Booking Recency Factor

Booking Recency Factor

The Booking Recency Factor is a smart pricing customization in PriceLabs that automatically applies a temporary discount to listings that haven’t received bookings for an extended period. The goal is to improve visibility and increase chances of securing bookings, especially for underperforming or new listings.

Why This Matters

Listings that go unbooked for long periods tend to lose visibility in search rankings, leading to a downward spiral in performance. Price reduction is a proven tactic to revive such listings.

How It Works

The Booking Recency Factor is applied as a customization, just like Seasonality and Demand Factors. It’s part of the algorithm and stacks with other pricing customizations such as Last-Minute Discount, Far-Out Premium, and Occupancy-Based Adjustments

Application Criteria

This discount only applies to listings that meet all the following conditions:
  1. No bookings in the past 15 days or more
  2. Reservation data is less than 3 days old
  3. Listing has been syncing with PriceLabs for at least 7 days
  4. Either:
    1. Listing Occupancy (LO) is less than 10% for the next 30 days, or
    2. LO is less than 80% of Market Occupancy (MO) and below 70% overall for the next 30 days.
- Discounts respect your minimum price—your prices will never drop below it.
- Blocks are counting as bookings while determining occupancy

Discount 

This customization is enabled by default. Once triggered, the discount only applies to the next 30 days in the calendar, ensuring it targets near-term availability without devaluing long-term rates.
The profile of the discount is a linear one the discount increases linearly from 5% (no booking in last 15 days) to 15% (no booking in last 45 days)

Parent-Child Mapped Listings, Multi-unit Listings & Combined Listings

For multi-unit or parent-child mapped listings, pricing consistency is key.
The Booking Recency Factor handles this by: Merging bookings data from all mapped listings and using the last booked date of the mapped listings
  1. Ensuring occupancy calculations are aligned (especially in true parent-child cases where bookings in one are blocks in the other)
  2. If these two inputs (pickup and occupancy) are consistent, pricing across parent and child listings will remain aligned.
Example 1 (Parent-Child mapped)
Lets say I have a parent listing that last got booked 16 day ago. and I have a child listing that last got booked 7 days ago.
While calculating the factor for this combination, we will merge the reservations, and we see that for the combination, the last booked date is 7 days ago, hence the factor will not be applied.

Example 2 (Combined listings)
Lets say you have a 6BR house, and that is split to two 3BR listings. Now lets say the 6BR house doesn't gets booked that often, and most the bookings come on 3BR listings. 
Note that whenever a booking comes on either 3BR listings, it will automatically block the 6BR house.
Now if the 6BR house hasn't gotten a booking in 15+ days, we will check for the occupancy conditions as mentioned here. Since the 6BR is blocked (because of listings on 3BR), we won't apply booking recency factor discount for 6BR.

Disabling Booking Recency Factor

If you do not want to apply this adjustment for your listing:
  1. Head over to your Pricing Dashboard → Review Prices on the listing.
  2. Once on the Pricing Calendar, click the "Edit" button on the Customizations panel
  3. Go to the All Customizations tab → Booking Recency Factor.
  4. Enable the toggle for Booking Recency Factor.
  5. Select Do not apply Booking Recency Factor. and click Save.
If you want to bulk update for multiple listings, you can edit the customization at Group or Account level. Step - 
  1. Go to this link: https://app.pricelabs.co/customization
  2. Go to Group or Account (whichever level you prefer to edit), and click on "Edit" button
  3. Go to the All Customizations tab → Booking Recency Factor.
  4. Enable the toggle for Booking Recency Factor.
  5. Select Do not apply Booking Recency Factor. and click Save.

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