Spatial distribution of shared accommodations and its influencing mechanism in Shanghai: From the perspective of urban tourism

With the vigorous development of sharing economy, shared accommodation has gradually matured, which has profound impact on the socioeconomic development in urban China. Despite the dramatic differentiation between the urban and rural shared accommodation markets, existing works focused on the spatial distribution and influencing factors of rural homestays, and shared accommodation research in urban areas is largely ignored. Shared accommodation in urban areas is closely related to urban tourism activities characterized by sightseeing, shopping, and cultural experience. This study obtained the data of the shared accommodations in Shanghai through Tujia (https://www.tujia.com/), and used spatial analysis tools in ArcGIS to depict the spatial distribution and the influencing mechanism of the shared accommodations from the perspective of urban tourism. The main findings are as follows: 1) The spatial distribution of shared accommodations is characterized by great concentration and localized scattering, and the shared accommodations are mainly concentrated in two tourist hotspots: The recreational business district located in the central city and the Disneyland area located in the suburb. 2) The spatial distribution has close relationship with urban tourism in Shanghai, which is the result of the balance between the behavioral decisions of tourists and the location conditions of the shared accommodations. Moreover, various types of shared accommodation agglomerations have different influencing factors, which provide the opportunity for targeted policies for the development of shared accommodation in different urban areas.