Modelling a grading scheme for peer-to-peer accommodation: Stars for Airbnb

This study aims, firstly, to determine whether hotel categories worldwide can be inferred from features that are not taken into account by the institutions in charge of assigning such categories and, if so, to create a model to classify the properties offered by P2P accommodation platforms, similar to grading scheme categories for hotels, thus preventing opportunistic behaviours of information asymmetry and information overload. The characteristics of 33,000 hotels around the world and 18,000,000 reviews from Booking.com were collected automatically and, using the Support Vector Machine classification technique, we trained a model to assign a category to a given hotel. The results suggest that a hotel classification can usually be inferred by different criteria (number of reviews, price, score, and users' wish lists) that have nothing to do with the official criteria. Moreover, room prices are the most important feature for predicting the hotel category, followed by cleanliness and location.