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Senior tourist is a salient segment of the tourism sector. This segment reflects a robust ageing population with discretionary income and an appetite for tourism activities. However, to date, there has been a paucity of empirical insight on how the combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations may influence senior tourists’ connectedness and booking intentions towards home-sharing accommodation. Thus, this study aims to investigate how senior tourists’ curiosity and social interaction may influence their connectedness towards Airbnb and subsequently booking intention.

A conceptual model was developed and tested using partial least squares structural equation modelling to analyse data collected from a sample of 195 senior tourists in Malaysia.

The results showed that intrinsic (curiosity) and extrinsic (social interaction) motivations positively influence senior tourists’ connectedness towards platform accommodation, which in turn positively affects the outcome variable. Furthermore, this study found that a sense of connectedness is crucial in linking motivators and booking intentions.

This research was carried out in Malaysia; therefore, cross-national studies are encouraged to establish whether the findings described in this study can be extrapolated to other cultures/countries.

From a practitioner’s perspective, this study reinforces the need to address and understand senior tourists’ curiosity and how it may invoke their connectedness and behavioural actions towards the Airbnb platform. More importantly, this study gives home-sharing practitioners practical leverage on how combined intrinsic and extrinsic motivations may deduce senior tourists’ booking intentions.

The study contributes to the literature on senior tourism and the home-sharing sector by demonstrating the role of curiosity and social interaction in shaping senior tourists’ connectedness towards Airbnb and behavioural intentions.

Positive reviews can enrich the favorable impression of peer-to-peer accommodation products, and seizing this impression is vital for hosts. This study aims to focus on hosts’ response strategies to positive reviews and their effects.

This study categorizes hosts’ response strategies to positive reviews into cordial and tailoring responses. This study empirically analyzes the influence of these response strategies on subsequent review volumes using 1,283 valid listings and zero-inflation negative binomial regression models.

While hosts use cordial responses more, tailoring responses are more likely to drive subsequent reviews. In addition, when the host chooses entirely shared accommodation or sets a high price, the facilitating effect of the two response strategies on subsequent reviews weakens.

This study enriches the knowledge system on managerial responses by proposing two specific response strategies to positive reviews that can be adopted by peer-to-peer accommodation hosts and by finding the promoting impact of these strategies on subsequent review volumes.

This study recommends that peer-to-peer accommodation hosts adopt cordial and tailoring responses to encourage subsequent consumer reviewing behavior.

As an early attempt to explore hosts’ responses to positive reviews and their impacts on subsequent review volumes, this study provides valuable insights into further research on positive review response strategies in the digital space.

The paper intends to review academic research on peer to peer (P2P) accommodation sharing, notably Airbnb, for 2010–2022 and to identify the knowledge gaps for future research directions.

Numerous databases were searched using keywords. Based on the central theme of the research papers, the papers were divided into eight segments—consumer behavior, host behavior, host–guest relationship (HGR), trust in Airbnb, dominant theories in Airbnb, Airbnb regulation, Airbnb and hotels and macro impacts of Airbnb. In-depth content analysis resulted in the final 101 papers for inclusion.

The review advances comprehension of the Airbnb phenomenon by enriching the literature with new and most recent studies. Most existing Airbnb research has been conducted in Europe, USA/Canada, followed by Asian countries like China, Singapore, S. Korea and India. Future studies should include South America, Africa and other developing nations. More cross-cultural studies are required to understand consumer and host behavior in different cultural settings. Numerous proposals to fulfill the research gaps identified by the paper are discussed.

The study will give better insights into the spiraling P2P accommodation economy. The study will be useful to researchers, scholars, Airbnb, the hotel industry, vacation rental players and destination marketing organizations by relating the study findings to practical competition analysis. The study provides deeper insights into the decision-making process of both guests and hosts by examining the relevant motivators and constraints. It will also assist the Airbnb platform in identifying its strength over the traditional hotel industry and other vacation rentals. The findings will also assist policymakers in better controlling the Airbnb phenomena by providing a comprehensive view of the micro and macro environment.

The paper includes the most recent studies from Asian countries like India, Singapore, China, Korea and Taiwan, not covered by earlier reviews. Prior studies mainly focused on European and American countries. Also, the paper tried to cover the macro impacts of Airbnb in-depth and the effects of COVID-19.

