Airbnb Pet Rules
Airbnb hosts can choose to allow pets in their listing. When doing so, it is a good idea to add additional house rules to communicate expectations to guests. In this analysis, we’ll use natural language processing (NLP) to uncover the most popular Airbnb pet rules.
Intro to the analysis
The dataset for this analysis started with the house rules from 30,000+ listings randomly sampled from the US in July 2023. I then wanted to create a subset of probable pet rules to analyze. To do this, I first filtered on only the listings that allowed pets. Then, I filtered on sentences in the house rules that contained the word “pet”. This left me with a dataset to perform exploratory NLP analysis to uncover what pet rules Airbnb hosts have.
Keyword Extraction
The first piece of exploratory analysis I performed on my dataset was a simple keyword extraction. Keywords are a great way to quickly parse out words and phrases that best describe a document (in this case, pet rules). There are many algorithms out there for pulling keywords out of text. For this analysis I used the Rapid Automatic Keyword Extraction (RAKE) algorithm. The top keywords uncovered using the RAKE algorithm are as follows.
Most popular Airbnb pet rules
From this we can see the most popular pet rules concern fees and cleaning. This tells us many Airbnb hosts who allow pets charge a fee or may charge fees if additional cleaning is required.
Interestingly, emotional support animal is the top keyword overall meaning many hosts who allow pets will include rules regarding emotional support animals in their house rules. However, it’s important for hosts to know the law in their jurisdiction. In some jurisdictions, hosts can decline guests with emotional support animals or charge a fee while in others they cannot.
Network visualization
To help flesh out more specific examples, I then performed a network visualization. In the graph below, each dot represents a word. The size of the dot represents how often that word appears across the pet rules dataset. Lines represent relationships between terms that often appear together.
From this graph we can see some of themes to look for when building examples for Airbnb pet rules.
Airbnb pet rules examples
Rules for what type of pet is allowed
- Breed restrictions apply
- Max weight per dog
- No cats/only dogs allowed
- Well behaved dogs only
- No emotional support animals (note: make sure this is legal in your jurisdiction)
Rules for before arrival
- Service pets must have documentation
- Guest must receive written permission from host
- Host must approve pet in advance
- Guest must agree to pet rules in advance
- Proof of shots and updated shot record
Rules for pet fees and other charges
- Whether the fee is lump sum or per night
- Pet fee is per pet
- Fee determined on case-by-case basis
- Excess pet hair will result in extra cleaning fee
- Penalties for breaking rules (for example not cleaning up after dog)
- Pets require security deposits
Rules for during stay
- Pets must be leashed on property
- Pick up after dog
- Use the dog bag station provided
- Dogs to stay off furniture and/or bed.
- Don’t leave animals unsupervised
- Put pet sheets on furniture
- Pets must be housebroken
- Crate dog if left unattended indoors
- Direction on where to let dog out (front yard, backyard, etc.)
- Vacuum after your pet if it sheds excessively
