Airbnb foot print in Seattle: a case study
What is Airbnb?
“Airbnb” stands for Air mattress bed and breakfast, which is very ironic in the sense that we found that almost all airbnbs have no airbeds and very few of them provide breakfast options!
Airbnb is an American a vacation rental online marketplace where one can rent a place while they are visiting a new place.
In this article we’ll be exploring the Airbnb foot print in Seattle by answering a few key questions which may help us in improving our business understanding.
Which part of Seattle has the most number of listings?
From the map above we observe that most of the listings in Seattle are located in the Central region which happens to be the Downtown and Capital Hill region. This observation is further emphasized by the following bar plot
2. Which neighborhoods have the highest mean price per listing and good ratings?
a. Average price per listing
While traveling we always love to live in places where we can get best bank for our buck while also having decent reviews and ratings. So, below we observe that Magnolia, Queen Anne, Downtown & West Seattle are most expensive neighborhoods.
b. Average rating of listings in each neighborhood
Not much can be inferred but as we see the most expensive neighborhoods have lower ratings, while cheaper neighborhoods like Delridge, Northgate, Rainer Valley have higher ratings
Are super-hosts any different?
according to the data we have, there wasn’t any conclusive evidence which established the reason of what makes super-host different. A quick search indicated that
- need at least 4.8 overall rating
- 90 % response rate
- < 1% cancellation
- at least 10 stays in the past year
Source :https://www.airbnb.com/superhost
However we did find an interesting trend in the pricing between super-host and regular hosts
From both of the heat maps we observe that, the pricing has a higher co-relation to the cleaning fee and security deposit for super-hosts,
when compared to regular hosts the price is a little less co-related to the cleaning fee and security deposit.
This could be one of the reasons why super hosts are expensive usually.
When do people usually visit Seattle?
In the above plot we observe that the non-availability of listings over time implies that they have been booked.
we observe that non available listings increase in April through September,
comparing this with the climate data available online, we observe that actually April through September is the best time to visit Seattle
This strengthens our finding from the data, that indeed the number of unavailable listings went up because more people have booked places
Conclusions:
- Most of the listings in Seattle are located in the Central region which happens to be the Downtown and Capital Hill region
- Magnolia, Queen Anne, Downtown & West Seattle are most expensive neighborhoods.
- Cheap neighborhoods like Delridge, Northgate, Rainer Valley have higher ratings
- Number of Available listings dropped because more people were traveling Seattle in April through September
Data source:https://www.kaggle.com/airbnb/seattle/data
