An Exploratory Study Of Airbnb Customer Reviews And Impact Of Covid-19

Airbnb has experienced meteoric growth in the sharing economy business model since it launched in 2009. Due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the operations impacted the overall decline in Airbnb activity. The depth study of how Airbnb activity and the rental market have changed during the COVID-19 pandemic using the comprehensive record of Airbnb listings, calendar, and reviews data. We propose an analytical framework of natural language processing on the text data of reviews left by the customers based on their experience with the property and host. The study found that COVID-19 had a catastrophic impact on the sector leading to massive cancellations and recorded low bookings with adverse effects on annual accommodations bookings for 2020 globally. However, as anticipated, the suspension of global travel due to the pandemic was foreseeable, but the drift was temporary and merely shifted to new tourist locations. We perform exploratory data analysis for the city-state; the impact of COVID-19 on the sharing economy in different cities; Analyze customer reviews using sentiment analysis to differentiate between positive and negative reviews and check the robustness of these reviews. We point out implications and avenues for future research based on the findings.