An Analysis of Social Features Associated with Room Sales of Airbnb
Proceedings of the 18th ACM CSCW Companion 2015
Social ComputingAirbnbData ScienceOnline Marketplace
What makes an Airbnb listing more likely to sell?
Price and amenities are obvious considerations when choosing a room. But a rental platform also provides social signals about hosts and previous guests. We investigated which of these features were associated with room sales.
Look at room features and social signals together
We collected and analyzed 4,178 Airbnb room listings. Alongside features such as price, minimum stay, and amenities, the analysis considered host responsiveness, wish-list counts, reviews, membership seniority, ratings, and references.
Social features did not all behave alike
Host responsiveness, wish-list counts, the number of reviews, and membership seniority were significantly associated with room sales. Overall ratings and the number of references were less critical in this analysis. Treating all visible social signals as equally informative would miss these differences.
An association is not a recipe for more bookings
The study helps characterize the role of social information in collaborative consumption. Because this was an observational analysis, the associations do not establish that changing a particular feature causes sales to increase. The results describe the platform and dataset studied at the time, rather than today’s Airbnb marketplace.
Read the original abstract
Lately, collaborative consumption has emerged as an important socio-economic model because of its economic and environmental impacts. Airbnb, an online hospitality rental service provider, is a fast growing company that utilizes rich social communications. In this paper, we aim to quantitatively characterize collaborative consumption behaviors in Airbnb. We collected and analyzed a total of 4,178 room data, and investigated which features are more strongly associated with room sales. Besides the well-recognized room features like price, minimum stay, and amenities, our result shows that social features such as responsiveness of host, count of Wish List, number of reviews, and membership seniority are significantly associated with room sales. On the other hand, some of the conventional social features such as overall rating and number of references turned out to be not so critical for room sales.