By Lisa Ward

When it comes to Airbnb bookings, a smile can go a long way.

So suggests a study published online last year that found that Airbnb hosts who smile in their profile pictures tend to attract more online bookings than those who don't smile. And important to note: Smiling mattered most for male hosts rather than female ones, according to the research.

The researchers looked at 9,248 hosts listing properties on Airbnb between January and August 2016. They found that a profile photo of a smiling host increased demand for properties by about 3.5% on average compared with hosts who didn't smile in their photos. The researchers measured demand by looking at the number of days a property was booked in a month.

When male hosts posted smiling profile pictures, demand for their properties increased by 8.7% compared with male hosts with straight-faced photos, according to the study. For female hosts, however, smiling or having a straight face in a profile picture made little statistical difference. There were more female hosts than male ones in the overall sample, which brought down the overall average to around 3.5%.

"Smiling helps boost demand in certain circumstances," says Shunyuan Zhang, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School and one of the researchers, adding that smiling may make more of a difference when the person booking the Airbnb is unsure about the listing's quality or the host.

In the analysis, researchers found that smiling had a greater effect on demand for hosts with less experience, hosts whose properties were in areas with more crime and hosts renting a single room in a home rather than an entire dwelling.

To better understand their initial findings, the researchers ran a series of laboratory experiments in which they showed participants a series of mock Airbnb listings and surveyed them about their likelihood to book the properties.

They concluded that a smiling profile picture had less of an effect on how participants viewed the actual accommodation, but it did have a significant effect on how they viewed the host. In one experiment, the researchers asked participants several questions, including: "How certain are you that the interactions with the host will be positive?" Those who saw a smiling host rated their expected interactions with the host 6.03 on a 9-point scale (with 9 being "very certain" and 1 being "not at all certain") compared with 4.86 when the host didn't smile.

"Smiling creates a halo effect. It inspires confidence in the host, which in turn increases the likelihood of booking an accommodation," says Elizabeth Friedman, an assistant professor at Columbia University Business School and one of the researchers.

Why does smiling seem to make more of a difference for men than women?

The authors found that the study's participants had more confidence in female hosts, viewing them as warmer, more trustworthy and competent than male hosts regardless of their facial expressions. Other papers had similar findings.

"Extensive research has documented that women are perceived as friendlier, more oriented toward the community, and more trustworthy than men," says Friedman, which could explain why participants were less concerned about interacting with female hosts.

Lisa Ward is a writer in Vermont. She can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 27, 2025 10:00 ET (14:00 GMT)

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