Peer-to-peer accommodation in destination life cycle: the case of Nordic countries

Abstract

Internet platforms, enabling short-term rental of private houses, are an increasingly important provider of tourist accommodation. The largest peer-to-peer accommodation platform is Airbnb. To date, most geographical studies on Airbnb investigated spatial patterns and effects of platform activity on large cities. This study attempts to expand the understanding of the role of Airbnb in various types of urban and non-urban tourism destinations. It employs Tourism Area Life Cycle model to investigate the differences in the quantity of peer-to-peer accommodation in destinations in various stages of their life cycles. Five Nordic countries are used as the study setting. A database of 61 thousand active non-hotel Airbnb listings is compared with statistical data obtained from national statistical institutions on regional (74 NUTS-3 regions) geographical scale. The results show that peer-to-peer rental supply and use is concentrated in destinations characterised by the quick increase in the number of tourist visits.

20 years of Nordic hospitality research: a review and future research agenda

“…The rise of new forms of collaborative consumption have transformed the production and consumption of hospitality and tourism (Gyimóthy et al, 2020). Recent papers on peer-to-peer accommodation in SJHT contribute with knowledge about relationship between stages of the destination life cycles and differences in the quantity of peer-topeer accommodation (Adamiak, 2020) and economic, social-psychological and spatial factors for "home exchange" (Casado-Diaz et al, 2020).…”

Interactive value formation: drivers and outcomes from Airbnb guests’ perspectives

“…Airbnb, a peer-to-peer hosting service provider and a popular sharing economy platform, has a significant impact on the global tourism and hospitality industry (Casado-Diaz et al, 2020;Dogru et al, 2020) and in Nordic countries (Adamiak, 2018(Adamiak, , 2020 including housing access, affordability issues and residential displacement (Garay et al, 2020). For example, Miami Beach, Florida surpassed all listings worldwide (Inman, 2020), while Copenhagen was among the top Nordic cities with the highest number of Airbnb listings (Adamiak, 2018) that generated an estimated 650 million dollars in 2018 alone (Airbnb, 2019).…”

Peer-to-Peer Accommodation in Rural Areas of Catalonia: Defining Typologies of Rural Municipalities

“…The study of the distribution and spatial location of this type of tourist accommodation and its functions has focused mainly on specific urban areas [10,[18][19][20][21]. Other territorial scales have been addressed to a lesser extent in studies that focus on an entire country [8,15,22,23] or a regional area comprised of several countries [24,25]. Rural areas have not been studied specifically.…”

“…Studies that consider the spatial distribution of P2P at a country or regional scale indicate that rural areas are late adopters of this trend, as the volume of this type of supply is comparatively less than that found in urban areas. However, the year-on-year growth rate is greater in rural areas, with dynamics that accelerate as the result of the state of maturity and/or collapse experienced by this form of accommodation in urban areas [12,15,25,30,31]. It is difficult to determine how rural areas have adopted the P2P phenomenon and to establish types of rural areas in relation to P2P because: (a) There are many types of rural areas with highly varied territorial dynamics (high mountain compared to mid-mountain, inland or coastal hinterland, to mention a few), (b) tourism in rural areas is more scattered than tourism in cities, which is generally concentrated, and (c) the forms of tourism are highly varied in rural areas, which results in a wide range of models of tourism development (for example, intensive mass tourism associated with the snow and winter in high mountain areas compared to alternative tourism, such as agrotourism or nature tourism, which is more respectful and sustainable in relation to economic tradition, the environment and the culture of these territories), compared to the greater uniformity in urban tourism practices.…”