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The sharing economy has allowed people from all over the world to more effectively utilize their assets. Owners or controllers of assets in the sharing economy are free to set any price they want subject to prevailing market demand as long as they operate in an imperfectly competitive market environment. This paper examines how various characteristics of an Airbnb listing (size, number of photos, ratings, host responsiveness, superhost status, distance from city centre, etc.) affect the prices of accommodation and determines which factors strongly affect price using weighted least squares (WLS) and quantile regression. A hedonic pricing model was developed and applied to data from the cities of Barcelona, Madrid, and Seville to determine how the different characteristics of an Airbnb listing affect the price of accommodation in these major three Spanish tourist cities. The estimation results, which are resilient to various robustness checks, indicate that overall rating as well as characteristics indicative of the size of the accommodation have the strongest positive influence on price, while the number of reviews and distance from the city centre have the strongest negative influence on price. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how different human mobilities negotiate public space and with which results. The case in point is that of cruise tourism in Barcelona, a city where the relentless growth of visitors and the expansion of accessibility gateways like the cruise port may well be behind the rise of "anti-tourism"™ voices in social and political circles. Our work focuses on the transits of cruise passenger groups in two exemplary public spaces of the city, analysing how they come to fence off, engage with- or feed the mobility of other collectives. This research provides fresh insights on the processes that may generate disaffection among different "place users"™, eliciting a revision of the expectations on the quality of public space. On a more technical level, this paper introduces a complex but cost-effective methodology, involving a mix of geo-analytic and qualitative methods, which manages to track the "mobility clash"™ in public space and make sense of the response tactics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cuadernos de Turismo is the property of Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Murcia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Previous research has mainly focused on spatial relations among tourist attractions in urban areas. However, few studies have examined the functional relations between tourist attractions and other urban places (i.e. the flows of tourists between them). Therefore, this study focuses on quantification of the tourist-functional relations among Places of Interest (POIs) using Foursquare data from Barcelona. This represents an effort to highlight the important functional closeness between different types of POIs whose significance is not usually obvious from their spatial relationships. In order to quantify these functional relationships, this paper classifies Foursquare POIs into 22 categories according to their different usages and constructs a matrix of usage-flows to depict the connections among these different usages. A model of interaction values is introduced to describe the strength of relations and identify the dominant tourist usages. The results confirm that the functional centroids differ from these spatial distributions which only focused around tourist attractions. In addition to tourist attractions, places in the categories of Restaurants, Transport, and Hotels play important roles in functional relationship of tourism. The typical urban usages of tourists can be distinguished by the interaction values between these categories. Our model provides a practical method to quantify the interlinkage of usages of POIs based on tourist flows. In particular, LBSN data has potential as a method to observe the tourist-functional relations among places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is focused on the study of the quality of experience lived by tourists when visiting a cultural heritage destination by using a tourist product based on a virtual tour. The research is justified by the increased demand by tourists to have a memorable experience in a destination as well as the growing offer on virtual reality and augmented reality technologies applied to the tourism sector. The database consists of online comments extracted from those who visited two well-known tourism destinations in Spain, Seville and Barcelona, where the immersive virtual reality technology named Past View is currently used. A total of 119 online comments on the tourists' experience after the use of the Past View smart glasses and posted in the e-WOM community Trip Advisor were valid for the analysis. Using a correspondence analysis of textual data, the results shed light about how virtual reality technologies influence on tourists' quality of experience. The findings drawn from the empirical analysis provide destination marketing organizations suitable and useful information to promote the destination and therefore encouraging entrepreneurs to innovate in tourism sector to attend the desire of tourists to have a memorable tourist experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Il Capitale Culturale: Studies on the Value of Cultural Heritage is the property of Il Capitale Culturale Studies on the Value of Cultural Heritage and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Local food as a tourism attraction has been well recognized and studied by many tourism scholars. However, the phenomenon that tourists prefer food other than