A Geolocation Analytics-Driven Ontology for Short-Term Leases: Inferring Current Sharing Economy Trends

Abstract

Short-term property rentals are perhaps one of the most common traits of present day shared economy. Moreover, they are acknowledged as a major driving force behind changes in urban landscapes, ranging from established metropolises to developing townships, as well as a facilitator of geographical mobility. A geolocation ontology is a high level inference tool, typically represented as a labeled graph, for discovering latent patterns from a plethora of unstructured and multimodal data. In this work, a two-step methodological framework is proposed, where the results of various geolocation analyses, important in their own respect, such as ghost hotel discovery, form intermediate building blocks towards an enriched knowledge graph. The outlined methodology is validated upon data crawled from the Airbnb website and more specifically, on keywords extracted from comments made by users of the said platform. A rather solid case-study, based on the aforementioned type of data regarding Athens, Greece, is addressed in detail, studying the different degrees of expansion & prevalence of the phenomenon among the city’s various neighborhoods.

Ontologies application in the sharing economy domain: a systematic review

“…Thus, for the SE domain to show its potential, the knowledge involving peer-to-peer collaboration must be addressed and managed efficiently through good ontology design and development. A study by Alexandridis et al (2020) developed a geolocation ontology to reveal the trends in the short-term rental market. Based on the analysis from the data dumps from the Airbnb website and users' reviews, the proposed ontology discovered ghost hotels within the area and depicted the density of Airbnb listings within the selected neighborhoods.…”

The sharing economy in tourism and property markets: a comment on the darker side of conceptual stretching

“…In the case of the former in particular, there is evidence of (residential) properties being acquired solely for this purpose. The term 'ghost hotels' has been used in towns and cities to denote the fact that the owner never resides in them (Alexandridis et al 2020): for all intents and purposes they are serviced accommodation; yet they are intended to be occupied continually by an impermanent string of 'residents' (not 'visitors'). They provide most if not all the benefits of staying in a hotel but, like so many spaces offered in the sharing economy, they are not subject to commercial regulation (Cromarty and Barton 2019).…”

Airbnb and hotel revenues in popular Greek destinations

“…Additional novelties include the employment of certain robustness checks, as well as the fact that the analysis is based on a unique dataset of Airbnb listings across the major popular Greek tourist destinations. The findings are expected to be of high significance for both tourist and financial authorities, since the hotel industry is strongly complaining that hosts on Airbnb do not pay the occupancy taxes imposed on hotels and can avoid other regulations, such as safety rules (Boutsioukis et al, 2019;Alexandridis et al, 2020).…”