So, you want to travel to Boston and take an AirBnB? — Here is what you need to know!
AirBnB makes it easy and cheaper to explore foreign cities.
AirBnB was launched in August 2008 under the name AirBed & Breakfast to provide short-term living quarters, breakfast and a business networking opportunity for those who were unable to book a hotel in the saturated market.
Since then AirBnB became a global business with a revenue $2.6 billion in 2017. Today Airbnb is a platform, that provides hosts with the opportunity to accommodate guests with short-term lodging and tourism-related activities.
This blog post will give you the knowledge to make the right decision for choosing the optimal BnB for your stay in Boston. Related to that the following questions will be answered:
1. What is the availability over the year and how does it affect the price?
2. Where are the BnBs in Boston and how expensive is each of them?
3. Which neighbourhoods are the most expensive?
4. What features influence the price of a BnB?
5. How does amenities impact the price?
Now that it is clear what you get from reading this poste, let us directly start with the first Question:
1.What is the availability over the year and how does it affect the price?
As you can see in the plot since more BnBs became available the mean price reduced to around $180 to $200 . The spike in the price is around the date of the Boston Marathon. Furthermore, there seems to be a pattern in the price that appears to be on a weekly basis. Let’s look at the mean price plotted for each day of the week.
The chart clearly shows that the price increases on Fridays and Saturdays. So if you want to save some monye, I would suggest visiting Boston from January to April and Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday would be the optimal days.
2. Where are the BnBs in Boston and how expensive is each of them?
As Boston is the biggest City in New England and the capital of the state Massachusetts it can be hard to decide on a specific location. The following map is interactive and should give you the tools to choose the right location. When hovering over a point you will see the price and neighborhood related to the listing.
3. Which neighbourhoods are the most expensive?
As mentioned above Boston is the biggest city in New England and offers a wide verity of neighborhoods to visit and maybe you have one in mind where you would like to stay. The next chart shows the average price difference to the mean price of the BnBs related to their neighbourhood:
The most expensive is Bay Village, the Leather District and South Boston Waterfront, which are on average $75 more expensive than the mean price. So if you want to save some money I would suggest picking a BnB in Roxbury which isn’t that far from downtown than the other cheaper neighborhoods. If you are willing to stay outside of the main areas, you can obviously save more money.
4. What features influence the price of a BnB?
As we saw in the chart above the neighbourhood showed strong variability in the price. But what about the location itself: What features influence the price of the listing?
I did a linear regression to get the impact of relevant features. The result of a linear regression is a so called coefficient which lets you interpret the change of price in us dollars which makes it easy to understand what each feature contributes to the price of a listing.
The strongest impact on price is the neighborhood of the BnB (which comes to no surprise since we already showed that different neighborhoods are on average priced well above or below the mean.) More specific the neighborhood Bay Village had the strongest impact as it increases the price by exactly $95,77.
Clearly you can choose a neigbourhood that isn’t as expansive to save some money but the best way to save money is to choose a private or shared room in comparison to an entire home/apartment. Here you can save up to $70. Another feature to save some money is to choose a bed type couche as the bed type here you can save an additional $18,82 in comparison to an air bed. It is interesting that number of review and review score had basically zero impact on the price of the BnB, as you can see in the chart below:
If you want to visit Boston cheaply you should be traveling alone or with one person extra, because each bedroom will cost you on average $45,50 more. You should also not choose a special kind of property type. Property type Other includes: Villa, Boat and entire floors, which will set you back an extra $40 in comparison to an apartment, or $35 for a house or a loft.
5. How does amenities impact the price?
As you look at the chart, you maybe wonder why amenities can reduce the price of a BnB.
A host is more inclined to list all amenities which should be under the category essential like internet access, lock on bedroom door or hangers, if he can’t offer much more than that, so it is more a signal about the ‘class’ of the object.
The good news many amenities won’t set you back so much, you can choose a lot of them for around $5 a night, like your best companion (your dog).
To have a doorman or an indoor fireplace is most likely not on everybodays essential list. But if you need it then it will set you on average $20 back. $13 for air condition is also on the expensive site but remember from January to April you won’t need one.
Now you should be able to choose a date and the right BnB for your visit in Boston. Here is a short list to summarize the main points:
- Travel date: between January and April on a Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday
- Location: Roxbury is a nice neighbourhood that won’t cost as much and is relatively close to Downtown
- Amenities: you can’t always expect to get the essentials but a alot of them won’t set you back that much (around $5)