What do Airbnb Users Care About Before, During and After the COVID-19? An Analysis of Online Reviews

In this paper, we aim to explore the impact of the COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic on the global tourism industry and the changes in users' online reviews of listings on the Airbnb platform in this context. As a result of the outbreak, countries have introduced travel restriction policies to limit the movement of people and control the spread of the epidemic, which has dealt a severe blow to the global tourism industry. We want to provide an in-depth study of the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on the tourism industry, as well as to explore the changes in the focus and attention of users on the travel experience. This is informative for tourism industry practitioners and policy makers to help better understand market demand and develop more rational policies. We selected online reviews on the Airbnb platform to explore the industry impact of the epidemic. Through topic modeling and sentiment analysis, this paper investigates the changes in users' discussion focus and attention level before, during and after the epidemic, and explores the reasons for them. The results show that the number of non-local visitors plummeted during the epidemic, while visitors paid more attention to topics related to environmental hygiene and personal health. In addition, this paper finds that user reviews have a very clear positive bias. From the triple perspective of platform, hosts, and users, this paper explores the reasons behind the phenomenon.