Estimating the impact of sharing economy accommodation platforms on rural tourism ecosystems: an empirical investigation in Italian “Borghi”

Tourism industry is witnessing a deep change due to the development of technology based innovative business models. One of the main changes happening right now in hospitality is the quick and relentless entrance in the sector of a new business model, based on the concept of platform between peers. More specifically, Airbnb and others platforms have described as disrupting the incumbents in this space, since they are often able to provide simpler accommodation solutions to a lower price. Many scholars have already studied the relationship between incumbents and new entrants in this fields, mainly focusing on the phenomena taking place in big urban centres, but due to the slower diffusion of sharing economy accommodation platforms in rural environment, few effort has been dedicated to observe, measure and describe what is happening in rural contexts. More precisely the literature in the field is analysing the phenomenon from a theoretical perspective, proposing frameworks, but a first empirical study is still missing. With this research we aim at filling this gap estimating in a quantitative manner the effect of sharing economy accommodation platforms diffusion on rural territories. Precisely we postulate that Airbnb is able to ease the process of accommodation creation, to enable the match between potential tourists and less popular destination and facilitate the networking among hosts and involvement of the community, resulting in a higher ability to attract travellers thanks to the effort of a number of micro-entrepreneurs. We took the list municipalities of the association “I borghi piú belli d’Italia” as research setting to run econometric model to measure the impact on the touristic arrivals. In order to be part of the association the town has respect criteria in terms of small size and presence of relevant touristic resources, and the public administration has to apply following a certain procedure, showing interest in being recognized as a valid touristic destination. The results show that the growth of Airbnb supply is positively and significantly correlated to the growth of arrivals in the destination. On top of that we also wonder whether the presence of an institutional website of the destination and the presence of an official tourism portal could influence the direct relationship between the growth of Airbnb and the growth of touristic arrivals. Evidence shows that the online visibility coming from official websites positively moderates the relationship between Airbnb supply and touristic arrivals