these ratios is a demand forecast. They show how little unlet available time each plan can still tolerate.
Work on verifiable operational assumptions
Clarify which revenues can actually be expected after cancellations and which costs change with occupancy, guest turnover or the scope of care. Working with costs per stay requires a different calculation than pure costs per night.
The test is useful if it makes the decisive occupancy assumption visible. A minimum occupancy derived from the calculation must never subsequently be written back into the financing as occupied demand.