Understanding the influence of feeling at home on healthcare travelers' well-being: a comparison of Airbnb and hotel homescapes

Although there is the saying there's no place like home, research on a traveler's sense of feeling at home in an accommodation and its influence on their well-being is underrepresented. Particularly, given the increase of peer-to-peer accommodations and healthcare travel segment, this gap is notable. Analyzing data including 420 respondents who stayed at an Airbnb and 320 who stayed at hotel accommodations, structural equation modeling tested the effect of an accommodations homescape on a healthcare traveler's sense of feeling at home and well-being. The findings have strategic implications that emphasize the need to engineer home-like environments for particular traveler segments.