Studying the effect of a sharing economy on the Tourism Industry: Developing the local economy for the Nubian Community: An empirical study using the Gharb Soheil Village.

Abstract

With the spread of modern technology in the last decade, the sharing economy has emerged as a rapidly growing sector of the business market. This new economic model has put a strong footprint in several fields, and especially in the tourism field. For the last five years, almost 500 sharing economy platforms have emerged that are related to tourism services; 50% of these are related to the transport sector, 39% leisure and 11% for accommodation (Peeters et al., 2015). The emergence of peer-to-peer technologies in the tourism industry has facilitated the communication process between the tourists and service providers, which has led to disappearing the mediators. Both of them have benefited. The service provider has recovered his money previously spent on the mediators and the tourist has saved a substantial amount of his money. This paper aims to discuss the effect of the sharing economy on the tourism industry and its role in developing the local economy for the Nubian community. This study has been based on descriptive research (a survey method research) by distributing online questionnaires via e-mail from August 2019 to September 2019. On the other hand, during a long trip to the Gharb Soheil village, which began from 21 September 2019 until midOctober 2019, other questionnaires were distributed to Airbnb hosts who could not answer the online questionnaire. The research sample consisted of 115 Nubians who using Airbnb platform for hosting tourists in the Gharb Soheil village out of 145 respondents. This questionnaire aimed to analyze the effect of the Airbnb platform as one of the sharing economy platforms on the average income per capita in the Nubian community.

Keywords

• Sharing economy
• local economy
• Nubian community
• tourism
• Gharb Soheil Village