local food has not gotten much attention. This article attempts to explore how the eating habits of tourists can hinder their consumption of local food by studying the food consumption behaviours of Chinese tourists in Spain. Qualitative methods were employed to interview fifty-two Chinese tourists in Barcelona, and field notes of participant observations taken during thirteen familiarization trips for Chinese market were also used to help understand the dining behaviours of Chinese tourists. The results show that due to different food habits, Chinese tourists only sampled local Spanish food during their travels in Spain. The challenges to Chinese food habits included unfamiliar ingredients, strange tastes, different quantities of food, different dining times and duration, and different cultural concepts of healthy food. The research also reveals that Chinese tourists chose many strategies to deal with the unaccustomed eating situations, such as enduring the cultural differences, eating familiar fast food, eating just Chinese food, or bringing food from home. In long-haul Europe travels, Chinese tourists often switch among these strategies in order to eat healthily and comfortably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perceived tourist image has been studied from different dimensions. However, destination lighting, as a dimension of the perceived tourist image, has so far been unexplored. This research letter analyses illumination of tourist sites as a dimension of the perceived night-time tourist image. Results show that lighting is a relevant issue for image perception, and is related to the image projected by some monuments and tourist attractions. Results show that age and origin are determining factors of this dimension of image perception. Some managerial and research implications are also considered and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to highlight the importance of urban food markets as tourist icons in the current competitive race to create attractive cities. Food markets attract a large number of consumers, both local and tourists. However, their impact on the city and its dynamics should be treated to establish measures to ensure sustainable (compatible) uses for both kinds of users. This calls for the establishment of a system of indicators to determine what level of sustainability food markets are at and facilitate decision-making for the agents involved in their management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tourism is a strong business sector in Spain. In terms of tourist accommodation, in addition to hotels, guesthouses and rural housing, more and more private dwellings are increasingly being transformed into tourist dwellings. Thus, in 2014, lodgings offered by these tourist dwellings were nearly twice the lodgings offered by hotels: 2.7 million compared to 1.4 million. This phenomenon is being greatly facilitated by new online platforms known as ‘collaborative economy’ – e.g. Airbnb or HomeAway. Barcelona, in particular, experiences a high concentration of tourist dwellings in certain neighbourhoods, as it is the fourth-ranked destination in terms of Airbnb guests. And in addition to the positive economic impact on the city and households, this phenomenon has also brought some negative side effects, even more in a country where 66.5% of the population live in flats (the highest amongst EU Member States), which are normally organised as condominiums. The aim of this article is twofold. First, to present the main negative impact of the abrupt growth concerning the transformation of private dwellings into tourist dwellings: the effects on the housing market in general on the liveability and security in neighbourhoods and also in condominiums. Second, to address the policies affecting both at public and private levels in order to protect and preserve neighbourhoods and condominiums without hindering the tourist development in the city. Measures such as the suspension on the concession of tourist dwellings licences, the approval of a new special urban planning and the regulation of a room rental scheme will be mentioned. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An understanding of expenditure patterns is vital to travel organizers and destination marketers. Using surveys conducted by the Barcelona Tourism Board (Turisme de Barcelona), this study profiled the trip by purpose: leisure or business, and investigated the relationships between travel expenditure, length of stay, repeat visits and satisfaction. Different trip-related and socio-demographic variables, such as trip purpose, number of nights spent and repeat visits were found to contribute to explaining the expenditure variations. The theoretical model is based on the literature, and puts forward different hypotheses, which are tested using SEM. The findings show behavioural differences between those groups and are useful for tourism managers of urban destinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines photographs taken by tourists of Barcelona in order to identify the perceived image of the city. Specifically, the study analyses 3100 photographs uploaded by tourist photographers on the social network Flickr. The method of analysis used was content analysis. The findings demonstrate that Barcelona's perceived image is dominated by a few very popular sights, but also contains a large number of new sights and spaces. These new elements are not of much individual value, but collectively account for a large volume and therefore have the capacity to expand the city's image. This is the long tail of Barcelona's tourist image, providing the city with a new image created by tourists themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]