Abstract
There is a widespread belief that the success of any business considerably! depends on customer satisfaction. Furthermore, service quality is an important antecedent! on customer satisfaction. Therefore, identification of the various elements of service! quality that contribute to customer satisfaction becomes critical. The purpose of this! Master’s thesis is to understand factors that affect customer satisfaction of a well-known! sharing-economy platform’s airbnb.com services. This Thesis explores the customer! satisfaction and service quality theory and adapts it in hospitality management context by! pointing out cleanliness, location, host and physical amenities as the elements of customer! satisfaction within Airbnb services.
Data were collected via reviews, comments and ratings available on airbnb.com website and content analysis of this data was performed. No previous study has focused exclusively on the content analysis of Airbnb user reviews. A total sample of 4924 reviews was investigated in this thesis which was split into two studies where one was quantitative in nature using SPSS for statistical analysis and other was qualitative utilising Nvivo11 software for coding and analysing the data.
The results of both studies are consistent and indicate that perceived quality of the services provided by the host is of primary importance for user satisfaction. Furthermore, the physical amenities and convenient location are two other factors crucial for Airbnb customer happiness with the service. In addition, the results of this thesis indicate that the attributes that drive sharing economy’s Airbnb customer satisfaction and repurchase intention are closely related to traditional services. Implications and limitations of the findings are further discussed.!
| Educations | MSocSc in Service Management, (Graduate Programme) Final Thesis |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Number of pages | 124 |
| Supervisors | Ioanna Constantiou |