Airbnb hosts trying to catch a discerning renter’s eye might highlight their high-end kitchens or sparkling swimming pools. But they could also tap a potentially more valuable marketing tool that’s free: a simple smile.
Airbnb profile photos with cheerful facial expressions leave renters with more positive impressions of the hosts, which significantly increases demand for their properties, according to recent research, “Serving With a Smile on Airbnb,” by Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Shunyuan Zhang.
And if a property owner is trying to rent a home in a less desirable neighborhood? That grin becomes even more critical to attracting business, says Zhang. She found that smiling is particularly helpful when renters are uncertain about the quality of a person’s accommodations or have concerns about interacting with the property owners.
With a growing number of consumer purchases shifting from in-store to the internet in recent years, Zhang’s research has important implications for business owners developing strategies for attracting buyers online. Smiles can make a difference not only in travel and hospitality but in any industry where trust is paramount, including those focused on customer service.
Savvy managers should consider displaying happy faces strategically on their websites, Zhang suggests. For instance, consider how patients might evaluate the trustworthiness of a medical provider based on the doctor’s website photo.
“When patients choose which doctor they want, they’re thinking about [the person’s] professional background, but they’re still looking at photos and making inferences about personal traits or characteristics about the doctor; for example, the doctor’s warmth, competence, and trustworthiness,” Zhang says.
Zhang conducted the research, forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Research, with Elizabeth Friedman, a professor at Columbia Business School; Kannan Srinivasan, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University; Ravi Dhar, a professor at Yale University; and Xupin Zhang, a professor at East China Normal University.
What does a smile convey?
In the past, Zhang has found that the quality of property photos can impact bookings on Airbnb, whose peer-to-peer rentals have challenged the traditional hotel model. The site, which provides a money-making opportunity for homeowners and boasts millions of listings, is ripe for analyzing consumer behavior, partly because of the obstacles involved in attracting customers, she says. One of those frictions is renter uncertainty.
Consumers may feel more comfortable staying at a popular hotel chain based on reputation rather than paying a deposit on an untested rental home. How could they know that the owner of a cute Victorian steps from the town center isn’t a horror movie villain?
“Unlike hotel rooms, which are more standardized, every Airbnb property is different, and properties are hosted by strangers,” Zhang explains. “If you stay at a hotel chain brand, you have some kind of trust that you know what you’ll get. With Airbnb, if you’ve never stayed at the place before, you’re uncertain about your choice. How do we deal with or resolve this uncertainty?”
The research team decided to focus on hosts’ profile expressions partly because previous research shows that smiling during in-store transactions improves customer satisfaction and makes employees seem friendlier.
After all, consumers deduce interpersonal information about people, such as their levels of competency and trustworthiness, through facial expressions, Zhang says. In the world of consumer behavior, these are considered "non-informational cues." While informational cues on an app like Airbnb would include star ratings and price, non-informational cues are less quantifiable—and might include, say, the vibe a person gets from somebody’s selfie.
“People make a lot of inferences based on the faces of other people. [This information] may be hard to quantify, but it’s important in influencing our daily decision-making,” Zhang says.
Zhang and her colleagues analyzed datasets related to Airbnb property characteristics and bookings, neighborhood information, and hosts' profile photos. They built a deep learning model optimized for facial recognition using 3.3 million images and analyzed hosts based on age, gender, and whether they smiled. The research team also recruited people to participate in online surveys, asking them whether they would likely book rentals with specific hosts—some smiling in their photos and others not.
Based on the series of studies, the researchers found:
Smiling in profile photos increases demand
The researchers noticed that most hosts smiled—but 25 percent didn’t. The study results showed people perceive those who smile as more warm and competent than those who don’t, creating a positive “halo effect” that reduces the uncertainty associated with staying at that person’s property and interacting with the host. As a result, demand for these properties increased by 3.5 percent.
Male hosts benefit more than women
Women smiled much more on average than men in their profile photos. But smiling boosted rental demand even more for men, perhaps because people tend to feel more uncertain about interacting with male hosts, the researchers say. A smile in a male host’s profile photo increased demand by nearly 9 percent.
Smiling works for non-Airbnb properties, too
Smiles increased the likelihood of booking for family-owned boutiques and Hilton hotel chains as well, although the effects were weaker than for Airbnb.
Smiling can help properties overcome trust barriers
The researchers found that rentals with factors working against them—for instance, inexperienced hosts or properties in less desirable neighborhoods—suffered from a trust deficit that a smile could offset. Demand for a smiling inexperienced host rose an extra 6 percent relative to a smiling experienced host.
So if people aren’t offering an oceanfront manor with an infinity pool, the least they can do is smile, Zhang advises.
“It could actually very effectively resolve the issue for them,” Zhang says, “which means more bookings for hosts.”
Image by Ariana Cohen-Halberstam.
