Abstract: the sharing economy between China and the United States is booming, so the comparative study of it has both practical and theoretical significance. After the case study of airbnb and Tujia, three common points are found: the main business of the company is online short-term leasing, the business model is moving towards mixed business operation, and the service objects are all in addition to leisure tourists, including business travelers; three differences: the original intention of the enterprise is different, the degree of offline involvement is different, and the degree of business diversification is different. The case study found that: the development level of China's sharing economy is still a certain distance from the United States. China's sharing economy needs to find a development path and mode suitable for its own national conditions. Sharing economy is an accelerator to promote China's economic and social development and progress.
As a new economic model based on the Internet, sharing economy is a hot phenomenon in the current global economic development and academic research. Both the United States and China rank in the top two in terms of economic scale and Internet development level. The sharing economy is booming in both countries. A comparative study of the development of the sharing economy between China and the United States is of practical and theoretical significance to China's economic development.
1. China and the United States share a sound economic development trend
China is the birthplace of the sharing economy. The representative enterprises of the sharing economy in the world, airbnb and Uber, were born in the United States successively. According to the report of sharing, cooperation and on demand: a new digital economy by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank and research institution in the United States, 72% of Americans have used at least 11 kinds of sharing products or online services. The main area of online services is densely populated areas. The sharing economy has begun to affect the nature of industries and work formed since the industrial society The American way of life has an important impact, and correspondingly brings political, policy and cultural discussions. The sharing economy also has a wide impact on the life field of Chinese society. In 2015, the term "sharing economy" appeared in the central document for the first time. In 2016, "supporting the development of sharing economy" was written into the government work report of that year. According to the annual report on the development of China's sharing economy (2019) issued by the National Information Center, the transaction scale of China's sharing economy in 2018 was 2942 billion yuan, an increase of 41.6% over the previous year. In 2019, Uber's performance in the New York Stock Exchange shortly after its listing was sluggish, and China's leading enterprises in the field of shared travel continued to decline. In this context, in the field of shared accommodation with a good development trend, a comparative study of the leading enterprises in China and the United States can inspire the research on the development of the shared economy in China and the United States.
2. Main similarities between airbnb and Tujia
Founded in 2008, airbnb is the "ancestor" of the sharing economy, with a valuation of $31 billion, far exceeding the listed Hilton Hotel Group (the international hotel group with the highest market value). Airbnb doesn't have a single home, but it has 6 million homes. Tujia, founded at the end of 2011, is the largest shared accommodation enterprise in China. As of the end of June 2019, Tujia has 2.3 million sets of global housing resources, and the number and business scale of domestic housing resources exceed that of airbnb China. 1. The main business of the company is online short lease. Airbnb originated from the sharing short-term rental of the landlord's own rooms in the city center, and Tujia started from the short-term whole house rental of the house in the holiday destination. After the rapid development in recent years, as a typical Internet company, the house types of both of them are increasingly rich, but they are clear that their enterprise positioning is mainly engaged in short-term rental in the housing rental market. 2. Business models are all moving towards mixed operation. At first, airbnb mainly carried out Taobao type C2C business, but with its increasing influence, many full-time landlords with more than one house under their name began to release houses on the platform, and then some housing intermediaries and property management companies with a large number of houses followed up, and a small B2C model similar to domestic tmall platform emerged. Tujia's initial development focuses on two aspects: one is similar to the B2C mode of JD's own operation. Through cooperation with domestic real estate developers and tourism destination governments, it focuses on the housing resources authorized by the trusteeship, carries out daily maintenance and care of the housing through the offline housing maintenance team, and carries out transactions with tenants; the other is the small B2C mode, which is used by the accommodation operators to publish on tujia.com housing resources. In 2015, Tujia developed C2C business and accepted the personal landlord to release the house supply on tujia.com. 3. The service objects include business tourists besides leisure tourists. Different from the traditional hotel industry, online short-term rental offers non-standard products. The society usually thinks that the main attraction of online short rent is leisure tourists. The development of airbnb and Tujia shows that part of the business travelers have also become the source of short-term online rentals. In 2014, airbnb began to provide services for business travel, and launched the "business airbnb" plan in 2015. "Carlson Wagonlit said its data showed that a tenth of business travelers are using epsilon, up to 21% for Millennials.". Tujia's own hotel apartment products, which are mainly built at the beginning, focus on customers, including business travelers.
3. Main differences between airbnb and Tujia
1. The original intention of enterprises is different. The original intention of the enterprise directly determines the purpose, orientation and values of the enterprise. Although invisible, it will play a more and more powerful influence with the development of the enterprise. Airbnb's creativity stems from the founder's personal experience of renting the room of his own house to strangers and forming a deep friendship. Therefore, the initial business focused on the behavior of contacting the individual landlord in the city center through the Internet to rent the room of his own house to strangers. Airbnb has opened a new era of sharing economy and inspired people to rent and sell idle real estate, cars and even time through Internet platform. It aims to promote people to share rooms with strangers, restore the intimate relationship between people who have been estranged in the era of science and technology, and bring people a sense of belonging when they travel. The establishment of Tujia is to learn from the foreign "holiday leasing" mode, "integrate the idle vacant houses scattered in the hot tourist destinations, and seamlessly connect the real estate value-added services of the tourist destinations with the holiday apartment leasing business through o2o" In this way, for a period of time, Tujia's houses are rented out in a complete set and located in the suburb of the tourist hot city. At the beginning, Tujia copied the model of home away, the leader of holiday rental industry in the United States. Compared with airbnb, Tujia is a typical successful business design, but it lacks the value elements that touch the human mind and spirit.
2. The degree of offline intervention is different. Since its establishment, airbnb has not carried out B2C self operated short lease business. It does not enter into the transaction process of the landlord and the tenant, especially for the house supply on the platform, it will issue relevant guidance suggestions, but it will not involve in the maintenance and repair link. The highlight of Tujia is the offline house maintenance. No matter what kind of housing source, "it needs to be upgraded through the non-standard transformation of Tujia. At the same time, it will be accompanied by the special trust service of Tujia, which can not only make the landlord feel relieved, but also make the tenant feel relieved." Tujia does this, on the one hand, because it is initially located in holiday rental to provide service experience of standard four-star hotels, on the other hand, because the credit system of the domestic housing rental market is not sound, so Tujia can only ensure the quality of housing. Half of Tujia's employees are people who provide routine maintenance and professional maintenance. Tujia has established its own business of B2C through the trusteeship housing. As of the second quarter of 2019, Tujia has more than 10000 self owned houses (ranking 30th in China Hotel Group).
3. The degree of diversification of business is different. So far, Tujia's business has not exceeded the scope of non-standard online short-term accommodation, and airbnb continues to develop new businesses. First of all, airbnb announced four new types of housing in early 2018, including boutique hotels, introducing real estate developers, commercial real estate managers, and operators of boutique hotels to release housing on the platform. Secondly, by the end of 2016, it launched the airbnbtrips service section, including itinerary, restaurant, air ticket booking, and OTA business. Again, the "experiences" project was launched. The project enables local people, including landlords, to provide users with localized in-depth travel experience, which is called the most innovative product since the establishment of airbnb. Airbnb's expansion of new business is just the deepening of its core concept. Airbnb is self positioned as a global community, and regards landlords and tenants on the platform as community members. