KOREASCHOLAR

Numerous studies have explored the influence of Airbnb on the tourism and hospitality industry. However, relatively few studies have focused on customer engagement. Considering its crucial role of boosting customer satisfaction and behavioral intentions (Harrigan, Evers, Miles, & Daly, 2017; So, King, Sparks, & Wang, 2016), there is a great need for research into Airbnb in terms of customer engagement. Therefore, this study aims to investigate customer engagement, satisfaction, and behavioral intentions among Airbnb users. This study recruited a total of 374 US Airbnb users through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), which has been increasingly adopted to collect samples in tourism and hospitality studies. Data analysis for structural equation modeling (SEM) was conducted to determine the effects of customer engagement on satisfaction and behavioral intentions of Airbnb users. The results show that customer engagement plays a crucial role in Airbnb user experiences. This study contributes to tourism and hospitality research by applying a customer engagement scale previously developed by So et al. (2016) to examine the relationship between customer engagement and behavioral intention to use Airbnb. In addition to this relationship, satisfaction was included as a mediator to better grasp the importance of customer engagement and the role of satisfaction among U.S. Airbnb users. This research also extends the current literature of Airbnb by examining, through an empirical approach, how customer engagement with Airbnb impacts its users’ behavioral intentions.

• Jungho Suh(Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, China)
• Soyoung An(Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, China)
• Thomas Eck(Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, China)