Abstract
The rise of the peer-to-peer accommodation service such as Airbnb has represented a transformational innovation in the tourism and accommodation industry. Guttentag and fellow researchers (2017) stated that limited research had examined Airbnb, and motivation-based segmentation research based on accommodation choice is much more limited. As a replication study, the purpose of the current research was to investigate why tourists choose to stay with Airbnb based on the 17 motivators proposed in Guttentag et al.’ study, but more specifically among young tourists in the Chinese context. In addition, this study investigated young Airbnb users' level of the importance of personal value items proposed by Schwartz (Schwartz, 1992), in order to study whether there are correlations between the choice of Airbnb and personal value profiles. Three research questions were developed according to the research purposes: (1) What motivations attract young Chinese travellers to choose Airbnb? (2) What are the segments of young Chinese travellers regarding the motivations of using Airbnb? (3) What are the value profiles of young Chinese Airbnb users?
This study adopted a similar quantitative research method to the previous study of Guttentag et al. An online survey method was adopted concerning the research nature and the difficulties of data collection during the COVID-19 quarantine period. The questionnaire was designed by two online survey service websites: Qualtrics and Wenjuanxing. The survey link was posted on various social media platforms, which resulted in 296 responses. The results indicate fourteen out of seventeen motivators from Guttentag et al.'s study affecting the use of young Chinese tourists which were grouped into four factors - Sharing economy ethos and local authenticity, home benefits, novelty and function & interaction. The respondents were grouped into four segments – Easy-going consumers, Non-collaborative consumers, Egocentric consumers and Captious consumers – based on the levels of agreement with motivations. Additionally, two personal value factors affected young Chinese tourists' use of Airbnb – contradiction and adaptation. Numerous practical and theoretical implications were discussed. Areas for current limitations and recommendations for future research were also described.