A vacancy label answers one question: if this hotel opens up, how fast do you need to move? It is Aki's own metric, computed mechanically from data Aki itself observed (openings caught and re-taken over the last 90 days, plus the current sold-out state) — it is not a hotel quality rating. Rare means an opening usually dies within the hour; Anytime means the hotel almost always has rooms.
Rare: openings usually vanish within the hour (nearly always sold out). Uncommon: openings rarely survive half a day. Occasional: gone within a day. Frequent: comparatively easy to get. Anytime: almost always has rooms (no need to rush). A label reflects how readily vacancies appear — no label says anything about how good the hotel is.
Two observed signals: (1) how long an opening survives — the median duration of each appeared→re-taken pair observed in the last 90 days; and (2) the current sold-out share — the fraction of watched nights with no vacancy. Thresholds: Rare = median ≤ 60 minutes AND ≥ 80% of nights sold out; Uncommon = median ≤ 6 hours AND ≥ 50% sold out; Occasional = median ≤ 24 hours; Frequent = everything else. Anytime alone uses its own rule: a hotel that never sells out produces no pairs for signal (1), so it earns Anytime only when all three hold — watched for 14+ days, at most 20% of nights sold out, and not a single sell-out observed in the window. Labels are recomputed roughly every 15 minutes.
A hotel with fewer than 3 observed opening→re-taken pairs gets no label at all (no badge) — we never rank on anecdote. Openings still alive right now are excluded rather than guessed. A hotel whose vacancy Aki has never once observed cannot be rated — there is no data.
Labels are computed at each watch's default party size (usually 2 adults). The only data source is Aki's own observation log — this is an independent metric, unrelated to any official figure from hotels, Rakuten Travel, or event organizers. Availability moves constantly, so a label is guidance, never a booking guarantee.
No. A label only reflects how rarely that hotel's openings appear and how fast they get re-taken in Aki's observations. It says nothing about quality, service, or satisfaction.
Fewer than 3 observed opening→re-taken pairs — the published gate against ranking on anecdote. Once enough observations accumulate, the label appears automatically.
Labels are recomputed roughly every 15 minutes; the underlying availability is observed about once a minute.
Watched events