![]() A few years later, the offer on the company’s website goes way beyond air mattresses and people’s spare rooms: with Manhattan lofts for $1.000 a night, luxury houses in Paris for multiple times that amount or properties in Barcelona for groups of up to 20 people – to name just a few examples –, Airbnb has become a competitor and a disruptor for the traditional hospitality industry. ![]() With the anecdotal origin of two recent university graduates converting their home into an “Air Bed & Breakfast” by offering overnight stays on air mattresses during a San Francisco conference in 2007 ( Guttentag, 2013), Airbnb created a commission-based web-platform for room sharers and travellers. While the initial web-driven initiatives in “social travel” revolved around the adventurous and altruistic motivations of offering people a place to stay and sharing experiences, networked hospitality businesses turned the “inviting strangers to your home” concept into a for-profit model. Our analysis of networked business models aims to demystify that understanding. Short-stay holiday rental by private individuals and entrepreneurs, as opposed to professional and established hotel businesses, is sometimes – incorrectly, in our view – categorized as part of something called the “sharing” economy. ![]() We will first discuss the drivers of growth of digital platforms which explain this disruption in the context of structural societal changes. In this paper we will analyse this development in order to assess its impact in the years to come. With the largest networked accommodation service, Airbnb, now surpassing the major hotel chains in number of beds offered and in market valuation, it is safe to say that many realized the extent of this disruptive business model too late. ![]() Just a few years ago, the emergence of networked hospitality businesses was hardly a topic of academic nor of commercial interest. The full terms of this licence may be seen at Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Published in the Journal of Tourism Futures. Copyright © 2016, Jeroen Oskam and Albert Boswijk License
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