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To promote the success of peer-to-peer accommodation, this study examines the effects of online host–guest interaction as well as the interaction's boundary conditions of listing price and reputation on listing popularity.

Using 330,686 data collected from Airbnb in the United States of America, the authors provide empirical evidence to answer whether social-oriented self-presentation and response rate influence listing popularity from the perspective of social exchange theory (SET). In addition, the authors investigate how these two kinds of online host–guest interactions work with listing price and reputation to influence listing popularity.

The results reveal the positive association between online host–guest interaction and listing popularity. Notably, the authors find that listing price strengthens but listing reputation weakens the positive effects of online host–guest interactions on listing popularity in peer-to-peer accommodation.

This study is the first attempt to adopt SET to explain the importance of online host–guest interactions in influencing listing popularity as well as examine the moderating role of listing price and reputation on the above relationship.

From the perspective of two-sided review systems, this study aims to investigate how guests’ prior reputation influences their subsequent satisfaction on Airbnb.

This study applied a conceptual framework based on social capital theory to explain the effect of guests’ reputation decided by hosts’ prior evaluations on their subsequent satisfaction. The authors collected 96,204 guest reviews posted for 17,325 properties on Airbnb and used the review polarity to measure guest satisfaction. All historical evaluations generated by hosts for each guest were collected and treated as a proxy of guest reputation. Ordinary least squares regressions were conducted to estimate the effect of guests’ reputation on their subsequent satisfaction.

Results show that guests whose historical evaluations have higher valences or larger variations tend to be more satisfied in their subsequent bookings. However, the number of reviews that guests received from hosts in the past does not influence their subsequent satisfaction.

This study provides new insights into the hospitality literature by identifying the influencing factors of guest satisfaction on peer-to-peer rental platforms from the perspective of two-sided review systems. Results also present practical implications to property owners and website designers to gain a deeper understanding of the determinants of guest satisfaction and the consequences of social interactions between hosts and guests.

This study is a novel attempt that analyzes the effect of guests’ reputation on their satisfaction with subsequent bookings based on two-sided review systems on peer-to-peer rental platforms. Thus, this study provides a starting point for investigating how two-sided review systems affect use behavior on peer-to-peer rental platforms.

This study aims to focus on peer-to-peer accommodation services in the sharing economy. Adopting construal level theory as the theoretical foundation, this study investigates the main and interaction effects of social and spatial distances on guest loyalty toward peer-to-peer accommodation.

This study uses a secondary source of online observational data archived on Xiaozhu, a leading peer-to-peer accommodation sharing platform in China. It consists of 2,612 observations of 1,304 unique travelers who stayed at 559 listings managed by 281 hosts in four major metropolitan areas of China over four years from August 2012 to August 2016. Non-linear binary choice panel models of probability regressions were used to estimate the effects of psychological distances (social and spatial) between hosts and guests on the likelihood of repeat purchase. The software used for the econometric analyses is STATA 14.

The results indicate that social distance negatively affects guest loyalty toward the listing hosts, while spatial distance has a positive influence on guest loyalty. The results also show significant interactions between the two psychological distance dimensions in influencing loyalty. The findings provide important insight into the influences of psychological distances on travelers’ repeat purchase behavior toward peer-to-peer accommodation providers.

This study contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence that supports the importance of psychological distances in forming a loyal relationship between hosts and guests in the peer-to-peer accommodation sector of the sharing economy.

The emerging situation of pandemic due to COVID-19 has not only influenced the daily life but also the society and travel activities around the world thereby depriving tourists (especially who are already on the move) of facilities and even making them to look for desperate alternatives. Such situation in fact may draw a long-term impact on guest–host relationship while residents’ behavior reflects hostility toward the tourists. Such kind of interactions contributes toward tourists’ perception and experience about the destination and its services thereby affecting their level of acceptance and tolerance for tour and travel activities (Armenski et al., 2011). Moreover, the guest–host relationship has mostly been studied with perspective of and focus on residents/host and not enough on tourists (Skipper, 2009; Vargas-Sánchez et al., 2014). Keeping this in view, this paper aims to analyze the impact of pandemic situation on guest–host relationship and its future impact on travel intentions among the tourists in India.

