Factors Affecting Development of the Sharing Economy in Russia: Airbnb

This work is dedicated to research on factors affecting development of the sharing economy in Russia in the sphere of hospitality by working with the case of Airbnb. Airbnb was chosen because of its biggest market share on the Russian market and position of one of the first and the most popular sharing economy companies in Russia. Behavior of the Russian clients of the company, who chose Airbnb for traveling within Russia was picked as the focus of our research with the intention to define the features of Airbnb performance in Russia. As for empirical material, we collected 231 reviews from Russian users on Airbnb.ru traveled in 10 the most popular cities for inner tourism in Russia and then processed them by using qualitative and quantitative analysis in program NVivo. The study found even results (for example, that Airbnb in Russia is used equally by men and women) and also uneven implications; for instance, the findings showed that Russian tourists value receiving of local experience more than level of service or comfortable location. However, the results of the study revealed that intentions of tourists change depending on purpose of traveling (for example, leisure tourists value location and experience while business tourists value service and amenities). Also, we created the thematic network describing the most popular themes of Russian Airbnb users and giving full representation of what they are valuing the most. We extracted 11 organizing themes, where each of them has detailed description. Results of our study can be useful for Airbnb itself (for instance, for upgrading the system of reviews) and also for other companies working in Russia with implementing the sharing economy principles for better understanding of target audience. Finally, we found several gaps (as an example, it is unclear why a lot of users traveled by Airbnb only once independently from the date of registration), which can be helpful for further research on related topics.