This study aims to testify the effects of green marketing on peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodation consumers’ repurchase intention and positive word-of-mouth (WOM) towards P2P accommodation platforms through the mediation of trust and consumer identification.

A questionnaire survey was applied to collect data from a sample of 488 consumers in China who had used P2P accommodation platforms in the past six months. Partial least squares structural equation modelling was used to analyse the data.

The study found that consumers’ perception of green marketing orientation of P2P accommodation platforms significantly increased consumer trust in the platform and consumer identification with the platform, which in turn each positively influenced repurchase intention and positive WOM to the platform. Furthermore, consumer trust had a positive effect on consumer identification and both trust and identification mediated the relationship between green marketing and repurchase intention and that between green marketing and positive WOM.

The findings of this study provide P2P accommodation platform operators with important insights to apply green marketing and focus on consumer trust and identification in sustaining their business and coping with the intense market competition.

This study contributes to better understanding of the impact of green business practices on consumers in sharing economy and offers practical implications on sustainable P2P accommodation practices.

Images and caption descriptions serve as important visual stimuli that influence consumer preferences; therefore, the current study focuses on property images and captions illustrated on the home pages of accommodation-sharing platforms. Specifically, this study investigates the relative importance of hue, brightness and saturation of a property image and caption description styles on potential consumers’ preferences.

A mixed-method approach was used, and a total of 293 valid responses were collected through a discrete choice experiment approach. Interviews were conducted for additional analyses to explore the detailed explanations.

The utility model demonstrated that the image’s saturation was the most critical attribute perceived by the respondents, followed by caption description style, hue and brightness.

This is one of the first studies to investigate the display of attributes on a digital accommodation platform by exploring potential customers’ stated preferences. This study focuses explicitly on images and captions illustrated on the home page of an accommodation booking platform. Detailed image investigation is also a new research area in sharing economy-related research.

In this study, the authors examine how organizational-, systems- and interpersonal-level trust may be required for a smooth functioning of the firms in the sharing economy (SE). The research objective is to explore the trust-building mechanisms of Airbnb, a leading SE organization, and its aim to foster generalized trust. An investigation of the Airbnb's promotion of different trust-building mechanisms will allow to evaluate their effectiveness in how they can help overcome scepticism and distrust between the transacting parties. Consequently, the authors can develop a unique theoretical perspective on generalized trust in SE environments and better understand any trust-related barriers preventing SE transactions.

The authors employ a case study approach to investigate the research questions with the aim to fully understand the abstract and complex nature of trust. They focus on Airbnb as the company enjoys a leading market position, being a sharing economy firm. Moreover, the personal nature of accommodation sharing, which is the business of Airbnb, increases users' trust requirements, and so the company must take active steps to promote trust between the transacting parties. The authors adopt thematic analysis to execute the data analysis of the study's findings, which are derived from emergent themes and directed by the research objectives and relevant literature.

The results show that users of Airbnb are concerned about the danger of opportunistic hosts, although they are primarily motivated to use the company's services due to its economic benefits. Nevertheless, the success of Airbnb platform stems from the trust that the company has succeeded in establishing among its users, in particular interpersonal trust. Analysis reveals that generalized trust is fostered at an interpersonal level in the form of peer reviews, at an organizational level in terms of brand familiarity and at a systems level in regards to interface design.

The authors advance the argument that confidence to transact in the social economy stems from a combination of three levels of trust, including organizational-, systems- and interpersonal-level trust. These findings contribute to the body of trust research in information technology and people literature from its unique investigative setting, whilst simultaneously strengthening the primarily speculative research on SE with in-depth empirical evidence.

To provide a dynamic view on accommodation choice behaviors during the pandemic, this study aims to examine the impact of recent trends on prospective travelers’ preferences for hotels and Airbnb.

The paper adopts a mixed methods approach that incorporates three independent studies (experimental analysis, online search pattern analysis and an econometric event study) to understand customer decision-making behaviors.

The findings indicate that travelers prefer Airbnb entire flats/apartments to hotels when the pandemic is trending upward. This result externally validates travelers’ preference toward Airbnb during periods of high risk. Interestingly, when the trends go downward, however, the same behavioral pattern was not identified.

This study provides important empirical insights into how the evolution of health crises influence customer decision-making for hotels and Airbnb. Future research needs to consider the role of socio-demographic factors in accommodation selection behaviors and examine how travelers react to cleanliness levels between Airbnb and hotels.

