Things you need to know before you book your next Airbnb in Berlin

Berlin is one of the coolest cities I’ve ever been to. It has an amazing vibe and it is relatively cheap in comparison to other cool cities like NYC. However, finding the right deal for a place to stay can be a daunting task.

Being a master student in CS and a data geek by heart, I felt very great to combine my former experience with a project for the Nanodegree course of Data Science (Udacity) to get the chance to dig into Airbnb’s open data for Berlin for 2019/2020.

In this article I’m going to outline the findings to the following questions:

Airbnb pricing trends in Berlin:

1. How does pricing increase or decrease by season and what is the peak season in Berlin?

2. How does pricing increase or decrease by neighbourhood and which ones are the priciest neighbourhoods in Berlin?

3. How do property types within neighbourhoods impact price for the most expensive neighbourhoods and most common property types?

Airbnb review sentiments in Berlin:

1. How can we categorize reviews based on sentiments?

2. Can we map positive and negative sentiments from reviews to neighbourhoods to understand which neighbourhoods rank higher on the positive sentiment scale and which ones rank higher on the negative sentiment scale?

Airbnb listing price prediction for Berlin:

1. Can we predict the price for a given listing?

2. What factors of the listing correlate best for predicting price?

First, I wanted to check out pricing trends by seasons and neighbourhoods. For someone who wants to visit berlin, It would be great to plan around the peak season since it tends to get expensive, as well as to know which areas would fall in our price range. Let’s look at what I found:

It’s not a surprise that the peak season in Berlin is during September as it is the best time of the year for Berlin when the weather is ideal for cafe sitting, park lazing and leisurely city strolling.

There is definitely a huge variation in different neighbourhoods in Berlin. The most expensive neighbourhoods were Forst Grunewald with an avg. price of $400 followed by Volkspark Wilmersdorf at $346. The cheaper neighbourhoods were Hellersdorf-Süd at $28 and Neu-Hohenschönhausen Süd at $19.5.

I was intrigued by the above findings, so I decided to take it one step further to explore the pricing trends in the expensive neighbourhoods among the most common property types (Condominiums vs. Apartments).

Apartments in Volkspark Wilmersdorf are definitely the most expensive option. It is interesting to note that in Volkspark Wilmersdorf have both the highest and the lowest price.

Shifting gears and looking at reviews published by the users of Berlin Airbnb, I decided to run the reviews through a quick Sentiment Analyzer to understand positive, negative and neutral sentiments. A whopping 71.5%of the reviews were positive, compared to just 13.3%% reviews that were negative. There were about 15.2%of the reviews that were neutral. I took this a step further and associated the reviews by neighbourhoods.

The neighbourhoods with the most positive reviews were südliche Luisenstadt, Reuterstraße, and nördliche Luisenstadt.

The neighbourhoods that ranked lowest on the review scale were Altstadt-Kietz, Hellersdorf-Ost and Hakenfelde.

In addition, I wanted to look at what factors about a listing had the most influence in predicting prices. I found that it was important for listings to have host details. It was also important to have descriptive information about the listing itself as well.

Based on my analysis, I now have solid data to back the fact that Berlin is definitely one of the most popular destinations! September is the are peak here for travel, and pricing can vary vastly between neighbourhoods. Most Airbnb listing reviews in Berlin are positive, so definitely seems like good quality housing options are available to make the best out of your next vacation!

I truly believe that travelling makes us not only better human beings but also teaches us about yourself. So, what’s your next destination going to be? Airbnb is definitely making things easier for all of us, so we have no excuse!

Related posts:

Facebook is watching you and you may want to avoid that. The reason for that may vary, however, since you are here most probably you already have your own. Let me show you how do I do it. Google…

everything but observably nothing, hot and cold, easily marked, difficult to draw with, very important to draw with, incredibly common, hard to make, calm, aggressive, and the list goes on. Such a…

A few stories back I looked at the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Hitch moved on to that great cinema in the sky many years ago, and I was wondering whether there are any living directors that could…