Research Paper on Marketing Strategy Airbnb

📌Category: Business, Corporation, Marketing, Strategy
📌Words: 490
📌Pages: 2
📌Published: 13 April 2022

Technological development has transformed the economy in a variety of ways, from corporate organization to corporate-consumer relationships or consumer-consumer relationships. These processes also have an effect on consumer behaviour. One of the most important phenomena of these changes is “sharing economy”. Sharing economy has had an effect on consumption patterns and prices and poses a major challenge to more traditional market players. (Boros, Dudas and Nagy, 2019)

 One of the most well-known examples of the sharing economy is peer-to-peer accommodations. They have opened the door for a wider selection of destinations for travellers, option of increased length of stay, travel frequency, meaningful social interactions with the locals, and unique experiences in authentic settings.

 Airbnb is definitely the leading market player in the industry. Nowadays, it offers more accommodation listings than some of the largest “traditional” hotel chains and has been able to gain a significant share within the tourism accommodation services and influence on the urban property and rental markets.

The hospitality market has witnessed substantial disruption by Airbnb and other similar platforms. While Airbnb has been able to make an impact on the hospitality and tourism industry, it sees a gravely skewed proportion of young people as its users. This poses a major challenge to Airbnb as “older people or seniors” comprise one of the fastest-growing travel markets.

Silver Travel Advisor’s survey (The Silver Travel Industry Report 2021) observes that 77% of senior travellers plan to book and travel within 6 months of getting vaccinated. An increase in bookings of older travellers has also already been detected by several tour operations. (Rashaad Jorden, Skift, 2021)

As the emerging senior market is predicted to comprise nearly a quarter or more of the population by 2050 (World Population Prospects 2017), one cannot contest the fact that seniors or older people are the most important and steadily growing tourist group (Wang et al., 2013). The number of trips by this age group is projected to reach 2 billion trips annually by 2050 — according to the World Tourism Organization (2001).

Additionally, almost half of UK homeowners’ housing wealth is concentrated in the hands of older people, specifically over-65. The generation of people born before the mid-1950s own £1.7tn of residential property by value. (Evans, 2019)

This makes seniors the best target market for hosts for Airbnb. In fact, with over 400,000 hosts, seniors are the fastest-growing host demography.

However, the 55 and above age group still accounts for only 12% of Airbnb’s users, whereas, 60% of all guests who have ever booked on Airbnb are millennials. This clearly indicates that while seniors are emerging as a lucrative market, Airbnb is still struggling to attract them.

The purpose of this research is to identify different ways for Airbnb to attract the market of “older people or seniors” by understanding the factors that are associated with the intention to use Airbnb as a host and/or as a guest. Following are some of the specific objectives that we aim to explore and learn about:-

1) The importance of accommodation attributes

2) On what basis do the seniors vary in their likelihood of using Airbnb

3) How length of stay & travel, among other factors, affect one’s choice of accommodation (Hotels vs Airbnb)

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