This study explores the key dimensions and attributes of Chinese customers’ experiences with peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodations through Airbnb in China. Thirty-four in-depth interviews were conducted with Airbnb customers. Results suggest that seven dimensions underpin the customer experience with P2P accommodations: physical utility, sensorial experience, core service, guest-host relationship, sense of security, social interaction, and local touch. This indicates that unlike traditional commercial hotels, P2P accommodations appeal to customers to a larger extent for their social and cultural characteristics. Implications are provided for stakeholders, including P2P accommodation practitioners and users, to co-create experiential value.

Introduction

The sharing of assets among communities of people has existed for thousands of years, but the advent of the Internet and especially Web 2.0 has brought about myriad new ways of sharing. Technology has also facilitated traditional means of sharing on a larger scale (Belk, 2014). The phenomenon of the sharing economy is described by Belk (2014) as collaborative consumption, where people coordinate “the acquisition and distribution of a resource for a fee or other compensation” (p. 1597). Collaborative consumption is also known as the P2P economy (Botsman and Rogers, 2010), defined by Hamari et al. (2015) as “a peer-to-peer-based activity of obtaining, giving, or sharing the access to goods and services, coordinated through community-based online services” (p. 3). Sharing business models have emerged in key sectors of the economy, including goods, professional services, transportation, space, and money. For example, Airbnb enables people to rent out part or all of their residence for short stays. This accommodation type evolved from bed and breakfasts (B&Bs), which can be traced back several centuries. Given information asymmetry between a host and his or her guests, B&Bs only operated on a small scale for quite some time. Today, the proliferation of information technology has made it much easier for B&B operators to post rental information. An increasing number of individuals who may not have otherwise considered renting a room in a private residence for an overnight stay have come to prefer such sharing models to mainstream alternatives (Cohen and Kietzmann, 2014). By the end of May 2017, Airbnb offered 3 million listings in 65,000 cities across over 191 countries worldwide, hosting 160 million guest arrivals (Airbnb, 2017a). Airbnb provides more rooms than any branded chain hotel. The rapid increase in Airbnb listings has actually influenced hotel revenues, with budget hotels and hotels that do not cater to business travelers among the most affected (Zervas et al., 2017). The sharing economy has transformed and disrupted traditional business practices, including a shift in consumption attitudes and behaviors (Brown and Swartz, 1989). Driven by increased resource accessibility, tourists are eager to build meaningful social connections directly with others and to seek authentic travel experiences (Botsman and Rogers, 2010). In a study conducted by Gfk, 93% of Chinese millennial respondents named travel as an important part of their selfidentity; 94% of respondents were interested in unique travel experiences (Gfk, 2017). P2P accommodations therefore cater to tourists’ growing need for personalized and distinctive travel opportunities. However, as a new entrant to the hospitality marketplace, P2P accommodations are characterized by a lack of service standards given their absence of star ratings or conventional quality classification (Tussyadiah and Zach, 2017). Moreover, P2P accommodations face conceptual challenges due to the shift in service delivery from professional business entities to ordinary individuals. Scarce research has examined whether this shift has caused differences in customers’ expectations and evaluations of accommodation services (Tussyadiah and Zach, 2017).