Pricing strategies on Airbnb: Are multi-unit hosts revenue pros?

The 7 Ps marketing mix of home-sharing services: Mining travelers’ online reviews on Airbnb

“…It is plausible that most descriptions and the pictures attached to the Airbnb listings genuinely reflect on what the travelers saw or experienced in person. As a result, they might not find the needs to make such comments as “the listing is pretty close to the images posted” unless they found themselves in a situation like “this place is even more adorable and quaint than the pictures show, if that’s possible :)” Meanwhile, even though price is a critical indicator of a lodging product’s service quality ( Xie and Kwok, 2017 ), it is also a variable that the hosts can easily manipulate ( Gibbs et al, 2018 ; Kwok and Xie, 2019 ). When travelers browse the available listings in a market, they have already seen the price and the fee structure of a listing.…”

“…For instance, they broke into the lodging market with a unique selling proposition with the offerings that hotels and hostels were not yet familiar with ( Karlsson et al, 2017 ), allowing them to spark enormous demands from travelers. Meanwhile, home-sharing websites provide a marketplace for people who want to make extra incomes from the under-utilized space they possessed as “microentrepreneurs,” fueling the supply of the home-sharing facilities to the market ( Abrate and Viglia, 2019 ; Kwok and Xie, 2019 ).…”

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

“…Single homes (single-hosted entire homes/apartments) form the majority that Airbnb offers in these countries, such as Denmark (mainly), followed by Sweden, Norway and Finland, except Iceland (mixed, a high balance of single rooms, single homes, multi-rooms and multi-homes) (Adamiak, 2019). Some recent studies indicated that, contrary to single-unit hosts, multi-unit hosts devoted more time and attention into the operations of their room-sharing business and thus were more proficient in serving guests (Kwok & Xie, 2019). In addition, multi-unit hosts were more experienced than single-unit hosts as they quickly learned from their operations of multiple listings at a given time and could identify more solutions to the problems that occurred in the operations.…”

Effects of host incentives on multiple listings in accommodation sharing

“…It is not only the sheer number of hosts but also the type of hosts that matter to the growth of sharing accommodation, which is primarily driven by the willingness of individual hosts to list their properties on the platform. A handful of studies have discussed the importance of multilisting hosts-who operate multiple properties to capitalize on short-term rentals-in driving the growth of Airbnb (Breese, 2018;Kwok and Xie, 2018;Xie and Mao, 2017). Because of the massive number of multi-listing hosts, the growth of accommodation-sharing services seems to undergo an exponential growth that traditional hotels are not able to match.…”

“…We will add that in the next two weeks." Despite anecdotal discussions on hosts' multiple listing behavior on the platform (Breese, 2018), empirical research has yet to examine what affects such behavior (e.g., Kwok and Xie, 2018;Xie and Mao, 2017). Several puzzles are still unsolved regarding the phenomena of multilisting that require empirical work.…”