Airbnb: Crisis Communication in the Sharing Economy

To cite this article: Daniel Guttentag (2015) Airbnb: disruptive innovation and the rise of an informal tourism accommodation sector, This article explores the emergence of Airbnb, a company whose website permits ordinary people to rent out their residences as tourist accommodation. The company was just recently established, but it has grown extremely rapidly and is now selling many millions of room nights annually. This rise is examined through the lens of disruptive innovation theory, which describes how products that lack in traditionally favoured attributes but offer alternative benefits can, over time, transform a market and capture mainstream consumers. The concepts of disruptive innovation are used to consider Airbnb's novel business model, which is built around modern internet technologies, and Airbnb's distinct appeal, which centres on cost-savings, household amenities, and the potential for more authentic local experiences. Despite Airbnb's growing popularity, many Airbnb rentals are actually illegal due to short-term rental regulations. These legality issues and their corresponding tax concerns are discussed, with an overview of the current state of regulatory flux and a possible path for resolution. Thereafter, the article considers Airbnb's potential to significantly disrupt the traditional accommodation sector, and the positive and negative impacts Airbnb may have on destinations. Finally, numerous questions for future research are proposed.

Millions of tourists have used Airbnb accommodations, and Airbnb is frequently discussed in terms of its current or future impacts on hotels. The purpose of this research was to investigate such impacts by determining the extent to which Airbnb is used as a hotel substitute and to examine how Airbnb guests expect their accommodations to perform relative to hotels. Together, these analyses were intended to provide empirical insight into Airbnb's status as a disruptive innovation. The study involved an online survey of over 800 tourists who had used Airbnb within the previous year. Nearly two-thirds had used Airbnb as a hotel substitute. When considering traditional hotel attributes (e.g., cleanliness and comfort), Airbnb was generally expected to outperform budget hotels/motels, underperform upscale hotels, and have mixed outcomes versus mid-range hotels, signalling some -but not complete -consistency with the concept of disruptive innovation. Numerous practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

Collectively termed the " Sharing Economy " , collaborative platforms are said to be challenging and redesigning traditional business models and ridding the tourism industry of monopolies and resource inefficiencies as they efficiently allocate assets and human resources. This paper explores the global " disruptive " brand Airbnb by utilizing the concept of cultural capitalism to ask questions as to how disruptive and innovative this platform is. We conclude that research about Airbnb and the sharing economy needs to overcome ahistorical, static, and narrow perspectives to integrate critical theories using diverse intellectual approaches to more fully explore platform's that seek enclosure and control so as to allow market capitalism to function more expediently.

Peer-to-Peer Accommodation Networks: Pushing the boundaries (author S Dolnicar), 2017

Using her first-hand experience as a host on both traditional holiday accommodation webpages and peer-to-peer accommodation network, respected tourism academic Sara Dolnicar examines possible reasons for the explosive success of peer to peer accommodation networks, investigates topics relating to peer-to-peer network accommodation which are less frequently discussed – such as charitable activities and social activism – and offers a future research agenda. Using first hand empirical results, this text provides much needed insight into this ‘disruptive innovator’ for all those studying and working within the tourism and hospitality industries.

Tourism in the era of the sharing economy adopts a model based on a global concept with a local practice. The traditional tourism offer is based on the attractiveness of a destination, expressed by a system of characteristics of the destination itself and a range of services related to accommodation, transport and food. The tourism model of sharing economy, instead, is based on the development of shared services that stimulate the flows of tourists. Traditional destinations are then alongside new destinations that, thanks to some factors that drive the development of sharing economy platforms, attract tourists, change behaviours and modify competitive dynamics. The new paradigm could be briefly described by the 4 Ts of sharing economy: Trust, Togetherness, Technology and Transformation.

