AI on guest reviews enhances vacation rental host insights
Accommodation sharing platforms provide hosts with pricing features and general guidance on how to improve their chances of booking out their listing. However, the platforms do not offer hosts value-added data products based on guest reviews to help them understand guest profiles, improve listings, and ultimately generate more business.
Our project, focused on mining guest reviews for sentiment and similarity, was built to show how text data can be used to enhance user experience. Our Airbnb host dashboard outputs insights on common themes mentioned in the most positive and negative reviews, key selling attributes, key points of concern, and guest profiles.
The value proposition:
The product helps hosts manage and optimize listings at scale, especially those with many listings and guests. It provides hosts with an actionable overview of who their guests are and what they are saying about their listings. This solution is an important lesson for any business to consider the full, untapped potential of its data. This exercise requires creativity, boldness and expertise in implementing cutting-edge analytics.
Our solution roadmap consisted of:
- Understanding the Airbnb business model, its data points, and the shortcomings in how data is used to enhance user experience.
- Building the value proposition for our proposed solution
- Preparing the data for analytics.
- Creating a pipeline to feed advanced text analytics into intuitive dashboards.
- Designing the host dashboard to be brief and actionable.
Technical and analytical environment:
- Python
- Advanced text analytics