How can Airbnb prices sometimes be counterintuitive?
Tags: datascience, watercooler
Published: 2022-09-03 21:50:21

I went to Paris on my last vacation to celebrate my 10th Wedding Anniversary. 

For the first time, we decided to stay in an Airbnb, we got a small studio, and it was a great experience, part of it because of our host (thanks again, Catherine), that was always available and super nice. 

From the beginning, Airbnb showed our host as a superhost. Only the hosts with more experience and high evaluations receive the superhost badge.

After understanding that, my first thought was that hosts marked as superhost would charge more to rent their places. To test this hypothesis, I went to [Inside Airbnb](http://insideairbnb.com/) and downloaded the data from all the listings of Paris on Airbnb.

## Are superhosts more expensive than regular hosts?

Paris has more than 50,000 listings; it’s the most visited city in the world. To narrow my analysis, I used only the listings for an entire home.

To my surprise, the average price for listings of superhost is € 143.57, and for regular listings, € 147.99.

It’s slightly different but not the higher price I was expecting. The two images below show the price distribution for the superhosts and the non-superhosts.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/qih4pvk3s9w7qu82shaj.png)

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/jfotq4seiu1k4b3kt801.png)

And we can see the price distribution for the superhost is concentrated at around € 100, and the regular host is more distributed.

## But what about the “professional” hosts?

Talking to my host, she said Airbnb had become a source of interest for many house owners in Paris, and many people have transformed the short-term rent into a lucrative business. Besides the known problem of elevating the rent prices, “professional” hosts with more than one unit are taking space from the hosts with only one unit.

In the Airbnb data, most of the listings for entire homes are from people with only one listing, and there are more than 30,000 listings of this kind.

The image below shows the count of listings per host, and we can see many of them with ten or more entire homes listed on Airbnb. 

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/4z0li8vaw41p3srrc7ij.png)

**Only one host has more than 200 listings**.

Again my intuition was that people with more listings would be able to operate with lower prices to gain more market.

Once again, I was wrong, and now by much.

The average price of entire homes for hosts with only one listing is € 128.51, and for hosts with two or more listings € 191.86. 

In the two histograms below, we can compare the price distribution between the hosts with one listing and those with more.


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/li3pw2f9ilooerr43hk1.png)


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/a6x3nx046zlvnx1mr70y.png)

One interesting take is that multi-listing prices have a broader range of prices.

## Who has the better review score?

The [Inside Airbnb](http://insideairbnb.com/) data provides data on review scores made by the guests. 

But that’s a trick data to analyze since most of the review score is above four on a scale from zero to five.

I was curious to see if the “professional” hosts could be as thoughtful as the regular hosts.

And now I finally got right, by a small margin, but right.

The average score of the “professional” hosts is 4.54, and 4.75 for regular hosts. 

As I said, that’s a metric difficult to take many conclusions from, but this slight difference could be due to more attention the host can give to their guests.

## Conclusion


This article looked at how Airbnb prices may not follow our intuition according to [Inside Airbnb](http://insideairbnb.com/) data.

We compared the prices from hosts the platform marked as more remarkable than the regular ones.
We then looked at how hosts with more than one listing are charging more than the ones with only one listing.
Finally, how do the guests score these different hosts?

The findings here are observational, not the result of a formal study. So the real question remains:

**How to take the maximum of your vacation using Airbnb?**

To see more about this analysis, see the link to my GitHub available [here.](https://github.com/lacouth/airbnb_data_analysis)