Sources of exit: Airbnb consumers’ perspectives
(A2023-114431)

AUTHORS

Esra Aslan, Norwegian School of Economics (NHH)

ABSTRACT

This study sheds light on key attributes affecting Airbnb users' exit behavior through the analysis of online reviews. A corpus that comprises 3700 Airbnb reviews from Trust Pilot is analyzed by using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) approach. LDA analysis revealed four topics of negative experiences that result in exit behavior of the sharing services, namely, poor cancellation and refund policy, risks associated with safety and health, poor customer service, and inaccurate listing information. The findings indicate that an Airbnb customer can leave the service permanently both due to the host related reasons (e.g., risks associated with safety) and Airbnb platform itself (e.g., inadequate customer service). The research uncovers the Airbnb customers pain points and highlights the reasons of exit behavior, which have consequential role for the future of sharing firms.