The impact of Covid-19 on airbnb: a NlP-based approach of analyzing shifting risk perceptions among tourists during the pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19pandemic has tremendously impacted our society, with massive economic shifts, including within the tourism industry. The aim of this research is to answer the question of how risk awareness has developed among tourists during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using Airbnb reviews, this research examines whether perception of cleanliness has changed since the outbreak and how this has affected indicators such as occupancy, price and monthly income. Based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modelling algorithm, this paper shows that there has been a change in risk perception, which also has a positive impact on the performance indicators of cleanly-perceived properties.