Accommodations providers in the sharing economy are increasingly competing with the guest experience which is familiar with the hotel industry. Additionally, research related to emotion is remained in the hospitality, servicescape and tourism literature. This research built a conceptual model to show how customer’s perceptions of airbnb’s environments influence behavioral intentions through emotions. Based on previous servicescape studies, this study explored the relationships among physical and social environment, customer’s emotional responses, and behavioral intentions.
First, the purpose of this study examined the impact of customer’s perceptions of physical and social environment on pleasure and arousal emotions and the effect of the emotions on behavioral intentions. To achieve this purpose, this study investigated customer emotion which is classified to pleasure and arousal based on Mehrabian & Russell(1974). Finally, this research was analyzed by gathering data from domestic areas oriented towards the customers who used airbnb for private room and shared room.
A survey has been performed to study servicescape for domestic airbnb’s users. In total 189 samples were collected and finally 164 valid samples were used in statistical analysis.
As a result after using a multiple regression analysis, research hypotheses were verified. First, it was found that internal environment had a positive effect on pleasure, whereas private service and external environment had no effect on pleasure. Second, private service had a significant effect on the level of customer arousal. But internal environment and external environment were no impact on arousal. Third, customer-host relationship positively influenced to pleasure. In addition customer-host relationship had a significant impact on arousal. Lastly, pleasure had a significant effect on behavior intention, but arousal had no effect on behavior intention.
Implications of this study are as follows: First, airbnb needs to offer private service for customers who are planning to business and short trip. And then satisfactory will be increased through a variety of services and customized service. Second, the host role is required to be expanded as a lot of direct communications are happened between host and customer. Third, service should be offered considering cultural characteristics of the country for customer who is using airbnb abroad. Finally, a future research is needed for e-servicescape since customer is able to contact with host online firstly.
There are limitations in this study: First, the age of survey I conducted was not vary. So, it is judged to diversify the sample ages. Second, service experience environment of all customer is different since airbnb is not standardized like hotel.
Future researches are as follows: First, the factor that servicescape affects on emotion of foreigner customer who is using domestic aribnb would be different. Secondly, separation is required for host-role depend on online communication or offline communication. Finally, a part of survey conclusion for the study shared room occupied a lot of portion in type of airbnb . So we need to study users who prefer for shared room. Eventually advance research will be possible in the future.


key word : physical-servicescape, social-servicescape, customer emotion, pleasure, arousal, behavior intension, M-R model, airbnb-users