Airbnb Offer in Spain—Spatial Analysis of the Pattern and Determinants of Its Distribution

Abstract

The rising number of homes and apartments rented out through Airbnb and similar peer-to-peer accommodation platforms cause concerns about the impact of such activity on the tourism sector and property market. To date, spatial analysis on peer-to-peer rental activity has been usually limited in scope to individual large cities. In this study, we take into account the whole territory of Spain, with special attention given to cities and regions with high tourist activity. We use a dataset of about 250 thousand Airbnb listings in Spain obtained from the Airbnb webpage, aggregate the numbers of these offers in 8124 municipalities and 79 tourist areas/sites, measure their concentration, spatial autocorrelation, and develop regression models to find the determinants of Airbnb rentals’ distribution. We conclude that apart from largest cities, Airbnb is active in holiday destinations of Spain, where it often serves as an intermediary for the rental of second or investment homes and apartments. The location of Airbnb listings is mostly determined by the supply of empty or secondary dwellings, distribution of traditional tourism accommodation, coastal location, and the level of internationalization of tourism demand.

Current state and development of Airbnb accommodation offer in 167 countries

“…Airbnb activity is not limited to big cities, but researchers give less attention to the platform offers in smaller towns, resorts and rural areas (Adamiak, 2018;DiNatale, Lewis, & Parker, 2018). Rare countrywide studies show that Airbnb supply distribution generally mirrors the distribution of tourism demand and traditional accommodation capacity (Adamiak, Szyda, Dubownik, & García-Álvarez, 2019;Domènech, Larpin, Schegg, & Scaglione, 2019;Strommen-Bakhtiar & Vinogradov, 2019), even though on the finer spatial scale there can be differences between the two (Eugenio-Martin, Cazorla-Artiles, & González-Martel, 2019). In Switzerland, Larpin et al (2019) notice that Airbnb activity started in the cities and later spread towards mountain tourism areas, where other rental platforms were active already before.…”

“…In Switzerland, Larpin et al (2019) notice that Airbnb activity started in the cities and later spread towards mountain tourism areas, where other rental platforms were active already before. In Spain, listings of entire properties and rooms follow different location patterns: while room rental is common in cities, in coastal destinations the Airbnb stock consists almost exclusively of entire properties (Adamiak et al, 2019).…”

“…However, activity and impacts of the platform differ between regions of the world following differences in housing market and tourism economy characteristics. For example, in Southern European countries, Airbnb is sometimes considered a tool to intensify the use of second homes and vacant housing in rural areas (Adamiak et al, 2019;Belotti, 2019). In Central and Eastern Europe high concentration and professionalization of vacation rental through Airbnb and other platforms is related to the unregulated housing market (Ključnikov, Krajčík, & Vincúrová, 2018;Roelofsen, 2018).…”

“…The scrapping was performed twice in yearly interval: in September and October 2018 (4.7 million listings), and in September 2019 (5.7 million listings). Only listings available in the following months were saved in the dataset, which results in an underestimation of the total number of offers by up to 20% (see Adamiak et al, 2019 for more details on the credibility of web-scrapping results). The datasets included the geographic coordinates of listings, information on property types (entire home/property, private room, shared room or hotel room), baseline prices per night, numbers of reviews and average ratings.…”

Impacts of the peer-to-peer market on tourist accommodation on the Balearic Islands of Mallorca and Menorca

“…The choice of Mallorca and Menorca is justified because both islands belong to the Balearic archipelago in the Mediterranean Sea, and their economy revolves around tourism to which more than 40% of their GDP and 30% of employment can be attributed (Exceltur, 2014). Furthermore, these are two cases for which Airbnb penetration is particularly intense (Adamiak, Szyda, Dubownik, & García-Álvarez, 2019). They are, therefore, two appropriate examples for the objectives that have been proposed and could be presented as exploratory cases (Yin, 1984).…”