Title: Exploring the impact of COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine dissemination on Airbnb's popularity and sentiment on Twitter

Authors: Sina Shokoohyar; Vahid Ghomi; Amirsalar Jafari Gorizi; Weimin Liang; Charlie Evert

Addresses: Department of Computing and Decision Sciences, Stillman School of Business, Seton Hall University, 400 W S Orange Ave., South Orange, New Jersey, 07079, USA ' Project and Supply Chain Management Program Department, Penn State Mont Alto, 1 Campus Drive, Mont Alto, Pennsylvania 17237, USA ' American University, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC, 20016, USA ' Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 121 Presidents Dr., Amherst, MA 01003, USA ' Erivan K. Haub School of Business, Saint Joseph's University, 5600 City Ave, Philadelphia, PA 19131, USA

Abstract: This study aims to quantify the sentiment of those discussing Airbnb on Twitter and visualise how this sentiment differed in three main periods: prior to the pandemic (pre-COVID-19), and during the pandemic before vaccines were disseminated (pre-vaccine), and during the pandemic, after vaccines were disseminated (post-vaccine). 344,705 tweets relating to Airbnb are collected. In this study, popularity, and usage analytics, sentiment analytics, voice analytics, and topic mining analytics were utilised. Through exploring the data in these three periods, it is possible to distinguish inverse correlations between the number of COVID-19 cases/deaths as compared to the popularity and positive sentiment of Airbnb-related tweets. Other findings include the topics most mentioned along with Airbnb on Twitter and an illustration of how the 'voice' of COVID-19 manifests in Airbnb tweets. The unique contribution of this study is in exploring Twitter sentiment towards Airbnb throughout the pandemic, as well as after the vaccine dissemination.

Keywords: peer-to-peer accommodation; Airbnb; COVID-19 pandemic; voice analytics; topic mining analytics; latent Dirichlet allocation; LDA.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2025.145134

International Journal of Web Based Communities, 2025 Vol.21 No.1/2, pp.124 - 154

Received: 08 Aug 2022
Accepted: 20 Mar 2023
Published online: 21 Mar 2025 *

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