“Value for money?” Exploring the consumer experience on shared accommodation platforms: evidence from online reviews in China

Purpose: With the development of the sharing economy, the collaborative consumption model has become more popular and has changed the way people engage in tourism. This study aims to explore. consumer experience in different types of rooms on a shared accommodation platform. Design/methodology/approach: In this study, the authors divided the rooms on the shared accommodation platform into a budget type and a luxury type according to the room price and used content analysis to analyze 15,710 online reviews published on Xiaozhu. Findings: This study found that consumer expectations varied depending on the room type. “Host,” “room,” “transportation and location” and “value” were the four common topics that consumers paid attention to in both room types. “Environment” and “objective conditions” were the particular focuses of the budget room consumers. However, consumers cared about “aesthetics” and “accommodation purpose” when staying in luxury rooms. These results reflected the influence of room prices on consumer experiences. Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to compare the consumer experience in rooms at different price points based on the evidence provided in online reviews. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) analysis was used to extract the underlying topics from the online reviews, which provided more exciting results. This study leads to a comprehensive understanding of the consumer experience from the perspective of expectation theory, enriching the prior research on shared accommodation platforms.