Ghost Booking as a New Philanthropy Channel: A Case Study on Ukraine-Russia Conflict

TL;DR

This study investigates how ghost bookings on Airbnb serve as a new form of humanitarian aid during the Ukraine-Russia conflict, analyzing platform attributes that influence donor behavior.

Contribution

It introduces ghost booking as a novel philanthropy channel on sharing economy platforms and identifies key platform features that motivate donations.

Findings

Donors prefer credible properties with humanitarian needs.

Platform credibility significantly influences ghost booking behavior.

Over 200,000 reviews analyzed to identify donation patterns.

Abstract

The term ghost booking has recently emerged as a new way to conduct humanitarian acts during the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in 2022. The phenomenon describes the events where netizens donate to Ukrainian citizens through no-show bookings on the Airbnb platform. Impressively, the social fundraising act that used to be organized on donation-based crowdfunding platforms is shifted into a sharing economy platform market and thus gained more visibility. Although the donation purpose is clear, the motivation of donors in selecting a property to book remains concealed. Thus, our study aims to explore peer-to-peer donation behavior on a platform that was originally intended for economic exchanges, and further identifies which platform attributes effectively drive donation behaviors. We collect over 200K guest reviews from 16K Airbnb property listings in Ukraine by employing two collection methods (screen scraping and HTML parsing). Then, we distinguish ghost bookings among guest reviews. Our analysis uncovers the relationship between ghost booking behavior and the platform attributes, and pinpoints several attributes that influence ghost booking. Our findings highlight that donors incline to credible properties explicitly featured with humanitarian needs, i.e., the hosts in penury.