[Completed] Airbnb host survey for the COVID-19 response

The survey has been completed. Thank you for your time :slight_smile:

The questionnaire is about the crisis over Airbnb hosting during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how you feel about Airbnb’s response to the crisis. I will take approximately 5 minutes to complete the questionnaire. Your answer will be used only for the research purpose, not commercial use.

All respondents will get a $5 Amazon gift card as a token of our appreciation!

Survey link: https://www.questionpro.com/t/AQjeoZhfXV

If you have any questions, please contact e917205@khu.ac.kr

Representatives of Smart Tourism Research Center (STRC)

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Pleasant change for someone looking for data to actually offer a small inducement to all participants, well done.

JF

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Who is the ‘Smart Tourism Centre’? Why are you carrying out the survey? Why should hosts participate? @Hwirim

The way you have phrased the questions are designed to lead to one outcome in terms of your survey results and many of your questions are variations of the same theme.

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Hello Helsi:)

Thank you for your comment!
Smart Tourism Research Center provide global trends regarding smart tourism such as sharing economy, AI adoption in hotel, etc.
This survey is for the academic article. We would like to know the Airbnb host’s difficulties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and how hosts feel about Airbnb’s response.
There are a lot of academic researches on Airbnb guests, whereas not many studies on Airbnb hosts. This research tries to focus on and advocate the right to Airbnb hosts. If you want to give your opinion, we will appreciate your participation but it’s absolutely fine if you don’t want to answer :slight_smile:

You haven’t answered my valid comment though; if you work for a market research company you should know how to design a survey and survey questions that are without bias and not to have multiple questions that call for the same answer/conclusion.

I wouldn’t answer because it’s clear your ‘survey’ has been designed to give you the headlines you want for your newspaper article rather than as a neutral academic study.

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The way you have phrased the questions are designed to lead to one outcome in terms of your survey results and many of your questions are variations of the same theme.

RE: Thank you for your opinion. Let me explain.
It wasn’t designed to lead to one outcome, because the respondent can choose the answer ‘Disagree’ about the questions. About the variation of the same theme, it is necessary to design the scale items similarly for detecting a careless responding without reading carefully. You may consider this academic format not practical… but please understand this is not for the report.
All questions were verified by the literature review and the pilot test.

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This is not for the newspaper. This is for the academic article in the journal.
We built the research model with hypotheses and try to verify by using data from the survey. Hypotheses are just hypotheses. Those may not be confirmed or confirmed. If you want, I can give you the references of the construct and scale items.

No don’t worry part of my day job is engagement including designing surveys @Hwirim :slight_smile: The phraseology of the questions are definitely designed to lead to an anti-airbnb sentiment in terms of the response.

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You think so? I had a look and thought it was fairly even handed. Phraseology a bit stilted, but not too bad for a non native speaker.

JF

@Hwirim Having looked at the questionnaire, I found myself split-thinking about Airbnb as an overall organisation, and the Customer Service representatives I have dealt with when I’ve had issues or problems.

I’ve had no experience of them during the pandemic, as I closed down before the UK Govt followed suit. I had no cancellations, as I closed before I would have expected any, prior to Easter.

My views of Airbnb as an organisation are tempered by the dreadful experience I had with their Airbnb+ programme, when they were totally intransigent and I felt I would lose control as a Host. They are just as intransigent over retaliatory reviews, and the one I had very early on still affects my rating overall.

That said, I am one of the very fortunate people to have experienced excellent support from their customer service reps.

This research is not for proving if Airbnb is doing well or not.
Hypotheses test the relationship between variables.

For example, there is a survey for ice cream brand “A” and asks taste, price, service quality, satisfaction, and brand loyalty. In that case, the research is to determine which factors affect the satisfaction of the brand, not to determine that ice cream A is delicious or not. The relation between taste and satisfaction can be significant. On the other hand, the relationship between service quality and and satisfaction can be not significant.

What I am trying to say is that the point of the research is the relationship, so we are not interested in the conclusion like anti-Airbnb.

You look this survey just from your perspective. There are people who think that the COVID-19 is uncontrollable happening or people who are satisfied with the Airbnb’s coping strategy.

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The questions are poorly worded if an objective analysis is intended. Variations are OK to provide some consistency.

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Some are, what we in the trade call, leading questions :slight_smile:

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You can lead me anywhere you want in a survey, especially if the outcome will not effect me directly, for an Amazon gift card; and if you think that’s mercenary, you wanna see what I’ll do for two pints of Estrella and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps :wink:

JF

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@JohnF fair enough :slight_smile:

Two pints of estrella definitely - have to be cheese and onion though.

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Personally, I’m astonished that a survey that claims to be professional would offer a mere $5. You should put it on MTurk or something for that figure.

You see, there’s truth in the old saying ‘you get what you pay for’. The problem with asking hosts here to give you their opinions is that this group is not necessarily indication of an Airbnb host - whatever that might be.

Because the survey link is posted on a public forum that can be seen by anyone in the world, there’s no guarantee that non-hosts wouldn’t have a go - bored youngsters mostly. There are also survey-people and non survey-people.

And even within the members here there are hosts with experience covering many years and hosts who have only been in the world of hospitality for a short time. (And everything in between).

There are hosts whose business is self-reliant who don’t depend on Airbnb for ensuring back-to-back guests and there are those who solely rely on Airbnb - and again, everything in between.

There are hosts who have STR businesses with maybe more than one rental and rely on those for their living. There are hosts who have a spare bedroom and see STR as being a part-time way to make a little extra money - and again EIB.

There are many many more variations and every single host has, mostly, different ways of working and therefore completely different opinions.

I know it’s a current thing, getting opinions by bunging a quick survey online, but that’s not how you’re going to get accurate, genuine information.

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You could have just posted here and some people will answer for free. As you can see, you can definitely get people to use their valuable time to critique your survey for free. LOL. However, if you want my critique that will be another $5. LOL.

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I bit. I defer to those with survey expertise, but I thought there was a balance between “I’m totally pissed at Airbnb” and “Airbnb has my back” question wording. What I couldn’t convey directly is that I don’t expect Airbnb to give a fig about a “caring” relationship with me as they are a business. Jaquo, there is a section at the end asking for host demographics that addresses the host variations you bring up. You are correct in that for all we know Airbnb staff are busily filling out false survey responses, but I expect as this appears to be an academic organization, they may have an algorithm to throw out outlier responses. At a minimum the resulting averages or bell curve will minimize the outliers.

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The survey appears to be poorly translated into English. You can’t hope to get accurate results or draw accurate conclusions from it.

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Well @Hwirim could have sent it to you in Korean but I bet your Korean is worse than their English :grin: Are you actually suggesting that you don’t understand the questions?

This is legitimate research group and the OP is listed as one of their “student members” which implies that someone else is already critiquing and overseeing their methods and communication. I doubt that they need a bunch of fussy hosts critiquing them as well. Take the survey or don’t. Personally, I think this kind of research is positive for our field and thank @Hwirim for including us!

I’ve also done plenty of research both socioloical and medical and I don’t think there is anything wrong with the questions or how they are asked. Though that’s not what was asked of us anyway. We were asked as hosts not researchers, lol.

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