The study undertakes the help of in-depth interviews and extracting themes to understand the guest–host relationship and the perspective of tourists in challenging times like COVID-19 and its impact on the relationship. The secondary sources have been adopted to retrieve the data related to current status of travel industry in India. In-depth interviews were conducted online to gather data for the qualitative analysis regarding the research. Further, the data has been analyzed for retrieving a dimensional approach to subject area.

The data from participant observation showed that the hosts displayed panic, mistrust and irresponsible behavior toward the guests, and this clearly indicates that the pandemic situation has a highly negative impact on the image of the community and the destination. This ultimately affects the guest–hosts relationships in the long term. Most of the tourists showed that they were okay with following the rules and respect local culture but were expecting support from local community during distress. It was found that there were two female tourists who were asked to vacate the accommodation, which can be considered as an inappropriate and extreme behavior. Thus, COVID-19 is not only causing a threat to the tourism presently but will have a prolonged influence on guest–host relationship as negative interaction or experiences are supposed to be frequently radiated by the tourists (de Albuquerque and McElroy, 2001).

There is no dearth of studies focusing on travel behavior dimensions, whereas the linkage of residents’ behavior toward it still requires much consideration and analyzing simultaneously. The study looks into the area of guest–host relationship and tries to explore it from the perspective and significance of tourist (guest) rather than the much read and researched resident (host) perception at the center. The findings of the study could be helpful in drawing the strategic framework for the industry to handle and sustain the guest–host relation so as to safeguard the future of tourism and sustain potential travel market reiterating the significance of tourists/guests and their perspective about the hosts, in developing and growing the tourism of a destination.

This paper aims to analyse the conceptual bases of the related terms of “host” and “guest” in Chinese and reveal essential, though overlooked, cultural differences that relate to “hospitality” in Western and Chinese cultural contexts.

A presupposition of this conceptual investigation is that culture manifests itself linguistically. The analytic approach used here is textual analysis. Confucian classical texts are the main source of evidence for examining the conceptual commitments of the Chinese characters 主 and 客 and their corresponding practical expressions.

Cross-cultural comparison reveals asymmetries between the term “hospitality” and its Chinese translations, etymologically and culturally. This study demonstrates how the Chinese 主–客 paradigm is both hierarchal in nature and centred on the role and interests of the host. It further compares this paradigm with its Western counterpart along five different dimensions.

The specific Chinese norms for the host–guest paradigm synthesized here could prompt both academicians and operators to question the cultural attachments associated with hospitality by participants and the cultural differences in hospitality transactions and management. The cultural sensitivity modelled here is intended to facilitate harmony between a hospitality setting and the culture in which it is embedded.

This conceptual paper is the first in the Anglophone literature to explore the Chinese cultural roots of the concepts “host” and “guest”. The linguistic perspective used in this study allows the concept of “hospitality” to be studied cross-culturally and in an interdisciplinary way, addressing a blind spot in the extant hospitality literature.

The research purpose is to conceptualize competitive productivity (CP) in the peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodation businesses. This study aims to conceptualize the four driving forces of P2P hosts’ CP and to empirically capture guest-based equity that supports such conceptual hosts’ CP model.

The goal of this paper is to apply Bauman’s Firm competitive productivity (FCP) model to the P2P accommodation business to conceptualize the CP of micro-entrepreneurial hosts. Four areas of the FCP model were reviewed to find how each of them contributes to the P2P hosts’ CP maximization.

Host talent, host resource management, value and host branding were conceptualized as key drivers of P2P hosts’ CP. The study also filled a gap in current literature by empirically analyzing online reviews to successfully capture key guest-based equity as satisfiers contributing to host talent, resource and branding.

Based on the hosts’ CP model, customer-generated resources play a significant role in the managerial implications, so that guest reviews with needs and wants and ratings can be empirically used to strengthen hosts’ CP under specific market circumstances.

This study is the first attempt to conceptualize a P2P host as a micro-entrepreneurial firm in the sharing economy platform for CP. This study looked at how the unique characteristics of the P2P accommodation industry and guest-based equity affect the P2P hosts’ CP.

This concept paper aims to discuss the effects of network hospitality on women empowerment in the city of Kuala Lumpur.

This paper uses a qualitative approach to analyse women engaged in Airbnb activity as hosts or guests.