Drawing upon Henri Lefebvre's notion of the production of space and Michael Callon's work on performativity in economics, this article examines the material and discursive practices through which the internet 'home-sharing' platform Airbnb has produced new social relations of domestic property. Through a critical examination of the discourses and practices of Airbnb in the popular media, courts of law and public hearings, I argue that internet-based platforms such as Airbnb represent a fundamental reworking of social relations of property based on radically new socio-material assemblages. These assemblages—which have served to further commoditise housing by constructing a new market in short-term rentals—have entailed the disruption of not just the hospitality sector, but of the socio-spatial relations of urban housing. As emerging spaces of domestic entrepreneurialism, short-term rentals have generated their own forms of localised opposition. With the spread of Airbnb transforming the lived spaces of housing across New York City, a discursive struggle has ensued over the meanings of this new form of domestic property. In the popular press, courts of law and the chambers and steps of city halls, the stakes have been nothing less than the means and ends of urban governance itself.

Airbnb, the largest networked hospitality platform, originated in “social travel” and is still associated with the “Sharing economy” and with altruism. But since 2008, it has evolved from sharing spare rooms and “living like a local” into a very successful business. Now that Airbnb beats the major hotel chains in accommodation offered and in valuation, we can argue many did not realize the extent and the power of the disruptive business model of “networked hospitality”. Building upon a previous scenario study about the potential future growth of Airbnb (Oskam & Boswijk, 2016), this paper will analyse the phenomenon in Amsterdam using data collected from the company’s website. It will propose a research agenda identifying further knowledge gaps. The study seeks to contribute to the understanding of networked hospitality businesses to inspire strategies for the hospitality industry and regulatory policies that foster innovation and reduce harmful side-effects.

Trust on the Line. A Philosophical Exploration of Trust in the Networked Era.

Please refer to as: Esther Keymolen (2016) Trust on the Line. A Philosophical Exploration of Trust in the Networked Era. Wolf Legal Publisher: Oisterwijk. Chapter 7 of my book Trust on the Line. A Philosophical Exploration of Trust in the Networked Era. This chapter addresses the role of trust on the platform of Airbnb. The aim of this platform is to connect people who want to rent their house or a room in their house and people who are looking for a place to stay while traveling. AirBnB is a prime example of the shared economy movement. This movement wants to change the economic system, which is based on ownership, to a system that is based on access. In short, it should no longer be important to own things but to have access to them. By cutting out the middleman, in this case the hotel owner, old forms of trust based on reputation and reciprocity can be reinvented. In other words, trust is solely something that is part of the context level. I will, however, argue that this view is based on a utopian belief that technology can restore the indirectness of the ontological distance that is at the centre of every interaction. I will show how not only the construction of the platform is shaping the building of trust, but that also the interests of the curator – AirBnB, a privately owned company - and the codification of AirBnB and several state actors should be taken into account when analysing trust between users of AirBnB.

Journal of Business Research, 2018

The sharing economy is a global phenomenon with rapid growth potential. While research has begun to explore segmentation between users and non-users, only limited research has looked at consumer segmentation within sharing economy services. In this paper, we build on this research gap by investigating consumer segmentation within a single sharing economy platform: Airbnb. Utilizing a mixed methods approach, with both a quantitative survey and a qualitative content analysis of Airbnb listings, we compare two different types of accommodation offered on Airbnb: shared room and entire home. Our findings indicate that within a single platform, the variety between offerings can create distinct consumer segments based on both demographics and behavioral criteria. We also find that Airbnb hosts use marketing logic to target their listings towards specific consumer segments. However, there is not, in all cases, strong alignment between consumer segmentation and host targeting, leading to potentially reduced matching efficiency.

Sigma Iota Rho Journal of International Relations, 2017

This paper discusses one the most pressing issues in the field of Modern Middle Eastern Studies: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Specifically, this paper aims to investigate the politics of Airbnb in the West Bank, and the ways in which Airbnb listings affect settlers’ sense of place and normalcy. The rise of the sharing economy and experience based tourism has provided settlers with the potential to leverage tourism as a political tool, asserting their perceived ownership and identity in a world that largely regards them as illegitimate. The paper draws from a variety of sources including historical analyses of the region and of Airbnb as a company, modern online news outlets, and Airbnb listings themselves to better understand the politics of place at play in the West Bank. This paper concludes that the sense of identity that settlers derive from Airbnb and tourism fails to cause major changes of opinion on the world stage. More serious changes will only come when settlers are willing to alter the way in which they engage with the outside world and the language with which they do so.