A Comparative Automated Text Analysis of Airbnb Reviews in Hong Kong and Singapore Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation
2020
Kiattipoom Kiatkawsin | Ian Sutherland | Jin-Young Kim
Airbnb has emerged as a platform where unique accommodation options can be found. Due to the uniqueness of each accommodation unit and host combination, each listing offers a one-of-a-kind experience. As consumers increasingly rely on text reviews of other customers, managers are also increasingly gaining insight from customer reviews. Thus, this present study aimed to extract those insights from reviews using latent Dirichlet allocation, an unsupervised type of topic modeling that extracts latent discussion topics from text data. Findings of Hong Kong’s 185,695 and Singapore’s 93,571 Airbnb reviews, two long-term rival destinations, were compared. Hong Kong produced 12 total topics that can be categorized into four distinct groups whereas Singapore’s optimal number of topics was only five. Topics produced from both destinations covered the same range of attributes, but Hong Kong’s 12 topics provide a greater degree of precision to formulate managerial recommendations. While many topics are similar to established hotel attributes, topics related to the host and listing management are unique to the Airbnb experience. The findings also revealed keywords used when evaluating the experience that provide more insight beyond typical numeric ratings.
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