The Rise of the Sharing Economy in Tourism: Exploring Airbnb Attributes for the Veneto Region

In just a couple of years, the sharing economy grew out to become a significant segment of the holiday accommodation market. Online peer-to-peer marketplaces allow people to offer rooms or entire houses to tourists, with Airbnb being the biggest and most famous example. This paper aims to give an insight into explaining which factors and attributes influence the success of Airbnb accommodations in the Veneto Region, using occupancy as a proxy. We analysed characteristics of 19624 Airbnb accommodations. The logistic regression model identifies a number of influential attributes which can be divided between locational characteristics, being located in attractive tourism destinations, and accommodation characteristics, for example the price, rating, number of previous bookings and the status of the host. The quantitative analysis allows to create an attractiveness scale, which is analysed for geographic patterns.