The Impact of COVID-19 on Chinese Hotel Industry and Airbnb

Abstract

The novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) outbreak in January 2020 has affected different industries in China. This paper focuses on the impact of COVID-19 on the accommodation industry in China. In this study, a regression model was used to analyze the correlation between weekly occupancy rates of hotel and Airbnb respectively and the number of infected people from January to April to test the hypothesis: (1) COVID-19 negatively impacts the hotel industry in China; (2) COVID-19 negatively impacts the P2P short-term rental apartment industry (Airbnb) in China. We found that hotel occupancy was negatively correlated with the number of existing infections. The occupancy rate of short-term rental apartment in Airbnb is negatively correlated with the number of existing infections. The results show that COVID-19 has had a negative impact on the hotel industry and Airbnb in China. Through comparative data calculation, we found that the impact of the epidemic on hotels is greater than that of the Airbnb. Current research on the impact of COVID-19 on the accommodation industry is inadequate. This study verifies that COVID-19 has a greater negative impact on hotels than Airbnb, and can provide suggestions for government and forecast, which could be references for enterprises' future investment portfolio and risk aversion.