What is Airbnb's business model?

Airbnb is a community-based, two-sided online platform that facilitates the process of booking private
living spaces for travelers. On the one side it enables owners to list their space and earn rental money.
On the other side it provides travelers easy access to renting private homes. Airbnb acts as a platform
for hosts and travelers. Hosts can put up their property for stay and if someone wishes to stay there, the
hosts get rent in exchange. The individuals who stay at Airbnb get a completely different experience by
staying close to the locals.

How does data influence different aspects of Airbnb’s business (customer value proposition, process,
capabilities)

Data driven technology is the key differentiator for the rapid growth of AirBnB and how it can make
better recommendations by matching the right people together. Using the customer reviews and
assigning polarity to it quantifies customer satisfaction and helps hosts make strategic updates to their
rental listings. Data has been in the forefront of developing unique data products and modifying existing
open source technologies to perfect suit their needs.

How would you calculate the potential revenue of a property on Airbnb using available data?

The inputs or comments/reviews of the customers were obtained in the form of text but could not be
used in regression modelling, so a model to use customer reviews was designed to optimize property
performance. The software chosen for this analysis was called qdap in R. Once the raw data was
imported into this sentiment analysis tool, all the data could be mapped to the variables. The qdap in R
polarity algorithm used a prespecified dictionary of positive and negative words. Neutral words had no
polarity. These polarity scores were computed to find the average. Once the numerical value was
assigned, it was used in regression modelling technique to optimize the revenue and calculate any other
variable and potential revenue.