An Analysis of Social Features Associated with Room Sales of Airbnb

Donghun Lee, Woochang Hyun, Jeongwoo Ryu, Woo Jung Lee, Wonjong Rhee, Bongwon Suh

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.