Going back to its roots: can hospitableness provide hotels competitive advantage over the sharing economy?

While the customer experience is at the heart of the hospitality industry, experience-related research remains underrepresented. This gap is critical, particularly given the emerging threat of the sharing economy to the hotel industry along experiential factors. Using data from a survey of 630 customers who stayed at a hotel or an Airbnb, the authors use structural equation modeling to compare two models with alternative conceptualizations of the dynamics of experiential consumption in the accommodations industry. Building on the concept of the experiencescape from the branding and hospitality and tourism literatures, the model enhances Pine and Gilmore’s (1998) original experience economy construct by demonstrating the critical role of the dimension of hospitableness in facilitating favorable experiential and brand-related outcomes, particularly in the context of the hotel experience. The findings have important implications for the hotel industry’s strategic experience design initiatives and emphasize the need to use hospitableness in order to create a competitive advantage in a rapidly changing environment.Accepted manuscrip

How crowdsourcing impacts prices and customer satisfaction: the Airbnb case

The travel accommodation industry has changed drastically due to the sharing economy. This sharing economy depends significantly on crowdsourcing in the form of quantitative and qualitative reviews. In this thesis, we study the impact of expressed sentiments in the text reviews on listing prices; we explore differences in the factors that lead to satisfaction according to customer origin and the effects of external shocks on Airbnb´s prices. We employ NLP to extract the sentiment and emotion scores to be modeled as a function of different characteristics and geophysical information. Our study provides an important contribute to the research on pricing and customer satisfaction in the sharing economy by finding a significant effect of the expression of positive sentiments on prices, describing the differences in the factors that lead to satisfaction according to customer origin, and revealing that guests moved away from main municipalities and valued listings with more bedrooms during the Covid-19 pandemic

Social media brand engagement in the context of collaborative consumption: the case of AIRBNB

This study focuses on social media brand engagement in the context of shared and collaborative consumption businesses, a novel trend in the hospitality industry. By drawing on the concept of brands being defined collectively through an assemblage of heterogonous human and nonhuman actors, and focusing on the brand Airbnb—a peer-to-peer online platform for renting, swapping, and lending accommodations—the current study examines how consumers’ perceptions of Airbnb brand equity mediate the relationship between functional and hedonic brand image and social media behavioral engagement in terms of consumption, contribution, and creation of brand-related content (COBRAs). Results discriminate between direct and indirect effects. Findings reveal that hedonic brand image directly influences behavioral engagement on social media, whereas brand equity fully mediates the relationship between functional brand image and COBRAs. Implications for theory and practice related to shared or collaborative consumption platforms in the hospitality industry are discussed and suggestions for future studies are presented. This research paper provides conceptual and theoretical clarity on issues such as how consumers’ brand perceptions influence their behavioral engagement on social media.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Text Mining of Airbnb Reviews: A holistic approach on reviewers’ opinions and topics distribution

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Marketing IntelligenceThis thesis aims to perform a holistic investigation concerning how Airbnb accommodation features and hosts’ attributes influence guest’s reviews and how are the main topics distributed. A dataset containing almost 4 million reviews from major touristic cities in the world (Milan, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Toronto, San-Francisco, and Sydney) was used for the text mining analysis to uncover the reviews’ social and market norms, as well as the guests’ sentiments and topics distribution. This research uses both Mallet LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) and Word2Vec methods to unveil the semantic structure and similarity between data in this study. This approach will allow hospitality providers to understand the impact of underlying factors on reviewers’ opinions for further improvement of their services. Finally, this study develops a predictive unbiased model to forecast the review’s scores, with an accuracy of 90.70%

What motivates people to become Airbnb hosts – do we know enough? — an exploration of the literature

Airbnb hosts open their doors to provide hospitality for strangers in 7 million homes in more than 100 000 cities around the world. On top of that, Airbnb hosts offer 40 000 guided local experiences across more than 1 000 cities around the world. Yet, in this article, we found that only a limited number of peer-reviewed studies exist on what motivates people to host. Sharing makes a great deal of sense for the consumer, the environment and for communities if managed and balanced fairly by companies and governments. The holistic and thematic map of Airbnb host motivators offered by this article provides hands-on value to those companies and governments and numerous other stakeholders affected by the sharing economy. The findings map a large span of motivational factors that hosts experience, ranging from financial, safety, and security risks of having to submit and renegotiate one’s intimate, affective space and private sphere – to escaping loneliness, connecting with people, making new friends and earning money as a micro-entrepreneur. Finally, the article finds that the thematic categories are interrelated, as the existence of an assurance structure for financial transactions does seem to reduce uncertainty among hosts, allowing them to participate.Keywords: Airbnb host motivation, Airbnb micro-entrepreneurship, collaborative consumption, sharing econom

