What about Airbnb in Milan?
By: Alessandro Guarnieri
Tags: Airbnb, Crisp Dm, Choropleth Map, Milan, Data Science

Short business trips? Holidays to escape from your daily life? Just moved in town and looking for an apartment? Smartworking by the sea? Airbnb is an answer to all these questions but how to decide which apartment or neighbourhood is the right one for you (and your pockets)?

I live in Milan and I know the city but I asked myself, from the perspective of a tourist, where would I want to book an Airbnb accommodation, so I came up with some questions:

Which are the most expensive neighbourhoods in Milan for Airbnb accommodations and where are they located? Which are the neighbourhoods with the highest density of Airbnb accommodations in Milan? Is there a correlation between price and density of Airbnb accommodations in this area? Is it possible to predict the price of an Airbnb accommodation given some of the information on its listing on Airbnb site?

Distribution of Airbnb accommodations’ prices

As you might expect, the most expensive Airbnb accommodations are all located in the city center. There are only a few exceptions, as highlighted in the following map, where two or three neighbourhoods show a higher average price compared to the surroundings in the south and east areas.

Is there anything else to say about that high average price in that small neighbourhood of the city center?

Comparison between density and prices distribution

Most of the Airbnb accommodations are located in the city center, as shown in the following graph. Around 54% of the accommodations are all located in only a few (10) of the city center neighborhoods, which are also the most expensive ones.

At a first sight, it is possible to say that the city center is both dense and with the highest average prices for Airbnb accommodations but taking into consideration the seven neighbourhoods with the highest average price, there are a few exceptions to consider:

The neighbourhoods with the two highest average prices (QUINTOSOLE and GIARDINI PORTA VENEZIA) correspond to the lowest density class.

Only two neighbourhoods are both highly dense and with a high average price (DUOMO and BRERA), the remaining three are in lower density classes.

You can now book your Airbnb accommodation

The neighbourhoods with the most expensive Airbnb accommodations, which are also among the ones with the highest density, are DUOMO and BRERA. No worries, there is always space in Milan if you are willing to spend a little bit more than average!

GARIBALDI REPUBBLICA, GUASTALLA and GHISOLFA have a lower average price and a lower density compared to the previous two. In my opinion GARIBALDI would then be the perfect option, considering also the nice places to visit and the night life in the very near neighbourhood ISOLA.

The most expensive one is GIARDINI PORTA VENEZIA, which has also a low amount of available places: it seems that this can be called literally an exclusive neighbourhood.

Average price of the most expensive neighbourhoods and related number of listing - June 2020

If you are curious about the data and the processing behind this post, feel free to reach my GitHub repository https://github.com/AleGuarnieri/Airbnb-accomodations-analysis-in-Milan