Abstract
Frame of the research. Peer-to-peer accommodation platforms such as Airbnb increasingly position accommodation as an experiential product, yet large-scale empirical applications of the Experience Economy framework to Airbnb user-generated content remain limited.
Purpose of the paper. The paper investigates how the four Experience Economy dimensions — education, entertainment, escapism, and esthetics — shape guest satisfaction in Airbnb accommodation reviews, comparing Rome and Paris.
Methodology. The study analyzes nearly one point six million Airbnb accommodation reviews from Rome and Paris. Experiential dimensions are operationalized through validated scales from Mody et al. combined with NLP-assisted coding, validated against human-coded reviews. Satisfaction is measured through sentiment scores and listing ratings.
Results. Esthetics is the strongest predictor of affective satisfaction, while education has the strongest association with rating-based satisfaction. Entertainment has positive but moderate effects across both outcomes. Escapism shows a more complex pattern: it is negatively associated with sentiment and non-significant in the baseline rating model, but becomes a significant rating driver in Paris. City interaction models show that experiential effects differ between Rome and Paris.
Research limitations. The study uses publicly available Airbnb data and relies on automated text analysis; therefore, sentiment classification and experiential coding may not fully capture irony, implicit meanings, or culturally specific expressions.
Managerial implications. Hosts and platforms should treat accommodation not only as functional lodging but also as an experiential product, investing in esthetics, cultural guidance, and destination-specific experiential positioning.
Originality of the paper. The paper provides large-scale empirical validation of the Experience Economy framework in peer-to-peer accommodation and demonstrates that experiential dimensions influence affective and cognitive satisfaction differently across destination contexts.