Exploring preferences and sustainable attitudes of Airbnb green users in the review comments and ratings: a text mining approach

Abstract

The sharing economy platforms for accommodation have emerged as a disruptive model that has revolutionized the tourist lodging sector and modified tourist consumption patterns. Airbnb is the paradigm of this business model, with approximately 300 million users and more than 7 million listings worldwide. However, studies that have attempted to explore the consumer experiences of green Airbnb users are still scarce, especially those using big data approaches. The present study explores the preferences and attitudes of green Airbnb users by analyzing the online review published in Inside Airbnb using text mining and sentiment analysis. Findings reveal six latent aspects among which the “sustainability” predominates in the online opinions of green Airbnb users, situating sustainability in relation to the most positive emotion of the Plutchik model. Moreover, the results of the analysis suggest a positivity bias in the online reviews of green Airbnb users. Managerial implications for sustainability, consumer behavior management, and marketing fields are discussed.

Keywords:

• Big data
• sustainable consumption behavior
• Airbnb
• sentiment analysis
• sustainable tourism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura Serrano

Laura Serrano is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Economics and Business at Universidad Loyola Andalucía (Spain), researcher member of Social Matters research group. Her research interests include sustainable tourism, sharing economy, tourism impacts.

Antonio Ariza-Montes

Antonio Ariza-Montes is director of Social Matters research group and professor of Organizational Design and Human Resources Management at Universidad Loyola Andalucía (Spain), researcher at Universidad Autónoma de Chile (Chile) and lead member of the Business@Heatlh Laboratory at Univserità Europea di Roma (Italy). His research interests include Organizational behaviour, HRM, Tourism and Hospitality, Volunteerism and Social Innovation.

Martín Nader

Martín Nader is a professor in the Psychological Studies department at Universidad Icesi (Cali, Colombia). His research and teaching interests are related to applied organizational quantitative research.

Antonio Sianes

Antonio Sianes is director of Research Institute on Policies for Social Transformation and professor of International Studies at Universidad Loyola Andalucía (Spain). His research focuses on development studies, in topics such as Global Governance, Development policies and the broader topic of Policy Coherencefor Development.

Rob Law

Rob Law is a professor at the School of Hotel and Tourism Management, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests are technology application to tourism and information management.