Airbnb customer satisfaction through online reviews

With the development and better access to the Internet, mobile devices and social media, people began to post online their opinions and reviews of products and services. These comments influence new customer buying decisions and qualify companies to gain superior insight into their customers’ experience and satisfaction. Thus, it has become essential for companies to adopt methods capable of analyzing this information and extracting its value in order to better serve their customers’ unmet needs. The area of tourism and hospitality was one of the most affected by this trend. For this reason, this study will focus on the reviews of an online platform, Airbnb, so that it also studies the technological disruption in the mentioned industry. This new method of home-sharing has gained more and more followers for its advantages and differences compared to common hotels, which has triggered increasing researcher. Airbnb’s guest reviews describe each guest’s experiences (the positive and negative aspects of their stay) and will be studied through Text Mining. This consists of several methods capable of analyzing large amounts of unstructured information such as Big Data, in order to better understand overall customer satisfaction, including the factors that will influence it. Results show that distinct dimensions are valued by guests and they are different in different areas of Sintra.Com o desenvolvimento e maior acesso à Internet, dispositivos móveis e redes sociais, as pessoas começaram a publicar online as suas opiniões e avaliações de produtos e serviços. Estes comentários influenciam as decisões de compra de novos clientes e permitem às empresas obter um maior conhecimento sobre a experiência e satisfação dos seus clientes. Assim, tornou-se imprescindível para as estas, adotarem métodos capazes de analisar esta informação e extrair valor da mesma de modo a conseguirem atender de forma mais ajustada às necessidades dos seus clientes. A área da hospitalidade foi uma das mais afetadas por esta tendência. Por esse motivo, este estudo vai ser focado nas reviews de uma plataforma online, o Airbnb, juntando assim também uma disrupção tecnológica desta mesma área. Este novo método de alojamento partilhado tem ganho cada mais seguidores pelas suas vantagens e diferenças em relação a hotéis mais comuns, mas também tem sido um assunto cada vez mais estudado por investigadores. Os comentários estudados do Airbnb descrevem as experiências de cada hóspede relativamente ao alojamento onde permaneceram e são estudados através de Text Mining. Este consiste em vários métodos capazes de analisar grandes volumes de informação não estruturados como Big data para consequentemente compreender melhor a satisfação geral dos clientes, nomeadamente os fatores que a vão influenciar. Os resultados mostram que existem várias dimensões valorizadas e diferentes para as zonas estudadas em Sintra

Emotional Labor in the Sharing Economy

The peer-to-peer nature of the sharing economy encourages participants to alter their behavior in ways that resemble traditional notions of emotional labor. A key element in this shift lies in the coercive nature of feedback mechanisms which condition both providers and consumers to perform emotional labor during service encounters. Using survey data from 207 sharing economy consumers in the US, we show how different facets of the feedback mechanisms employed by sharing economy services influence consumers’ emotional labor. In addition, we show how platforms and their policies matter in encouraging emotional labor, indicating the need to analyze the topic on a fine-grained level. We conclude by deriving propositions for future research and practical recommendations

Take me on a ride: The role of environmentalist identity for carpooling

Sharing does not need to involve corporate providers but can also happen on a peer-to‐ peer (P2P) basis. P2P sharing platforms who match private providers and users are thus dealing with two different customer segments. An example of this is carpooling, the sharing of a car journey. Recent years have seen considerable research on why people use sharing services. In contrast, there is little knowledge of why people may offer a good for sharing purposes. Drawing on identity theory, this paper suggests that users and providers of carpooling need to be addressed differently. A pilot study and two studies, including both actual car owners and nonowners confirm that the extent to which one identifies as an environmentalist predicts car owners' willingness to offer carpooling, but does not affect nonowners' willingness to use carpooling services. These findings remain robust when controlling for various potential confounds. Furthermore, Study 2 suggests that an environmentalist identity plays an important role for car owners' actual decision to offer a ride via an online platform. These results suggest that marketers of P2P platforms need to pursue different strategies when addressing potential users and providers on the same platform