Visualizing the Airbnb Landscape in Three Megacities

Since its inception in 2008, Airbnb has grown into one of the most popular travel and short-term accommodation apps on the market.

In 2021 alone, there were more than 300 million bookings (for both accommodation and experiences) made through the app.

To visualize just how massive the Airbnb landscape has become in major cities, this graphic by Preyash Shah shows every single listing in New York, London, and Paris.

About the Data

To make this graphic, Shah used September 2022 data from insideairbnb.com, a website that pulls data directly from the Airbnb app. Once collected, the raw data was then cleaned to include active listings only fitting a few key parameters:

• Any listing that did not have a review in 2022 was removed
• The most expensive listings were individually checked to ensure the listing price matched the actual historical price and removed if there was a major discrepancy. This is due to inactive listings that are extremely marked up instead of de-listed

After scrubbing the data, each city’s immediate metro area was left with roughly 20,000 listings.

As the data shows, a majority of these listings were for entire apartments. Paris had the biggest share, with about 85% of listings for entire apartments rather than private or shared rooms.

This is especially interesting considering that Paris has extremely strict regulations around short-term rentals and Airbnb usage, one being that an Airbnb rental must be someone’s primary residence.

Airbnb’s Beginnings

Two co-founders of Airbnb include Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, two roommates in San Francisco.

In an act of desperation, they decided to set up and rent out a few air mattresses on the floor of their apartment to help pay their rent. Free breakfast was included with the stay, and after getting $80 a night for each mattress, Chesky and Gebbia knew they were onto something.

Yet, while Airbnb has shown great success over the last decade, it’s received its fair share of criticism from skeptics. Because of concerns over housing supply and price gouging, many cities have put restrictions around the use of Airbnb, or even outright banned the platform.

Like other technology companies, Airbnb has had a challenging year in the stock market. Once valued at $113 billion in 2021, the company is currently sitting closer to a $60 billion market capitalization today.

This article was published as a part of Visual Capitalist's Creator Program, which features data-driven visuals from some of our favorite Creators around the world.