This will make you think twice before booking a hotel in Boston
Have you ever planned a vacation and balked at the price of hotels? Think about it, the hotel is only one part of the cost of staying somewhere. On top of that you need to eat! Some of us have food restrictions/requirements that are hard to accommodate when traveling. How do we not break the bank and still enjoy our vacation? Have you considered Airbnb? If you rent an apartment instead of a hotel, you may wind up saving money on your room and your meals and not have to worry about food restrictions!
I wanted to find answers to some questions around whether it makes sense to consider staying at Airbnb when traveling to Boston. I based my research on data from Kaggle.com for Airbnb Boston from 2016/2017. Specifically, I used the Listings data with its 95 features and the Calendar data with its 4 features. I did a little cleaning, filtering, encoding and feature engineering to get data ready for modeling. Armed with data and models, it was time to answer some questions.
How does the average price of a hotel in Boston compare to that of an Airbnb property?
Statistas.com has an average hotel price in Boston for 2016/2017 which is the same time period as the Airbnb data. The average was calculated by adding up the quarterly averages and dividing to arrive at $275. The average price for an Airbnb property is $167 but this does not factor in the number of people in your party. Assuming 1–4 people in a hotel room and filtering the Airbnb data based on how many people the unit will accommodate, the average price goes to $143. That’s a savings of $132 right off the bat.
Digging deeper raises questions such as: Is it really a savings if fees are factored in? The average cleaning fee for a like sized property is $61. After factoring that in the room price goes up to $204. That is still a savings of $71.
What do the neighborhoods of Boston have to offer in terms of price and size?
It looks like you should explore the “End” neighborhoods of North End, South End and West End if money isn’t tight. Add South Boston Waterfront to the mix and there should be plenty of viewing opportunities. It was a little surprised to see Back Bay and Beacon Hill so low down the list of average prices as they tend to be affluent neighborhoods. That said, Allston down there at the bottom of the list is not a surprise as it is home to lot of college students.
What options are there to rent a property with a group of 8+ friends?
Need to plan a trip for a group, say a wedding party or even just 2 or 3 families traveling together and need a big place, well Airbnb has options all around Boston. West Roxbury, South End, and South Boston have the most options.
Are there any unique properties available for rent in Boston?
After learning about the costs, neighborhoods, and property sizes of Airbnb properties, I had to wonder what types of properties were being rented out? It being a city, a lot of apartments was probably a safe assumption and now I have data to back that up. Some unique properties did emerge when digging into the data. Staying on a boat would be pricy but fun! A dorm would definitely be an affordable choice if you don’t mind sharing space. Who knew there would be a villa for rent in Boston!
If you had to guess what features help predict the price of an Airbnb property in Boston, what would they be?
Property type? Number of beds? Neighborhood? Well I built a model to do just that. The features that factored most heavily in price prediction were unsurprisingly related to privacy (Room Types: Entire home/apt and Private Room) and size (# bedrooms, # bathrooms, # beds). It is interesting to see that the number of reviews the property gets per month has a positive correlation when predicting price.
What is the takeaway from all of this research?
With this data science project, I set out to answer some questions about Airbnb rentals in Boston. When comparing the cost of a hotel rental vs an Airbnb rental, on average Airbnb will have a $71 savings! When looking at Boston neighborhoods in terms of price and size, it was clear that properties with water views command a higher price. Properties that could accommodate larger groups tended to be clustered in 3 neighborhoods. In looking at the diversity of property types, apartments dominate the list, with options ranging from boat to dorm to villa, so there are choices available. Finally, when looking at predicting the price of an Airbnb unit, size and privacy are key features.
Next time you plan a vacation, will you consider Airbnb?
Find code for this project here on Github.