Findings show new types of entrepreneurs, hospitality services, and socio-cultural expectations under this change.

The recent growth of Network Hospitality platforms such as Airbnb around the world has generated multiple impacts on urban destinations worldwide. Network hospitality is transforming the way tourism is produced and consumed. Several studies have analysed the impact of network hospitality on destinations’ accommodation and housing markets, the gentrification effects and users’ experience. However, studies on the social impacts of Airbnb in developing economies remain scarce. Network hospitality is creating entrepreneurship and mobility opportunities for women. In the case of Malaysia, there is a noticeable empowerment trend of women through network hospitality.

The purpose of this paper is to explore Airbnb’s inherent network structure emerging from transactions between hosts and guests and provide comprehensive background information on the underlying data basis.

The analysis is based on actual Airbnb data from 16 major US cities (Asheville, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Nashville, New Orleans, New York City, Oakland, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Seattle and Washington DC), available at InsideAirbnb.com, comprising a total of 135 thousand listings and 2.7 million transactions. The data are transformed into a graph and analyzed from a network perspective.

The web of host–guest connections on Airbnb represents a omniferous graph, that is, connecting virtually all users via relatively short distances. Hosts and guests differ markedly with regard to degree distribution. Overall, 98 per cent of all transactions represent first-time encounters.

This paper provides first insights into the very fabric of host–guest interactions on Airbnb from a macroscopic perspective. The platform’s network topology may be leveraged as a resource for trust-building between users. Moreover, platform operators may use network analyses to gain deeper insights into their user base. These may in turn be used to identify determinants of side-switching, deter users from platform circumvention or for churn prevention.

Platform ecosystems continue to expand and gain increasing economic, social and societal importance. For C2C platforms with two compartmentalized and decentral market sides (i.e. many individual providers and many individual consumers), the emerging transactional network structure has, thus, far experience almost no research attention. This analysis of Airbnb’s web of host–guest connections reveals a topology some archetypical social network properties (e.g. short distances). This structure and the knowledge about users’ positions therein yields viable cues for trust-building as well as a valuable resource for (platform) business analytics.

Due to their very different contexts, the responses made by property hosts to online reviews can differ from those posted by hotel managers. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate the determinants of the responding behavior of hosts on peer-to-peer property rental platforms.

This study applied a comprehensive framework based on the theory of planned behavior. Empirical models are constructed based on 89,967 guest reviews with their associated responses to reveal the responding pattern of property hosts.

Unlike hotel managers, property hosts are more likely to reply to positive than to negative reviews; moreover, when they do choose to respond to negative reviews, they are likely to do so negatively, in a “tit-for-tat” way. This study also finds that one reason for the difference of responding patterns between property hosts and hotel managers is the hosts’ lack of experience of consumer relationship management and service recovery.

This study provides a good start point for future theoretical development regarding effective responding strategy on peer-to-peer property rental platforms, as well as some useful implications for practitioners.

This study is an early attempt to analyze the impact of the particularity of emerging platforms on the responding behavior of service providers based on a comprehensive conceptual framework and empirical model thus provides a good starting point for the further investigation of effective response strategies on these emerging platforms.

Online ratings and reviews have recently emerged as mechanisms to facilitate accountability and transparency in the provision of goods and services. The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature and outcome of the accountability that online ratings and reviews create in the sharing economy.

The study draws on 30 face-to-face and Skype interviews with Airbnb guests and hosts as well as on secondary materials, including content from Airbnb data analytic reports.

The authors demonstrate that face-saving practices widely condition user ratings and comments. Face saving occurs when individuals attempt to preserve their own identity and the identity of others during a social interaction. At Airbnb, the authors find that reviewers adopt three distinct face-saving strategies: the use of private reviewing channels, the creation of tactful reviews and refraining from reviewing entirely. The authors also find that users are sceptical of rating metrics and public comments and draw upon a wide range of alternative sources, such as private messaging and other publicly available resources, in their decision making.

This paper highlights the overwhelmingly positive character of Airbnb ratings and reviews. It proposes the concept of crowdbased accountability as a limited, partial form of assurance for sharing economy users. Guests and hosts alike prioritise face-saving practices over reviewer responsibilities to provide authentic, reliable accounts to the public. Consequently, reviewers effectively remove the risk of sanctions for those in the network who underperform.