Zooming into Airbnb listings of European cities: Further investigation of the sector’s competitiveness

Abstract

Airbnb has a major role to play in the competitiveness of the overall accommodation sector of individual destinations and it is rather unlikely that this role will diminish in the post-COVID-19 recovery of the tourism industry. Therefore, the present study motivates the Airbnb sector to look back at its past performance for insights that can be used in setting post-pandemic targets. In particular, this research assesses competitiveness of the Airbnb listings of 28 European cities by including hotel-related data as uncontrollable input variables within interactive data envelopment analysis modeling. The contribution lies in joining Airbnb listings and hotels into the benchmarking discussion and efficiency analysis, along with looking beyond the cumulative number of listings by dissecting the overall sector into commercial and private listings—something that has not been attempted as of yet, in spite of the ever-growing body of literature on the sharing economy.

Modelling prices and volatilities in the sharing economy

“…This type of tourist accommodation, whose popularity has risen greatly in recent years, has been empirically analysed from various standpoints using econometric, time series and AI methods. Among the econometric approaches that have been adopted, some are based on models of tourism demand (Gunter et al, 2020; Jiménez et al, 2023; Suárez-Vega et al, 2022; among others), 2 on the analysis of price determinants using hedonic models (Hernández et al, 2021; Wang and Nicolau, 2017; among others), on parametric and non-parametric methods for determining production efficiency (Pérez-Rodríguez and Hernández, 2022; Zekan et al, 2019; Zekan and Gunter, 2022) or on dynamic pricing (Gibbs et al, 2018a,b; Kwok and Xie, 2019; Leoni and Nilsson, 2021; among others). 3 With regard to time series or AI methods used to model and forecast conditional daily prices for Airbnb, recent work includes papers by Moreno-Izquierdo et al (2018), Priambodo and Sihabuddin (2020) and Chattopadhyay and Mitra (2020).…”