5 Hosting and co-hosting on Airbnb – before, during and after COVID-19
5 Hosting and co-hosting on Airbnb – before, during and after COVID-19
Sheranne Fairley, Department of Tourism, UQ Business School, The University of Queensland, Australia
Kathy Babiak, School of Kinesiology, University of Michigan, USA
Sarah MacInnes, Department of Tourism, UQ Business School, The University of Queensland, Australia
Sara Dolnicar, Department of Tourism, UQ Business School, The University of Queensland, Australia
Please cite as: Fairley, S., Babiak, K., MacInnes, S. and Dolnicar, S. (2021) Hosting and co-hosting on Airbnb – before, during and after COVID-19, in S. Dolnicar (Ed.) Airbnb before, during and after COVID-19, University of Queensland DOI: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14204531
Hosting on Airbnb before COVID-19
When Airbnb was first founded, it was perceived as an alternative avenue of securing accommodation when travelling. The initial assessment by the licensed commercial tourism accommodation sector was that Airbnb would not stand in direct competition with it (von Briel & Dolnicar, 2021). The pioneers among the hosts were befrienders who enjoyed getting to meet travellers during their journeys, and ethicists who were true believers in putting their underutilised spaces to good use (Hardy & Dolnicar, 2018a; Karlsson & Dolnicar, 2016). As word spread about the benefits of peer-to-peer accommodation, it developed from a fringe phenomenon to a mainstream tourist accommodation option. As such, it attracted more and more capitalist hosts (Hardy & Dolnicar, 2018a; Karlsson & Dolnicar, 2016) – people who entered the short-term rental market for the sole purpose of maximising their return on investment. This shift caused dismay among the pioneers of hosting who felt that the original ethos of Airbnb had disappeared (Hardy & Dolnicar, 2018b) and that Airbnb.com had become just another commercial distribution channel for tourist accommodation.
Befriender, ethicist and capitalist hosts experienced hosting differently because of the substantial differences in their personal business models. Many befrienders and ethicists were renting out spare rooms – spaces that were part of their primary residence and were sitting idle. Listing those spaces on Airbnb came at minimal additional cost to them – they had to wash towels and bedlinen and used a marginal additional amount of electricity and water. If nobody booked those spaces, befrienders and ethicist hosts had no additional expenses at all. As a consequence, they had the freedom to list and delist spaces at their leisure, independent of whether their spare spaces were required for a different purpose or not (Dolnicar, 2018). From Airbnb’s perspective, these were probably the most attractive hosts in terms of being most resilient to any external circumstances, as COVID-19 would later show.
Capitalists were in a different position altogether. They were pro-actively leveraging the entrepreneurial opportunities offered by Airbnb (Sigala & Dolnicar, 2018). Some entered long-term r