Rural resiliency through peer-to-peer accommodations

Abstract

The rural service sector’s entrepreneurial venture into peer-to-peer accommodations (P2PAs) has gained momentum in rural US communities through platforms such as Airbnb with recent success attributed to a heightened urban-rural migration amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. P2PAs provide benefits such as regional economic development, small business and destination word of mouth marketing, and conservation of natural resources. Increasing P2PA activity in rural communities necessitates a theoretical anchor for P2PA management strategies that comprehensively examines potential P2PA impacts in rural communities and future rural destination trajectories that might be influenced by P2PA development. Thus, this study builds upon a previous theoretical framing of P2PA impacts which utilized both socio-ecological systems theory and tourism development models through its application in a rural destination. Even more, this study’s superimposition Actor-Network Theory (ANT) on this existing theoretical framework provides deeper insight into the iterative relationship between P2PAs and the communities that host them. This study counters a binary positioning of P2PAs as either solely positive or negative disruptions in a tourism system. Instead, it explores the complex network of internal and external “agents” in rural communities potentially impeding or compounding the effects of P2PAs on rural community resilience to inform development of P2PA management strategies.