Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Annals of Tourism Research journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/annals The construction of home feeling by Airbnb guests in the sharing economy: A semantics perspective Yunxia Zhu a , Mingming Cheng b,c , Jie Wang a , Laikun Ma d, ⁎ , Ruochen Jiang d a School of Business, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia b School of Marketing, Curtin Business School, Curtin University, Australia c Otago Business School, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand d College of Business, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, 777 Guoding Road, Shanghai 200433, China ARTICLE INFO Associate editor: Konstantinos Andriotis Keywords: Home feeling Airbnb Peer-to-peer accommodation Online reviews Semantics perspective Sharing economy ABSTRACT Although the literature of peer-to-peer accommodation is increasingly recognizing the im- portance of home feeling, little has been done to theorize the construction of home feeling and its impacts on Airbnb guests’ future intention. To fill in this gap, this study systematically unpacked how Airbnb guests construct the feeling of home. A total of 42,085 review comments containing the feeling of home from three major cities in the USA were analyzed from a semantics per- spective. Based on our findings we conceptualize home feeling as a PASS_h process, which contains multiple dimensions: physical and spatial, social, and affective, coupled with hospitality. Essentially, the home feeling with the interaction of these dimensions fulfills the daily hybrid needs of the guests. This article also launches the Annals of Tourism Research Curated Collection on Peer-to-peer accommodation networks, a special selection of research in this field. Introduction The peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodation providers, such as Airbnb and HomeAway, have started transforming our existing ac- commodation sector. While they disrupt the existing hospitality business models, they also offer users different and unconventional experience (Yannopoulou, 2013). The P2P accommodation experience was widely described as a more authentic offering of closer guest-host encounter. As one of the largest P2P accommodation providers, Airbnb has particularly enjoyed a rapid worldwide growth and claims to have created “a community built on sharing” (Airbnb, 2018). The literature has detailed what essentially entails an Airbnb experience of location, amenities, and hosts (Cheng & Jin, 2019). More recently, various studies have attempted to understand these various attributes of an Airbnb experience on Airbnb guests’ satisfaction and loyalty. These attributes refer to Airbnb guests’ hedonic and utilitarian values, Airbnb listings’ amenities, and the host-guest relationship (Lee & Kim, 2018; Wang & Jeong, 2018). Lee and Kim (2018) find that Airbnb guests’ hedonic value, which is experiential and emotional, positively influences both satisfaction and loyalty. This finding about the importance of hedonic or emotional aspect of values was a point of departure that prompted us to investigate the topic of “home feeling” and its possible impact on consumer behaviour. Airbnb guests tend to have a “feeling at home” (e.g., belongingness) (Liu & Mattila, 2017), or a feeling of home away from home in Airbnb (Liang, Choi, & Joppe, 2018) during their stay. They also feel that “the production and provision of such homely feelings is something that one can never https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2018.12.013 Received 31 August 2018; Received in revised form 13 November 2018; Accepted 11 December 2018 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: y.zhu@business.uq.edu.au (Y. Zhu), Mingming.cheng@otago.ac.nz, mingming.cheng@curtin.edu.au (M. Cheng), j.wang16@uq.edu.au (J. Wang), malaikun@163.com (L. Ma). Annals of Tourism Research 75 (2019) 308–321 0160-7383/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T