Three simple rules to book the perfect Airbnb

Nashville, Tennessee - also known as the Music City of the USA, it is the home of the famous Grand Ole Opry and Country Music Hall of Fame. It is the obvious destination for any country music lover, NFL fan or simply a great place to go on a first date (as seen in the Netflix show Master of None). But when it comes to planning your trip it can often be stressful trying to book the perfect place to stay.

The famous Broadway running through the heart of Nashville

There is a multitude of things to think about when trying to plan a trip, you already know your destination but you also need to decide other things, such as

• What time of year to plan your trip
• Who to go with and how to get value for money from your accommodation
• Which of the many thousand hotel and apartments to choose from in a tourist hotspot

Fortunately for us Airbnb have come to the rescue. The online marketplace for homes, apartments and rooms to stay in has a variety of different options in almost every holiday destination you can think of.

With all these available stays comes a vast set of data that can be found here with details of all the listings in a city and their subsequent reviews amongst other features. We can use this to break down our various dilemmas and choose the perfect stay for any vacation.

Decision 1 — When to plan a trip to Nashville?

There are a few factors to take into account when planning a vacation such as weather, school holidays, large events taking place.

Above all of these, as a twenty something year old traveller, I want to keep my accommodation as cheap as possible to get the most out of the rest of the vacation.

Therefore we can use the Airbnb to data to see how the average price of properties in Nashville over the year.

Figure 1 — the average price per night (in USD) in Nashville Airbnbs

These results may come as quite a surprise compared with the initial hypothesis. Although there is some seasonality affecting the price, with slight peaks around the autumn and spring times, the overall trend is that the later you leave it to book your vacation, the cheaper it will be.

There could be a few reasons this trend is appearing. The most obvious one for our dataset is the current uncertainty in the world with the ongoing pandemic affecting almost every vacation. We would need to extend this data to historic data to see just how much of an affect this has.

It also is the case that the airbnb marketplace has more availability in the near future (as can be seen in figure 2 below) rather than six to twelve months in advance. In this scenario the common saying “the early bird catches the worm” does not apply.

Figure 2 — Proportion of properties still available to book from the dataset

Decision 2 — Who to go with?

One distinct frustration I have had many times with Airbnb in the past is selecting a group size and having some search result that say they can accommodate 8 people, but actually 3 of your group have to sleep outside and the other 5 are all crammed onto a single sofa bed.

Fortunately with the vast dataset at hand we’re able to see just what type of properties are available in Nashville so that I can choose something between a solo trip or getting all my pals along and reserving a massive country home.

Figure 3 — Number of properties available and their capacity

To ease the frustrations of a tight squeeze again, the data in figure 3 is based on the condition that there is at least one bed for every two people staying.

Nashville is definitely the sort of place where the best value for money is going to come from a larger group going as opposed to just one or two people. With the majority of places having space for more than six people we will have a much larger pool of places to choose from if there are more guests.

A possible cause of this distribution is the relatively small metropolitan district of the city of Nashville. Although there is the hustle and bustle of Broadway, not too far from the city is the vast Tennessee countryside. We can compare this with other cities in the US with steadily larger city centres.

Figure 4 — Distribution of Airbnb sizes in three gradually larger US cities

So now that we have decided when to visit Nashville and how many people to go with, we’re left with the task of choosing a specific Airbnb.

Decision 3 — How to choose an Airbnb

The pre-planning for an Airbnb search is now complete and we can search for a location, the number of guests and the dates we want to visit.

There will still be a plethora of options for our vacation so we could do with applying some additional features to our search in order to narrow things down before selecting the perfect property.

In order to proceed we can model the 6000 properties currently listed in Nashville to see which features will lead to a good review. After processing our data to ensure we only had rows where the host has a rating we can run a linear model to simply see which features may be a good choice for applying our filters.

Figure 5 — Relative importance of each filter to the model

We can takeaway immediately from this data that the first thing we want to do to narrow the search is hit the superhost filter. This has more than double the importance of any of the other features we took into consideration.

If there are still too many choices we can narrow it down further by perhaps taking into account the cancellation policy. As we have already decided it is better to book a trip closer in the future we can see that the higher rated properties have a more moderate cancellation policy.

So there you have it, a simple guide to booking the perfect holiday in Nashville. If you want to book THE best Airbnb all you have to do is follow three simple steps

1. Don’t book in advance, leave it til the last minute
2. Go in a larger group
3. Book with a superhost (preferably one with a flexible cancellation policy)

You can see the method behind this analysis and try it out for a different city of choice on my Github.