An investigation into the motivational factors for consumers to choose Airbnb’s accommodation rather than Hotels

Abstract

The aim of the study was to investigate the motivational factors that drive consumers to choose an Airbnb accommodation rather than a hotel in order to compare the motivations between Airbnb and hotel guests and to find the pivotal factors that have caused the increasing competitions between those two kinds of accommodation. A quantitative approach and an Online Questionnaire have been chosen to gather data for this research. Firstly because of the limited time available to gather meaningful data, and secondly because an online survey would have enabled the researcher to gather answers confidentially, quickly and cost-effectively. Moreover, the answers of the 130 participants have been collected with Bristol Online Survey and analysed with SPSS. The results of the questionnaire suggested that Airbnb and hotels have different type of guests that have diverse kind of motivations. In fact, has it has been observed from the literature that even if these two kinds of accommodation offer almost the same kind of services the mainly compete on price. Hence, price has been observed to be the major motivational factor for Airbnb consumers and that hotels responded to this threat by lowering their prices in order to attract more tourists. However, it has been demonstrated that only low budget hotels and a portion of mid-range hotels have been affected by the competition between Airbnb since luxury hotels address to different kind of tourists. For this reason, the researcher aimed to understand the major causes of the competition in order to predict the future of the hospitality sector. Additionally, few limitations in relation to the age, gender and participants’ purpose of travel emerged from the study. Hence, the researcher is aware that not all the results are generalisable to the entire population. In fact, the last chapter provides recommendations for future research related to the research topic based upon the limitation and the findings of this study.