Booking your next trip to New York City with Airbnb? Let’s Data help you with your booking decision.
By: Sunita Inderjit
Tags: Data Analysis, Kaggle, Data Science, Airbnb

Photo by Lerone Pieters on Unsplash

“ This is a Udacity Data Science Nano Degree project”

New York City is one of the most popular cities in the United States. It’s divided into five boroughs Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, and Staten Island. With Manhattan, the center of tourist attraction is known as the “Big Apple”. Each borough is filled with rich culture and has its own unique international and local flavors. Manhattan is famous for its skyscrapers, Empire State Building, Theater on Broadway, Central Park, Diamond District, Fashion District, NYC Stock exchange, and so much more. It’s a must-visit.

For this project, I used the 2019 Airbnb dataset for my analysis. My motivation for this project is to give guests insightful information about NYC Airbnb and the options available to them.

These are the three questions I would like to explore.

What type of rooms are available? Location with the highest numbers of listing? Average room price in the neighborhood?

Question1. What type of rooms are available?

The dataset is consists of 48,895 listings. These listings are divided between the five boroughs. Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, and Staten Island. The room types available are:-

Private room

Entire house/Apartment

Shared room

Figure 1. Available room types

Figure 1. gives a breakdown of the type of rooms available. There are 25,409 entire home/apt and 22,326 private rooms and 1160 shared rooms. This is a clear indication that private rooms and entire houses/apartments are more popular.

Question 2. Location with the highest numbers of listing?

Location is one of the many important factors when planning a trip. Let’s look at some statistics. Figure 2. shows the listing available within the five boroughs, Manhattan and Brooklyn the most popular location.

Figure 2. Available listings within the five boroughs

Figure 3. Breakdown of available rooms in the five boroughs

Figure 4. minimum night per room type

Figure 3. gives a breakdown of the numbers of private rooms, entire home/apt, and share room available in the five boroughs. In Manhattan, there are 13,199 entire home/apt and 7,982 private rooms. In Brooklyn, there are 10,132 private rooms and 9,559 entire house /apt. So Brooklyn has a lot more private rooms available than Manhattan. Also, noted in Figure 4. guests spend more time in the entire house/apt in Manhattan.

Figure 5. top location in Manhattan

Figure 6. top location in Brooklyn

Figures 5 and 6 show the hot spots in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The most popular area in Manhattan is Harlem with over 2658 listings and Brooklyn, Williamsburg 3,920, Bedford-Stuyvesant 3,714, and Bushwich 2465 listings.

Question 3. Average room price in the neighborhood?

Price is one of the most important factors to consider when looking at location, length of trip, and the number of people traveling together.

Let’s review the location, price, and room types. In Manhattan, the average price per night is $196, and in Brooklyn, it’s $124. There is a difference of $72 in the price range. That’s why Brooklyn has more hotspot than Manhattan because it cheaper, more options available, and easy access to Manhattan by Transit, MTA Buses, and Taxi services.

Figure 7. The price range in the 5 boroughs

Figure 8. room types and price

So the average price per night for the entire home/apt is $211 and $89.7 for a private room. These are the two most popular room types in all 5 boroughs. With Manhattan and Brooklyn with the highest numbers of listings.

Figure 9 price, room type,. and neighborhood

Figure 10 room types available in the neighborhood

In figure 9. we can see that Manhattan and Brooklyn with the least availability throughout the years. This means that these locations and rooms types are occupied quickly. Plan ahead and look at the other location just in case these are not available.

Conclusion

Planning a trip can be hectic but having some statistics to review prior, for example, room types available, location, and price can help ease the stress.

Knowing the room type available is an important factor because depending on the purpose of the trip guest might have different preferences as to whether a private room or an entire house/apt will be best for the stay.

Location is another important aspect because as guests you want to be able to navigate in and around the Cities easily to get to your destination. So having a variety of options available can help.

Budgeting for a trip is one of the most important factors. Depending on room type, location, and price. Therefore, having flexibility definitely can help to make the decision process easy.

I hope you find this post helpful. Thank you for reading.

Please feel free to leave comments. Link to my github