IBIMA Publishing Journal of Eastern Europe Research in Business and Economics http://ibimapublishing.com/articles/JEERBE/2022/601146/ Vol. 2022 (2022), Article ID 601146, 8 pages, ISSN: 2169-0367 DOI: 10.5171/2022.601146 ______________________ Cite this Article as: Elena Stiubea, Simona Ardelean and Alina Badulescu (2022)," The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Collaborative Tourism Industry: The Case of Airbnb ", Journal of Eastern Europe Research in Business and Economics Vol. 2022 (2022), Article ID 601146, DOI: 10.5171/2022.601146 Research Article The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Collaborative Tourism Industry: The Case of Airbnb Elena Stiubea, Simona Ardelean and Alina Badulescu Department of Economics and Business, Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Oradea, Oradea, Romania Correspondence should be addressed to: Alina Badulescu; elena_stiubea@yahoo.com Received date:26 March 2021; Accepted date:28 August 2021; Published date: 2 February 2022 Academic Editor: Alexandra Toader Copyright © 2022. Elena Stiubea, Simona Ardelean and Alina Badulescu. Distributed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International CC-BY 4.0 Introduction Contemporary tourism is driven to some extent by technology. If until not long ago, people were not so interested in finding out about the place they are going to visit, nowadays it has become a trend for the tourist to study in detail the future destination. They are much more interested in what a destination offers, from where to stay, gastronomy, leisure activities to the Abstract In a relatively short period of time, the development of the sharing economy has surprised analysts and practitioners with a new perspective on how to access and distribute services, the speed of growth in a multitude of economic sectors and their global expansion. In the field of tourism, home sharing has come to satisfy the changes in the preferences and behaviour of tourists, mainly oriented now towards vacations that offer authentic and memorable experiences. In this article, we made a comparison between the expectations of tourists from Airbnb and those they have from a traditional accommodation and which are the reasons why people choose collaborative services. We are also interested to see how these home sharing systems have adapted to the recent challenges posed by the global pandemic crisis, differences and similarities with the strategies of traditional operators, and to what extent we can anticipate future trends in tourism accommodations. However, the data about online platforms, in general, but also about the Airbnb platform, in particular, are not well nuanced, despite the fact that there is more and more interest in this field, and the ongoing impact of the global pandemic is still partially captured and refined in international statistics on tourism. Keywords: sharing platforms; experience; Airbnb.