The first time I visited Seattle was 20 years ago, I only stayed one night which was a good memory. Since then, Seattle has been booming thanks to all the high tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft. Seattle is always on the top list of the cities that I want to revisit.
Covid-19 changes everyone’s life in the world, traveling becomes extremely challenge especially on deciding where to stay. AirBnB provides an alternative for people who travel with family or/or friends and be affordable to stay in a family like environment.
In planning my trip to Seattle (of course, after the pandemic is over), I am curious about:
1. What are the top three locations with the most AirBnB listings?
2. Does the listing price change over the season or month? If so, when is the most economical time to visit Seattle?
3. How does the other factors such as # of bedrooms or review scores impact the listing price?
Using the CRISP-DM methodology I recently learned in my “Data Science” class from Udacity, I would like to do some analysis on the Seattle data provided by AirBnB and available on Kaggle, and hopefully it can answer my questions.
First, let’s take a look at the datasets, and it shows:
Some datasets have quite a lot missing values, and not all the columns are related to my questions. Before performing any analysis on the data, some preparation on the data needs to be done such as building a clean data frame to include only the related fields with meaningful values that can provide some answers to my questions.
What are the top three locations with the most AirBnB listings?
Once the data is prepared, I can now take a deep look at the data to see if I can find the location with the most listings, here is what I find:
Excluding “Other neighborhoods”, “Capitol Hill” is the one with most AirBnB listings, followed by “Downtown” and “Central Area”, my first question is answered.
Does the listing price change over the season or month? If so, when is the most economical time to visit Seattle?
Now let’s see if I can find out the answer for my second question, I start with the high level overview of the prices, and it shows the majority of listings is centered around $100 ~ $150.
But does it depend on the season or month? What is the average price for each month? With further analysis, I obtain the following:
So the question to my second question is now answered — July through September is the most popular months as the price is higher, if I wait a little bit until November, the price might drop by more than 10%. If I can wait until February or March, the price will be more affordable.
How does the other factors such as # of bedrooms or review scores impact the listing price?
The listings data set provides tons of information for each listing, I would like to understand how other factors might impact the pricing, I select the following factors:
· Accommodates
· Bathrooms
· Bedrooms
· Beds
· Number of Reviews
· Review Scores Rating
By running an analysis on each of them with pricing, here is the result:
Apparently, “bedrooms” and “beds” definitely impact the pricing, but surprisingly, “accommodates” is the one that impacts the pricing the most. Review doesn’t seem to impact the price at all.
Conclusion
Using CRISP-DM method to analyze the Seattle AirBnB data, I can easily get all my questions answered:
1. The top three locations with the most listings are: Capitol Hill, Downtown and Central Area.
2. The listing price does change depends upon the season or month. The most economical time to visit Seattle is February or March.
3. The factors that impact the pricing are: accommodates, bedrooms and beds. Reviews don’t seem to impact the price.
Now, I am ready to plan my next trip to Seattle 😊
