Daniel Guttentag

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 Airbnbs novel business model, which is built around modern internet technologies, and Airbnbs distinct appeal, which centres on cost-savings, household amenities, and the potential for more authentic local experiences. Despite Airbnbs 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 Airbnbs 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.

Volunteer Tourism: As Good as It Seems?

This Department has been specifically created to include findings of special significance and problem areas of subtle nuances in tourism research. Insightful contributions presenting the state-of-the-art, preferably from the developing societies, will be appreciated. It will also encourage scholars and authors to think against the grain, probing the consistency of theoretical notions and research trends whose heuristic value is all too often taken for granted. For details, contact Editor-in-Chief, Tourism Recreation Research, A-965/6 Indira Nagar, Lucknow, India, e-mail: trrworld@gmail.com

Why Tourists Choose Airbnb: A Motivation-Based Segmentation Study:

Airbnb has grown very rapidly over the past several years, with millions of tourists having used the service. The purpose of this study was to investigate tourists’ motivations for using Airbnb and to segment them accordingly. The study involved an online survey completed in 2015 by more than 800 tourists who had stayed in Airbnb accommodation during the previous 12 months. Aggregate results indicated that respondents were most strongly attracted to Airbnb by its practical attributes, and somewhat less so by its experiential attributes. An exploratory factor analysis identified five motivating factors—Interaction, Home Benefits, Novelty, Sharing Economy Ethos, and Local Authenticity. A subsequent cluster analysis divided the respondents into five segments—Money Savers, Home Seekers, Collaborative Consumers, Pragmatic Novelty Seekers, and Interactive Novelty Seekers. Profiling of the segments revealed numerous distinctive characteristics. Various practical and conceptual implications of the findings are discussed.

Pricing in the sharing economy: a hedonic pricing model applied to Airbnb listings

ABSTRACT This paper examines the impact of a variety of variables on the rates published for Airbnb listings in five large metropolitan areas in Canada. The researchers applied a hedonic pricing model to 15,716 Airbnb listings. As expected, the results show that physical characteristics, location, and host characteristics significantly impact price. Interestingly, more reviews are associated with a drop in price. This information is useful to hosts who are forming a pricing strategy for their listings as well as for Airbnb, who needs to support them. The paper raises important questions about pricing in the sharing economy and suggests avenues for future research in this area.

The legal protection of indigenous souvenir products.

Abstract The indigenous products that tourists purchase as souvenirs are often actually imitations of the original products that are both mass produced and sold by non-indigenous people without authorization from an indigenous group. This practice entails outsiders appropriating and imitating cultural heritage products in an inauthentic manner. It also limits the economic benefits indigenous groups can gain from products of their culture. This paper explores the possibility of using intellectual property laws to protect the production of such souvenirs for indigenous groups. The paper focuses on three different indigenous groups: the Kunas of Panama, the Aborigines of Australia, and the Atayals of Taiwan, to show that each groups situation is unique and protection efforts consequently must be adaptable rather than universal. Traditional intellectual property laws offer little potential for indigenous groups to establish legal rights over the production of their products, but unique sui generis laws can be established to achieve this goal. The paper explores numerous underlying questions that must be addressed if protective legislation is to be truly beneficial. Also, the protection of indigenous intellectual property is closely linked to other indigenous rights issues.

Regulating Innovation in the Collaborative Economy: An Examination of Airbnb’s Early Legal Issues

Airbnb, a service through which ordinary people rent out their spaces to tourists, has become one of the most prominent companies in the collaborative economy. Hundreds of thousands of tourists sleep in Airbnb accommodations every night, yet a large number of these accommodations are actually illegal according to many jurisdictions’ regulations on short-term rentals. This situation has made regulatory conflict an omnipresent issue for the company. Such regulatory tensions actually define the early years of many major innovations because the innovations are not perfectly compatible with existing regulatory frameworks. Moreover, Airbnb is a disruptive innovation within the collaborative economy, and operating within a tightly regulated industry, which made regulatory conflicts virtually inevitable for the company. Airbnb’s rapid growth has forced policymakers to urgently rethink their applicable regulations by assessing the primary issues and impacts, both positive and negative, surrounding Airbnb—tourism, taxes, consumer protection, and local residents. In response, destinations have taken different approaches to regulating Airbnb, centred on renting restrictions, permits, enforcement, and taxes. As the regulatory landscape continues to evolve, more and more destinations will look to overcome the challenges associated with legalising, regulating, and taxing Airbnb.

Use of dynamic pricing strategies by Airbnb hosts

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive analysis of dynamic pricing by Airbnb hosts.,This study uses attribute and sales information from 39,837 Airbnb listings and hotel data from 1,025 hotels across five markets to test different hypotheses which explore the extent to which Airbnb hosts use dynamic pricing and how their pricing strategies compare to those of hotels.,Airbnb is a unique and complex platform in terms of dynamic pricing where hosts make limited use of dynamic pricing strategies, especially as compared to hotels. Notwithstanding their limited use, hosts who own listings in high-demand leisure markets, manage entire places, manage more listings and have more experience vary prices the most.,This study identified a great need for Airbnb to encourage dynamic pricing among its hosts, but also warned of the potential perils of dynamic pricing in the sharing economy context. The findings also demonstrated challenges for hotel managers interested in actionable information related to Airbnb as a competitor.,This is the first Airbnb study to use a comprehensive set of data over a continuous period in multiple markets to look at a number of listing and host factors and determine their relation with dynamic pricing strategies.

Superstition as a personal moderator in the development of commitment and loyalty to and within casinos

Gambling is a popular leisure activity for people around the world and the global casino industry has expanded rapidly in recent years. Behavioural loyalty among gamblers can be very important to the success of casinos, which will benefit from marketing strategies used to induce loyal patronage. However, it must also be appreciated that extremely loyal behaviour may be an indication of problem gambling, by which this leisure activity becomes detrimental. This article presents 12 propositions related to behavioural loyalty and casino gambling, focusing on superstitions role as a personal moderator influencing the formation of casino gambling loyalties. This conceptualization is based on a pre-existing model that delineates the process by which behavioural loyalty develops in a leisure context. The propositions are divided into six main categories: the basic functions of superstition as a personal moderator, types of superstition, the casino as a setting for the development of superstition, loyalty towards different types of games, socio-demographic and cultural variables, and the prevention of problem gambling. Implications for casino management and the prevention of problem gambling are discussed.