Abstract
Despite its dissemination in several areas, opinions about the sharing economy and collaborative consumption (CC) vary among researchers. Some believe that this is a ‘disruptive business model’ that will threaten current companies and their business (Guttentag, 2015: 1199). Others argue that it has emerged from the contemporary economy and will tend to grow as an alternative method of doing business (Botsman, 2010). These two concepts are discussed in this chapter. As an alternative form of tourism, following the tradition of bed and breakfast accommodation, the peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing practice is one of the most notable forms of CC (Belk, 2014a). The phenomenon reached such dimensions that it was considered one of the main disruptive forces in the tourism sector (Buhalis et al., 2020), calling into question the sovereignty of traditional accommodation chains (Pizam, 2014; Fang et al., 2016). This new type of accommodation, as well as the most popular platform that gives it life, Airbnb, will be the target of detail in this chapter. The chapter is structured in four sections. The introduction presents the relevance of the contents covered in the chapter. The second section adresses the new phenomenon of sharing and the different designations for it. In the third section, a discussion and an explanation of the P2P accommodation and its impacts are presented. Finally, the last section adresses the general conclusions of the chapter.