Barcelona’s peer-to-peer tourist accommodation market in turbulent times

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of sociopolitical instability on the peer-to-peer market for tourist accommodation. Design/methodology/approach The author studies for the case of Barcelona the impacts of the events occurring in the past months of 2017, which consisted of a terrorist attack and the calling for a referendum on the independence of Catalonia, by fitting a fixed effects regression model to a data panel of Airbnb listings, using New York and Paris as a control group. Findings The results show that, after controlling for individual and time effects, listing reviews and revenues fall in the last quarter of 2017 and do not recover until the second quarter of the next year, in spite of a notable effort to decrease prices in the same period. They also indicate that peer-to-peer hosts react fast to demand shocks and as those from traditional markets. Originality/value This is the first study to evaluate the impact of terrorism or political uncertainty in the peer-to-peer market and the first to evaluate their combined effect in any market.