Chapter 3: Marketing Strategies for Tourism Entrepreneurs in Peer-to-Peer Accommodations

Tourism is known as a resource-intensive industry, which necessitates upholding accountability in terms of sustainability. Sustainable tourism has emerged as a form of modern tourism practice, balancing the needs of travellers, the host community, and the environment (Arora et al., 2023; Lu & Nepal, 2009). Encouraging sustainable tourism is a global necessity that requires taking shared responsibility for tourism from both consumers and providers involved in the travel and hospitality industry (Goodwin, 2023). Sustainable tourism can only be effective if there is entrepreneurship and sustainable innovation that benefit the entire community, giving it a competitive edge (De Lange & Dodds, 2017). Driven by shared values and the surge of social network technologies, the ‘sharing economy’ concept has gained popularity. The sharing economy is a socioeconomic system characterized by the exchange of unused resources among individuals (Tussyadiah & Sigala, 2018). The sharing economy is changing how businesses operate and how customers behave in a variety of sectors, including hospitality and tourism. Among the different sharing economy platforms, the P2P accommodation model is the most remarkable manifestation of the sharing economy concept (Shin et al., 2023). However, little is known about how providers known as hosts can better tailor their services to different consumer segments (Chung & Sarnikar, 2022).