The sharing economy in the lodging industry: the inequality of Airbnb in Venezia

Abstract

The sharing economy is a recent phenomenon which is spreading quickly in many domains, as the transport sector, food service and lodging industry. The business model of the collaborative economy offers to everyone the chance to exchange, rent or barter resources or skills to get earnings or benefits from other people The intermediation channel is represented by collaborative platforms that connect supply and demand in real time avoiding useless transaction costs. In the receptive sector, the most famous platform is Airbnb, an online marketplace for arranging and offering lodging that has become the leader in the hospitality industry, with more than 150 million rooms available within 190 countries. The fast “invasion” of Airbnb in the major cities of the world, has triggered the debate about the sustainability of this digital platform, that seems to be a strong impact both on the social and economic fields of the destinations with many Airbnb listings. Moreover, an overall low level of regulation about short-term rentals and collaborative platforms made worse the concerns related to Airbnb, and just recently only few cities are beginning to manage and rule Airbnb’s listings in a serious way. The aim of my research is to contribute the discussion about the consequences of Airbnb in the cities through an analysis conducted in the metropolitan area of Venezia. I chose this destination because the high concentration of listings and because it is already a sensitive place which is suffering several problems of overtourism. In particular, the analysis that I’ve conducted pursues the goal to explain the effect of Airbnb on the inequality of income and properties between the hosts; indeed, I’ve tried to understand how the revenues and the available listings are distributed between Airbnb’s providers, discovering an high level of disparity of earnings and a concentration of several multi-listings in the hand of few. The thesis will be divided in 4 chapters: 1)in the first section I’ll introduce the sharing economy, explaining what it is and describing its general characteristics and the main actors. Then, I’ll continue the research with the description of the driving factors and showing its value proposition. After recognizing the main opportunities and threats of the sharing economy, I’ll summarize the most famous digital platforms and I’ll illustrate the current regulation of the sharing economy at EU level. 2)In the second chapter, I will introduce an overview about Airbnb, describing its history and how it works; I’ll continue with the theory of Airbnb as disruptive innovator and the value proposition of the platform. Finally, I will focus on the main socio-economic impacts that the company produces to the destinations, citing the analysis of many scholars. Then, I will illustrate the main regulations and rule enforcements imposed by some cities around the world. 3)In the third section I’ll start to illustrate the diffusion, growth and presence of Airbnb in Italy and then I will focus on the presence of Airbnb in Venezia, explaining the listings’ numbers, statistics and impacts found out by previous scholars. In the end, I will illustrate the current regulation on short term rentals and tourist tax ruled by the municipality. 4) The last chapter of my thesis will deepen the topic of the inequality of Airbnb in Venezia: through the IDE R Studio and the statistical software Microsoft excel, I will import and analyze Airbnb’s datasets from the website InsideAirbnb to understand how the revenues coming from Airbnb are distributed between the hosts and to examine the concentration of the listings of Airbnb owned by the service providers. I’ll conduct this research both at city and neighborhood level and moreover I will compare more than one dataset to search for an historical trend on the inequality, correlated to the increase of listings available in Venezia