An analysis of apartment listings in best destinations on an OTA: Thailand versus Japan

Purpose The sharing economy enables apartment owners to generate income from their assets. “Agoda Homes” is an online travel agent (OTA) that directly competes with Airbnb. A destination has to discover its competitiveness, but few studies have provided an overview of accommodation attributes in each destination, which are crucial to shaping its brand image. This paper aims to illustrate firm-generated content or attributes that apartment owners list about their properties on an OTA platform to comprehend factual information about apartments in each destination with various star ratings and user ratings and to formulate a research model for future studies. Design/methodology/approach Informational content and accommodation attributes for apartments are automatically collected using a Web scraping tool (the Data Miner). Descriptive statistics and text analysis (word cloud and word frequency) are used to analyze data. Findings Findings reveal the primary location, facilities, cleanliness and safety attributes for all apartments in each destination, along with star ratings and user ratings. A research framework for scholars is also suggested. Guidelines for stakeholders in the tourism industry are additionally furnished. Originality/value This work concentrates on apartments, which have received less attention in the tourism literature. The study gathers factual data from a website to mitigate respondent bias issues inherent in the traditional survey methods.