You are not alone: Heal the P2P accommodation guests with digitally displayed close relationships

Abstract

With people in modern society increasingly feeling alienated, their desire for relatedness satisfaction simultaneously strengthens. A somewhat different phenomenon observed is that people book P2P accommodations for private rather than shared space with other strangers. This study proposes a novel social cue to be integrated into P2P accommodation marketing, displayed close relationships in a host's profile photo. This subtle way of social touches should potentially benefit the relatedness satisfaction of potential guests which they still implicitly desire and in turn enhance their enhanced booking intention. We adopted a combined-methods approach that combines secondary data from a home-sharing platform with two lab experiments. Findings support that displaying close relationships in the host profile photos facilitates P2P accommodation bookings; additionally, such an effect is mediated by the guests' relatedness satisfaction and is more evident when guests sense higher-level social anxiety. This study advances research on relationship management while providing practical implications for P2P accommodation platforms and hosts for strategic marketing design that integrates relatedness support.