Reported fire safety and first-aid amenities in Airbnb venues in 16 American cities

Could Failures in Peer to Peer Accommodation Be a Threat to Public Health and Safety? An Analysis of Users Experiences after the COVID-19 Pandemic

Peer to Peer (P2P) accommodation has effected a disruptive change in cities and traditional tourist destinations, with considerable growth in the number of customers and hosts offering services worldwide. This growth is not without the problems that arise from service quality failures. Previous research has largely concentrated on positive consumer responses to P2P accommodation, while failures in service have been neglected. Research regarding the impacts of failures on health and safety issues is particularly scarce, especially after the pandemic. Therefore, this research is exploratory in nature and drew on the real experiences of 91 guests worldwide since the beginning the pandemic until 2022. It analyses failures in public health and safety regarding P2P accommodation, classifying them and expanding the categories in order to design recovery strategies to mitigate the negative impacts. The findings provide novel insights that help understand failures in P2P accommodation from a guest's perspective. Moreover, this research suggests recommendations to platforms and hosts that will help improve the levels of service quality and trustfulness for this type of accommodation.

How sharing is the "sharing economy"? Evidence from 97 Airbnb markets

Digital platforms such as Airbnb have become a major economic and political force in recent years, presenting themselves as a "sharing economy"-a new, more just way of organizing social and economic activity-while functioning as owners and managers of proprietary markets. These platforms have in recent years been subject to variegated but growing regulations, begging questions of how these affect their platform markets. This paper examines these claims by a large-scale international comparative analysis of the revenue distribution of Airbnb markets in 97 cities and regions, focusing on the level and evolution of revenue inequality, and estimating the racial and gender revenue gaps by using machine learning classification of host profile pictures. Examining 834,722 listings, 513,785 hosts, and 13,466,854 reviews, the paper finds an average Gini coefficient of 0.68, implying that a majority of the market revenue tends to go to about 10% of the hosts. The level of centralization varies significantly across cities, but is consistently growing over time, with government regulation appearing as a counteracting factor, which however only temporarily slows down the growing dominance of a small minority of large-scale hosts. The paper furthermore finds large gender and race revenue gaps, as Black hosts receive on average 22% less revenue for their listings, and women an average of 12% less. These findings contribute important data to ongoing academic and policy debates, as well as a starting point for further research on inequality in the sharing economy, and how it can be regulated.

Household Rules regarding Cannabis Use and Tobacco Smoking in Denver Airbnb Venues

Cannabis legalization threatens to undermine clean indoor air norms. We investigated the prevalence and nature of tobacco and cannabis use rules in Airbnb venues in Denver, Colorado, where recreational cannabis was legalized in 2014. The study used publicly available Inside Airbnb data for all Denver listings (N = 4,511) collected on 06/29/2019. We analyzed reported tobacco smoking and cannabis use house rules. Tobacco smoking with or without conditions was allowed in 9.7% of venues. Of all venues, 23.7% included details about cannabis use. Of these, 75.9% allowed cannabis use without or with conditions. Of the venues that allowed cannabis use, 30.5% also allowed tobacco smoking. Of the venues that did not allow cannabis use, 0.4% allowed tobacco smoking. Additional multilevel regression models revealed that venues in higher income neighborhoods were less likely to allow cannabis and tobacco use. A substantial number of Airbnb listings in Denver, Colorado permit cannabis use and venues permitting cannabis use may be more likely to also permit tobacco smoking. Findings support the idea that cannabis legalization threatens clean indoor air norms. Airbnb should consider including cannabis use in house rules in jurisdictions that have legalized cannabis to help guests identify spaces with clean air.