With rapidly increasing volume of sharing economy transactions, the existing business has shown growing concerns over how the market will be affected. This study examines the issue empirically in the context of accommodation sharing using the data directly obtained from Airbnb and the website data collected by AirDNA during 2010-2014 in Korea. We first examine how hotels' revenue and operations are affected by the introduction of Airbnb in Korea using a reduced-form analysis and find a negative impact on revenue and room rate, but not a significant effect on occupancy rate. We then estimate a structural model of the demand for accommodation and find that hotels become relatively less attractive with the increase of Airbnb supply. However, an additional analysis of hotel review ratings shows no significant change in the quality of hotel services with Airbnb growth, rebutting the argument that hotel accommodation quality may be lowered as a response to competitive pressure from cheap options available on Airbnb. Overall, we conclude that hotels have responded to Airbnb growth by lowering prices, resulting in the decrease in revenue, but they do not appear to have degraded their service quality.

With rapidly increasing volume of sharing economy transactions, the existing business has shown growing concerns over how the market will be affected. This study examines the issue empirically in the context of accommodation sharing using the data directly obtained from Airbnb and the website data collected by AirDNA during 2010-2014 in Korea. We first examine how hotels' revenue and operations are affected by the introduction of Airbnb in Korea using a reduced-form analysis and find a negative impact on revenue and room rate, but not a significant effect on occupancy rate. We then estimate a structural model of the demand for accommodation and find that hotels become relatively less attractive with the increase of Airbnb supply. However, an additional analysis of hotel review ratings shows no significant change in the quality of hotel services with Airbnb growth, rebutting the argument that hotel accommodation quality may be lowered as a response to competitive pressure from cheap options available on Airbnb. Overall, we conclude that hotels have responded to Airbnb growth by lowering prices, resulting in the decrease in revenue, but they do not appear to have degraded their service quality.

1 Introduction

2 Data and Descriptive Statistics

3 Airbnb Effect on Hotel Performance

4 Airbnb Effect on Hotel Service Quality

5 Concluding Remarks

Figures and Tables

Appendix

References