Anat Tchetchik (p), Lee Mayra Gafter

This study has two objectives: to examine the interplay between communication technologies, social ties, attractiveness of destination and distance, focusing on the visiting friends tourism; and to further distinguish the visiting friends sub-segment from the visiting relatives’ one. We pursue a quantitative approach by analyzing survey data among 300 respondents who maintain connections with friends overseas, while accounting for endogeneity and simultaneity concerns. We find further justification of the need to study visiting relatives and visiting friends separately. We demonstrate that the use of different communication channels is not monolithic; some media are negatively correlated with travel to meet in person, while other media and meetings in person are mutually reinforcing. Yet, the ongoing advances in communication technologies, on the one hand, and in transportation, on the other, entails that the interplay between communication technologies and face-to-face meeting will evolve, hence, it should continue to be explored in future research.

Aliza Fleischer (p), Eyal Ert

Online peer-to-peer marketplaces, also known as the sharing economy, are growing at a rapid rate. These marketplaces comprise individuals (consumers) who transact directly with other individuals (sellers) while the online platform itself is maintained by a third party. Examples of such leading platforms are Uber providing taxi services and Airbnb providing hospitality services. Unlike virtual markets such as eBay wherein they sell products, many of the sharing economy markets offer services. Thus although they involve online trading they are typically followed by face-to-face interactions upon service provision. Therefore, they involve a complex set of attributes that consumers face in the purchasing process. In the case of Airbnb, for the market we chose to study a consumer has to consider the following types of attributes: the attributes of the property (e.g., number of rooms, price), spatial attributes (e.g., neighborhood, proximity to points of interests), attributes of the host (e.g., trustworthiness). The information on the different attributes appears on the Airbnb website; some are straight forward, like price and neighborhood, and some are inferred from images (like the photo of the host) or text (description of the host). A consumer in Airbnb faces a richer set of attributes while making a choice than a consumer in an online hotel market (e.g., Booking.com). As far as we know, there is no full market analysis in the literature of the sharing economy markets which take into consideration such an intricate unique set of attributes.
We aim to provide such an analysis of the Airbnb market in Stockholm. We apply an aggregate nested logit equilibrium model with product differentiation. The nested structure is defined by the different neighborhoods. We modeled the Airbnb listing choice made by a single guest, continue with the population distribution and the listing's market shares and conclude with the listing’s equilibrium-pricing behavior. An empirical specification is derived from the theoretical model and is applied to Airbnb data gathered from information publicly available on the Airbnb website.
Our results indicate that the host’s virtual attributes play an important role in this market as much as the property and spatial attributes. The seller’s trustworthiness is as important as the location of the property.

Iason Koufodontis (p), Eleni Gaki

The role of social media on tourist destinations has been extensively researched during last years. Internet sites with user generated content such as TripAdvisor have been one of the focus items. When presented and evaluated on the internet, the individual tourism related resources of a region form a complex “digital image” that complements the actual - physical and perceptual - image of the region. This paper attempts to examine specific aspects regarding the effect that the artificial digital image has to the overall attractiveness of a tourist destination. A wide array of secondary data is collected from two sources. First, structured online user content from leading sites is combined in order to estimate a level of attractiveness of specific Mediterranean destinations, based on their digital image. Second, official tourism statistics for the same destinations are organized to provide a comparable base. The data is then analyzed in order to identify potential associations between the digital image and the tourist flows. On selected cases, where historical data is available, the existence of more dynamic and interactive relationships is examined. Findings are then compared with the formation process of the conventional tourism destination image, based on a broad related literature review. The research further examines the importance of conventional parameters not reflected on the digital image and pinpoints evidence related to the degree these fundamental parameters continue to affect tourism in the age of internet.

Ling Xue (p), Jin Weng

To develop its frontier, the Chinese central government in 1999 announced its “Go West” campaign, which some compare to the Marshall Plan. Tourism is one of the most important industry for advance the development of the western region and bring about a coordinated development of regional economies. To understand regional tourism development in areas that are characterized by varied destinations，we should inevitably focus on the tourism growth under multi-player competition. Thus, comprehending the micro-mechanism of macro spatial evolution is an essential prerequisite for regional tourism study. Traditional research methods, whether descriptive or spatial econometrical, can not reveal the dynamic process of evolution and complexity of the tourism spatial structure. The paper establishes a multi-regional tourism spatial model on the condition of two-dimensional space, which also includes product differentiation, scale economy and travel cost. Meanwhile, by using agent-based modeling (ABM) and NetLogo platform, the paper simulates the tourism spatial structure of Northwest China and tries to reveal the core factors affecting spatial structure of regional tourism from micro-economic perspective. In this simulation, we choose East China as the tourism source region and prefecture-level cities of Northwest region as tourism destinations. Simulation result and spatial structure described by data of the hotels in the real world are highly correlated. The correlation coefficients are almost all above 0.9 with different elasticity of substitutions. Simulation result also shows that tourism spatial structure of Northwest China presents obvious gradient diminishing feature: from east to west, Xi'an is the highest level tourism city in the Northwest; Yan'an, Yulin and capital cities Yinchuan, Lanzhou, Xining belong to second level; Urumqi, the other one capital city, under the impact of the distance, is only a third level one. This paper also simulates some strategies and recommendations to promote the development of regional tourism. Firstly, both improving the accessibility of the destination cities and constructing 5A-level scenic spots can increase the scale of the regional tourism industry. Secondly, the simulation result shows that the transport cost affects the spatial structure of regional tourism much more deeply than product differentiation does. Therefore, construction of the airports and direct flights play important roles in promoting tourism development of those remote tourist destinations.