2 The evolution of Airbnb’s business model
Stephan Reinhold, School of Business and Economics, Linnaeus University, Sweden
Sara Dolnicar, Department of Tourism, UQ Business School, The University of Queensland, Australia
Please cite as: Reinhold, S. and Dolnicar, S. (2021) The evolution of Airbnb’s business model, in S. Dolnicar (Ed.) Airbnb before, during and after COVID-19, University of Queensland DOI: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14195957
The academic fascination with Airbnb, but not with its business model
By reinventing home stays and tourism experiences, Airbnb has introduced to the tourism and hospitality sectors one of the most fascinating innovations of the past decade. By facilitating an online peer-to-peer trading platform, Airbnb has extended short-term accommodation capacity in unprecedented ways (Dolnicar, 2019), and provoked strong responses from both the established commercial tourism accommodation sector (Zach et al., 2020) and local regulators (von Briel & Dolnicar, 2020).
Airbnb has adapted the platform business model to the long tail of hospitality in ways that had not been attractive to established distribution networks (Reinhold et al., 2020). In so doing, Airbnb demonstrated that a Silicon Valley-style start-up company (Gallagher, 2017) can scale in tourism and hospitality, and create a broad ecosystem that facilitates new entrepreneurial activity serving at a number of levels: hosts, and providers assisting hosts with service provision (e.g., Sibbritt et al., 2019; Sigala & Dolnicar, 2018). While these additional entrepreneurial opportunities were welcomed, the success of Airbnb also presented host communities and other stakeholders with new sets of problems (e.g., Xie et al., 2020). For both its merit and associated conflict, Airbnb has become an iconic, category-defining case study in industry and scholarly discourse (Dolnicar, 2019; Kuhzady et al., 2020).
As of July 2020, Elsevier’s Scopus database lists 602 scholarly articles on Airbnb published between 2011 and 2020 in English in peer-reviewed journals. About two thirds of them appeared in the fields of business (34%) and social science (29%). The first article mentioning Airbnb in Scopus was published by Robin Chase (2011) in the Journal of Urban Regeneration & Renewal. Of the 602 articles, 46% appeared in tourism and hospitality journals, with the International Journal of Hospitality Management (45 articles), Annals of Tourism Research (26 articles), and Tourism Management (23 articles) the main outlets. The focus of most studies is on guest and host behaviour, the interaction among different stakeholders, and regulation. Only 53 articles address the business model of Airbnb, with the first one published by Daniel Guttentag (2015). Most of these articles do not analyse Airbnb’s business model as an integrated logic of value creation and capture. They thus fall short of meeting the standards of the broader research program on business models as a theoretical