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ABSTRACT
Airbnb is the most prominent example of novel peer-to-peer networks in tourism. This new form of accommodation provision may alter demand structures in tourism destinations and has led to uncertainty amongst established accommodation providers and destination marketers. To gain a better understanding of Airbnb adopters, this paper systematically compares actual travel behaviour of Airbnb users in a specific destination with that of visitors staying in traditional accommodation. Due to this controlled comparison, the paper is the first one to offer a robust comparative profiling of Airbnb users. The analysis is based on a logistic regression of data from the standardised International Visitor Survey for 2015 in Western Australia. Results indicate that Airbnb users in Western Australia differ from visitors staying in traditional accommodation, but that it might be wrong to conceive Airbnb adopters to be ‘alternative tourists’ beyond the mainstream.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Michael Volgger, BSc, Mag, is Senior Research Fellow with the School of Marketing, Curtin Business School at Curtin University in Australia where he is Co-Director of the Tourism Research Cluster, and Senior Research Affiliate at Eurac Research in Italy. He obtained a doctoral degree in Economics and Business Administration from the Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt in Germany. Prior to joining Curtin University, he has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Regional Development at Eurac Research in Italy. His areas of expertise include tourism destination governance and location management, product development and innovation in tourism, sharing economy, inter-organisational cooperation and qualitative research.
Christof Pforr is Associate Professor and Course Coordinator for Tourism & Hospitality and Group Leader of the Research Focus Area ‘Sustainable and Health Tourism’ at the School of Marketing, Curtin Business School, Australia. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the Northern Territory University (now Charles Darwin University) and a ‘Staatsexamen’ in Geography and Political Science from the University of Tübingen (Germany). His academic background is reflected in his main research interests, which include tourism public policy and planning, sustainable (tourism) development, wellness tourism, medical tourism, coastal tourism and geotourism as well as destination governance with a specific focus on network management and network analysis.
Agnieszka Elzbieta Stawinoga, PhD, has been working at Eurac Research since May 2015 as expert statistician in Social Science. She got a PhD in Statistics in 2011 at the University of Naples ‘Federico II’ in Italy. She has more than five years’ research and working experience in the field of statistics and social statistics, particularly in methodology of social network analysis (SNA) and textual data analysis. Regarding the applicative aspects she has dealt with issues related to scientific collaboration and innovation, in particular with reference to the economic and business contexts.
Ross Taplin is a Professor in the School of Accounting, Curtin Business School, a Senior Technical Advisor in Risk Analytics at Bankwest, and an accredited statistician (AStat) with the Statistical Society of Australia. His research interests span diverse areas in science and business. Within tourism, his research concentrates on visitor surveys: methods for the collection, analysis, presentation and interpretation of quantitative information obtained from visitors to recreational and tourist venues. His research focusses on providing and improving techniques that are intuitive and accessible to management rather than those requiring a high level of statistical sophistication.
Steve Matthews, is Principal Analyst at Tourism Research Australia (TRA) in Canberra where he has worked since 2008. His role encompasses the conduct, management and data administration of the International Visitor Survey (IVS) and National Visitor Survey (NVS) within TRA. Prior to joining TRA, he worked with the Statistical Unit of the Australian Department of Immigration and spent 7 years with the Bureau of Immigration Research. His areas of expertise are tourism research, data dissemination, information technology and quantitative research.
Notes
1. The question was asked as: ‘Did you book any accommodation in a private home or apartment for this visit using one or more of the following websites? Interviewer note: We do not mean general online accommodation websites like WOTIF, Bookings.com, Hotelscombined.com etc. or the accommodation’s own website.’ [A list of accommodation websites follows, including Airbnb]. Copies of the full questionnaire are available from the authors on request.
2. This selection does not preclude that these visitors during their trips stayed also in other Australian states.
3. To ensure a solid interpretation of data in a destination-based quantitative study, we only used Western Australian data although data for the whole of Australia was available. We focused on the subset, because an in-depth understanding of the destination in question helps to reduce risks of mistakes in data processing and interpretation, in particular, when detailed location-based data needs to be dealt with.
4. As suggested by a reviewer and by Tussyadiah and Pesonen (Citation2018), for test purposes, we created a variable indicating the number of different activities undertaken during the trip. In a bivariate analysis, Airbnb use was indeed significantly associated with an increasing range of trip activities. However, when including this variable in the multiple regressions, it lost its statistical significance, possibly due to its correlation with length of stay, and did not change our proposed model.
5. It should be noted that many international visitors to WA undertake multi-destination trips (54% stay at least in two different places, and 41% in at least three different places). However, the available data does not allow to exactly identify in which part of their trip they utilised Airbnb-booked accommodations (it allows to specify that it was within WA).