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Inside Airbnb alternative: 6-city listings in one schema

Inside Airbnb is the first stop for most people hunting Airbnb listings data, and it is a good one: free CSV snapshots for cities worldwide, published under CC BY 4.0. This page compares it with the 6-city pack sold here. The rows come from the same source and carry the same license. The pack adds normalization, an index, and query access on top. Read both columns and pick what fits your project.

What Inside Airbnb gives you

Free, public snapshot files. Downloads need no account.
CC BY 4.0 license, so reuse and republishing work with attribution.
Per-city file sets for dozens of cities, with snapshot dates documented on the site.
Coordinates blurred by about 11 meters and host names removed from summary files, which makes the data safer to share.

For a single-city project, the source files cover it. Download there and skip any purchase.

What the 6-city pack adds

Six Inside Airbnb snapshots ship as six separate files. Cross-city work then starts with an ETL step: rename columns, align types, check each snapshot date, stitch rows together. The pack does that once and ships the result:

One schema, 12 columns, all 6 cities. A query written for Austin runs unchanged against San Diego.
cities-index.csv. Six rows, one per city: snapshot date, listing count, median nightly price, room-type mix.
Summary stats and a data dictionary. Every column documented, per-city stats included, source checksums shipped with the files.
Snapshot dates written out. Each date appears on the product page, in the data dictionary, and next to the files.
MCP query access. query_dataset and get_stats filter and paginate all 90,169 rows, 100 rows per call, from a script or an agent. No ETL on your side.
Host fields dropped everywhere. The files load safely into a shared database or a classroom exercise.

Side by side

	Inside Airbnb	6-city pack
Price	Free	Free sample and free MCP queries; full pack priced on its Getly product page
License	CC BY 4.0	CC BY 4.0, same rows and same license
Coverage	Dozens of cities worldwide	6 US cities, 90,169 listings
Schema	Per-city files, schemas documented per city	12 shared columns across all 6 cities
Cross-city work	You normalize and join the files	Done; cities-index.csv ships with it
Query access	Download CSVs, load your own tools	Same CSVs, plus MCP tools over the full rows
Snapshot dates	Documented on the site	Written on the page and in the files

Snapshot dates, written out

Every city was captured on one date, so each row is a picture of that market that day. The dates below ship with the bundle and appear in the data dictionary:

City	Snapshot date	Listings
Austin, TX	2026-06-22	11,295
Nashville, TN	2026-06-26	10,242
Denver, CO	2026-06-30	4,939
New York City, NY	2026-08-10	30,234
Las Vegas (Clark County), NV	2026-06-27	20,234
San Diego, CA	2026-06-27	13,225

Try the free files first

sample.csv: 20 real Austin rows, all 12 columns.
cities-index.csv: the complete 6-row index with per-city stats.

MCP queries over the full 90,169 rows, free:

npx --allow-git=all -y github:jayjex/dataset-mcp

Those files stay free. If they answer your question, no purchase needed. Worked examples live on the For agents page.

When the source files are enough

Three cases where downloading from Inside Airbnb directly is the better move: you study one city, you need a file type the pack leaves out (calendar, reviews, neighborhood geometry), or you want a fresher snapshot and can normalize it yourself. The pack fits when the job is comparing cities in one schema, feeding rows to an agent over MCP, or cutting the normalization step out of your pipeline.

Get the full 6-city bundle

Download free sample (CSV) Get full data

Full pack: per-city CSVs, cities-index.csv, data dictionary, methodology, source checksums. Checkout and download run through Getly. Data from Inside Airbnb, CC BY 4.0.