Home Sharing and Tourist Attractions: Spillover Effects, Mechanisms, and Unintended Consequences

Home sharing platforms have changed the way people travel by pairing them with spare places of local residents in tourist attractions. Yet, attractions can also be vulnerable to unintended consequences of home sharing. Using unique data on home sharing and attractions, we leverage a quasi-experimental design and machine learning techniques to investigate how home sharing affects attraction visits and the associated consumer experience. We find that home sharing benefits attractions in two important ways—home sharing properties in an attraction not only increase the visits to the attraction but also elevate the consumer experience with the attraction. We provide evidence that capacity expansion and local host support are plausible mechanisms driving these impacts. However, our results suggest that, due to over-tourism, the positive impact of home sharing on consumer experience significantly weakens at higher-level attractions and peak seasons. These findings collectively add evidence to the debates on home sharing and contribute to the literature on sharing economy, platform-based markets, and the social impact of the platform economy. They also provide timely implications for entrepreneurs operating home sharing businesses, attraction administrators, and policymakers.