“Thank you to Marie for her welcome and her kind attentions!”, “Gauthier was very friendly and responsive” … on the Airbnb site, by which a third of the seasonal rentals in France pass, the comments of This genre – positive, even enthusiastic – are very majority, providing for rental candidates a feeling of security, that they do not feel in the same way on competing platforms.
The average notes are also very different. Half of the Airbnb housing drops a perfect note of 5/5 while only a quarter of those offered by TripAdvisor exceeds 4.5/5. How is it possible that so many tenants passing through Airbnb are so satisfied? Are mediocre housing here drastically eliminated, or the masted bitter opinions thanks to a tip? This is the starting point for our research, which led us to study in detail the online evaluation system set up by the platform.
Like any accounting system, this evaluation is based on choices: what to count, how to count it and how to restore it publicly (or not). It is Airbnb, of course, which here chooses the rating criteria (cleanliness, quality/price ratio, etc.), the weighting of these criteria, and the fact that they appear publicly, such as prisms of value of the intimacy of owners, what really matters in housing.
a fine knowledge of consumer psychology
During our research, we analyzed the ways of communicating online from the Airbnb community ( Netnography ), studied in a statistical way the evaluations received over several years in the largest” Airbnb cities “in the world, and finally conducted interviews with users in France. We thus highlighted the way in which the platform managed, in a skillful way, to maximize the number of favorable and very favorable opinions, which increased the overall attractiveness of its offer, while minimizing the cost of controls.
Very problematic housing is, in fact, quickly identified in the midst of delighted evaluations. To reach these goals, Airbnb uses several techniques based on fine knowledge of consumer psychology. First of all, the platform, much more than its competitors, carefully stages the human aspect of the relationship between owners and tenants.
Both must post their photos, present themselves personally, evoke their tastes, their hobbies, describe their habits. The purpose of this presentation is to secure the owners, the identity of future visitors that can be verified by the platform. But it also has a psychological impact. In this context, the tenant is not an anonymous customer who can complain without a complex of an owner/provider who would also be anonymous.
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