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Airbnb is arguably the world’s most popular accommodation sharing platform. Its impact on demand and supply within the tourism and hospitality industry is nowadays unquestionable. The present study delves into inspecting the efficiency of Airbnb listings of European cities, as, in spite of the success of Airbnb as a whole, it cannot be presupposed that all listings are equally successful. More specifically, data envelopment analysis (DEA) is employed in this first comprehensive benchmarking attempt within the domain of the sharing economy to date. This article also makes a contribution to robustness by introducing an interactivity note to the base model, thus, inspecting the results for corroboration/discrepancies and going beyond the static analyses that are common in DEA modeling. Ultimately, this is done with the goal of highlighting opportunities for inefficient Airbnb listings to properly utilize their inputs and therefore become more competitive.

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The development of indicators and metrics systems has been identified as being of paramount importance by many tourism boards and international tourism organizations. This article discusses the bottom-up, micro-level approach of TourMIS, which is a platform for exchanging tourism statistics among tourism organizations, for collecting measures of sustainable urban tourism development. The authors provide a synthesis of various frameworks for sustainable tourism indicators for subnational regions and cities, concluding that it is more feasible to analyse existing sustainable tourism indicators than to introduce new measures lacking in direct practical applicability for the organizations. The application of data envelopment analysis (DEA) for benchmarking urban tourism destinations is then demonstrated by assessing measures available in TourMIS. Findings include inefficiency scores that suggest both managerial and political implications. Furthermore, the concept of a virtual reference destination assisting managers and politicians to analyse their destination’s strengths and weaknesses is introduced.

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