Do Airbnb’s “Superhosts” deserve the badge? An empirical study from China

ABSTRACT

The “Superhost” badge is that Airbnb entitles the host provides good services. This study verifies Airbnb’s “Superhost” mechanism by applying text mining technologies, combined with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and K-Means, to the entire dataset of tourists’ online reviews of Hangzhou city, China. Six kinds of hosts’ good services are identified, including “Three Meals or Night Snacks,” “Fruits, Drinks or Snacks,” “Travel Guides,” “Free Shuttle or Helping with Luggage,” “Chats,” and “Replies or Communications.” The study reveals the minority of “Superhosts” are mentioned of providing the majority of six kinds of good services, which means “Superhosts” do deserve the badge.

KEYWORDS:

• Sharing economy
• Airbnb
• Badge
• Superhost
• Online reviews
• Text classification
• LSTM
• Text clustering
• K-means
• Service behavior

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Nan Sun http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2612-658X

Dongsheng Liu http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5286-6429

Anding Zhu http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8162-6213

Yahui Chen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8734-8274

Yufei Yuan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8388-8433

Notes

1 First step noise words: 第二天 (next day), 我们 (we), 房东 (host), 房主 (homeowener), 地方 (place), 早上 (morning), 非常 (very).

2 Second step noise words: 阿姨 (aunty), 很多 (many), 东西 (thing), 而且 (and), 出来 (come out), 还给 (return), 一起 (together), 杭州 (Hangzhou), 还 (also), 是 (be), 每天 (every day), 什么 (what), 超级 (very much), 耐心 (patient), 热情 (enthusiastic).

3 Third step noise words: 可以 (can), 时候 (when), 姐姐 (sister), 晚上 (night), 麻烦 (trouble), 贴心 (intimate), 亲自 (personal).

4 Fourth step noise words: 一直 (always), 老板 (boss), 提前 (early), 小姐姐 (beauty), 一些 (some), 详细 (detailed), 免费 (free).

5 The newly acquired words include: 入住指南 (check-in instructions), 准备早餐 (prepare breakfast), 来地铁站接 (pick up at the subway station), 寄存行李 (store luggage), 推荐美食 (recommend food), 行程建议 (suggest a trip), 一起聊天 (talk together), 提行李 (carry luggage), 搬行李 (carry luggage), 拿行李 (take baggage), etc.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (71471164), The Ministry of education of Humanities and Social Sciences project (17YJC630155), Public Projects of Zhejiang Province (LGF18G010003, 2017C33109).