We draw on existing academic publications on peer-to-peer accommodation, industry and media reports, and public archival sources to reconstruct Airbnb’s business model at various points in time, and transformations over time. In this chapter we explore in detail the evolution of Airbnb’s business model across three distinct development periods. The business model perspective provides insights into how Airbnb’s context and business model shape one another. Those interactions determine the success of the platform, the viability of its facilitator, the dependability of services for guests and hosts, and externalities experienced by other stakeholders. Understanding Airbnb’s business model shows how the design choices as a dynamic equilibrium (Demil & Lecocq, 2010) have shaped and are being shaped by the evolution of Airbnb and its interactions with guests, hosts, and other contextual contingencies. This review of scholarly work on Airbnb shows that only few studies focus specifically on Airbnb’s business model. Figure 2.1: Scholarly publications mentioning Airbnb (dots represent year of first publication source: Scopus) At the time of writing, there was another half year for new articles to be registered on Scopus. The slight decline between 20 is likely explained by the cut-off of the search in July 2020. The sharp increase in 2019 is partially explained by Annals in Tourism Research launching its virtual curated collection on peer-to-peer accommodation leading to a surge in new submissions. The first publications for each set are marked with a colour-corresponding dot. They thus fall short of meeting the standards of the broader research program on business models as a theoretical concept (e.g., Foss & Saebi, 2018 Massa et al., 2017).įigure 2.1 shows the number of Scopus-registered articles published by year for the search terms Airbnb and Airbnb + “business model”. Most of these articles do not analyse Airbnb’s business model as an integrated logic of value creation and capture. Only 53 articles address the business model of Airbnb, with the first one published by Daniel Guttentag (2015). The focus of most studies is on guest and host behaviour, the interaction among different stakeholders, and regulation. Of the 602 articles, 46% appeared in tourism and hospitality journals, with the International Journal of Hospitality Management (45 articles), Annals of Tourism Research (26 articles), and Tourism Management (23 articles) the main outlets. The first article mentioning Airbnb in Scopus was published by Robin Chase (2011) in the Journal of Urban Regeneration & Renewal. About two thirds of them appeared in the fields of business (34%) and social science (29%). For both its merit and associated conflict, Airbnb has become an iconic, category-defining case study in industry and scholarly discourse (Dolnicar, 2019 Kuhzady et al., 2020).Īs of July 2020, Elsevier’s Scopus database lists 602 scholarly articles on Airbnb published between 20 in English in peer-reviewed journals. While these additional entrepreneurial opportunities were welcomed, the success of Airbnb also presented host communities and other stakeholders with new sets of problems (e.g., Xie et al., 2020). In so doing, Airbnb demonstrated that a Silicon Valley-style start-up company (Gallagher, 2017) can scale in tourism and hospitality, and create a broad ecosystem that facilitates new entrepreneurial activity serving at a number of levels: hosts, and providers assisting hosts with service provision (e.g., Sibbritt et al., 2019 Sigala & Dolnicar, 2018). By facilitating an online peer-to-peer trading platform, Airbnb has extended short-term accommodation capacity in unprecedented ways (Dolnicar, 2019), and provoked strong responses from both the established commercial tourism accommodation sector (Zach et al., 2020) and local regulators (von Briel & Dolnicar, 2020).Īirbnb has adapted the platform business model to the long tail of hospitality in ways that had not been attractive to established distribution networks (Reinhold et al., 2020). The academic fascination with Airbnb, but not with its business modelīy reinventing home stays and tourism experiences, Airbnb has introduced to the tourism and hospitality sectors one of the most fascinating innovations of the past decade.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |