  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.
