How Airbnb Ratings Work
When guests stay at an Airbnb, they can choose to leave a written review along with a star rating on a scale of one to five across the following categories:
- Overall experience. Overall, how was the stay?
- Cleanliness. Did guests feel that the space was clean and tidy?
- Accuracy. How accurately did the listing page represent the space? For example, guests should be able to find up-to-date info and photos in the listing description.
- Value. Did the guest feel that the listing provided good value for the price?
- Communication. How well did you communicate before and during the stay? Guests often care that their host responds quickly, reliably, and frequently to their messages and questions.
- Check-in. How smoothly did check-in go?
- Location. How did guests feel about the neighbourhood? This may mean that there’s an accurate description for proximity and access to transportation, shopping centres, city centre, etc., and a description that includes special considerations, like noise, and family safety.
source: Airbnb
The rating and review system is very important to the Airbnb platform. Ratings give prospective guests a way to evaluate a listing. For hosts, ratings impact things like search ranking on the platform and ultimately, occupancy and revenue.
Introduction to the Analysis
For the analysis we’re going to be using this from data from Inside Airbnb, an activist project with the objective to provide data that quantifies the impact of short-term rentals on housing and residential communities. The dataset contains 1.3 million listings from around the world as of April 2020.
We’ll restrict the dataset to listings with over 5 reviews. Airbnb will post aggregate scores after three guest review but doubling that threshold will provide a richer data set. Using this criterion drops the number of listings from the full data set of 1.3 million to 650k. For the analysis we’re going to look average category ratings. This will tell us which ratings hosts score the highest and lowest on in general. We’ll also look at distribution of the overall rating. This will help us put overall ratings into perspective and context.
Average Category Ratings
First let’s look at the average of those aggregate scores across all listings in the data set. It’s interesting to note that the average for overall score is lower than the average score of any other individual category (other than value). This is because overall score is not calculated as an average of all other scores but rather as it’s own score. It’s not unheard of for a host to receive fives across the board on all categories and a four on overall score, especially from guests new to the platform.
Overall Airbnb Rating Distribution
Next let’s look at how ratings are distributed across listings. Take note of the skewness of the data. Anyone who’s visited Airbnb’s platform has probably noticed ratings tend to skew high. In fact, 98% of listings analyzed had a rating of at least 4 stars. Listings with an overall rating of under 4 stars are almost unheard of. This is encouraged by Airbnb who push their hosts to maintain high ratings. With this incentive to keep ratings high, 86% of listings analyzed had a rating of at least 4.5. 12% of Airbnb listings analyzed had a rating of 5 stars.
What is a Good Airbnb Rating
Generally speaking a 4.8 would be a good overall rating. If we consider the halfway point of the distribution to be the line of good and bad, 4.8 is roughly that threshold. It’s also probably not a coincidence that this is where Airbnb has placed one of their Superhost criterion. Superhosts must maintain a rating of at least 4.8.
Having said that, this analysis is looking at a large aggregated data set. It’s up to every host do determine what qualifies as a good overall rating. Factors such as your goals as a host and competition in your market will influence this.
Key Takeaways
- Among individual Airbnb ratings categories, overall satisfaction, cleanliness, and value score the lowest on average whereas check-in and communication score the highest
- Overall Airbnb ratings skew high – 86% of listings analyzed had an overall score of 4.5 of higher.
- 4.8 would be considered a good overall rating on Airbnb