As one of initial studies that empirically examine Airbnb customers’ decision-making behaviors in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic’s trends, this study provides a dynamic view on how the evolution of the pandemic influences accommodation choice behaviors.

Peer-to-Peer Accommodation Service (P2PAS) has emerged as a novel paradigm that enables consumers to book temporary accommodation through P2PAS platforms (online transaction), and then reside in hosts' rooms (offline consumption). Due to potential variance in performance and conflict of interest between hosts and platforms, consumers may differ in their trust perceptions of the two parties, which in turn affects consumers' continuous usage of P2PAS. To this end, the authors endeavor to unravel the effect of consumers' trust incongruence on continuance intention, and to further elucidate the moderating influence of transaction and consumption risks on this relationship. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned objectives.

This study collected data through an online survey of 408 P2PAS consumers. Polynomial modeling and response surface analysis were conducted to validate the hypothesized relationships.

Response surface analysis reveals that trust incongruence did not significantly affect consumers' continuance intention. However, continuance intention would be greater when TP was higher than TH compared with when TH was higher than TP. Furthermore, the analytical results suggest that trust incongruence exerts greater negative effect on continuance intention when transaction and consumption risks were high.

First, the study marks a paradigm shift in conceptualizing the incongruence between TP and TH as a determinant of consumers' continuance intention toward P2PAS. Second, the authors derive a typology of risks that is contextualized to P2PAS. Finally, the authors establish transaction and consumption risks as boundary conditions influencing the effects of trust incongruence on consumers' continuance intention toward P2PAS.

The main purpose of this study is to explore the effect of three dimensions of “home feeling” – home-as-practical, home-as-social and home-as-attachment – on the online rating of homestays and additionally considers the accommodation’s attribute performance and level of sharing.

To achieve the research aims, more than 9,738,335 items of user-generated content concerning 743,953 Airbnb listings covering 35 cities were collected as the study data. These data are analyzed through hierarchical regression.

The results show that all three dimensions of home feeling positively affect the online rating; all three dimensions negatively moderate the relationship between attribute performance and online rating; the size of the moderating effect of each dimension on the relationship between attribute performance and online rating gradually increases in the order home-as-practical, home-as-social and home-as-attachment; and as the level of sharing increases, the moderating effect of home feeling on the relationship between attribute performance and online rating diminishes.

This study contributes to the literatures on the role of home feeling in homestays, the online rating of homestays and the motivations of guests who choose different room types. The findings of this study can help hosts better understand the formation of online rating of homestays, make targeted improvements in rooms and services and create a home feeling for specific degrees of sharing. This in turn will help them to improve the online rating of their homestays, establish an excellent online reputation and, ultimately, increase sales.

This study advances knowledge by confirming three dimensions of home feeling not only have direct positive impacts on online rating but also mitigate the impact of attribute performance on online rating. This effect differs significantly in magnitude with the degree of sharing.

This study aims to understand the motivations behind using Airbnb as a collaborative housing platform brand, their impact on satisfaction and engagement, and how the latter affects brand electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM) and brand loyalty. It also analyzes the potential moderating effect of the use intensity of collaborative housing platforms for the proposed causal relationships.

An online survey was addressed to active users of Airbnb with a final sample of 405 users. Data were analyzed using a covariance-based structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the causal model and a multigroup SEM to test the moderator effect of the intensity of use.

The results show that convenience affects brand satisfaction and hedonic motivation influences brand engagement, and both affect return intention and eWOM. In contrast, sustainability motivations seem unrelated both with satisfaction and engagement. Furthermore, the mechanism by which people reach loyalty in terms of return intention varies according to their usage intensity. Thus, the engagement–intention way is stronger for more intensive brand users. In contrast, the satisfaction–intention mechanism is significantly stronger for those with more sporadic use.

The management of collaborative housing platforms should promote tools and actions that favor enjoyment and fun since they increase engagement. On the other hand, it should be interesting to communicate the idea of the convenience of the applications, such as availability for a great offer, ease of contracting, or saving time, since this type of motivation directly correlates with customer satisfaction.

The motivational and behavioral heterogeneity demonstrated in this research can make it easier for people to be reached through different communication strategies and arguments both by the collaborative housing platforms and by public agencies with interests in city tourism management.