Airbnb in China: The Impact of Sharing Economy on Chinese Tourism

Today an increasing number of young people are likely to book homestay hotels instead of traditional hotels. We find Airbnb is one of the most popular websites in China to reserve homestays for young people traveling aboard. Since the company’s headquarters is based in San Francisco, we find it is not well-known in China and little research has been done about it in China. Therefore, this paper addresses how Airbnb can influence Chinese tourism. We use mixed methods in this paper, including surveys, interviews and ethnography studies. We conduct semi-structured interviews to travelers and Airbnb employees. We carry out surveys to participants. The surveys have been posted both on the internet and in print. Ethnography studies have been conducted in order to get detailed information about customers’ usage of the website. We find that 59.05% of the participants prefer to live in starred hotels, and 49.52% of the participants prefer to stay in budget hotels and 18.1% of the participants used Airbnb. We find out that interviewees believe that the emerging of sharing economy like Airbnb does influence or will impact the traditional hotel industry. Some participants expressed their preferences about the website design and the work environment of Airbnb. Our ethnography studies also investigated four Airbnb customers’ travel experiences about using Airbnb website. They reported that Airbnb not only offered them diverse rooms, but also offered them good accommodation, lots of travel information and help from landlords. However, trust issue still is a big concern between customers and Airbnb.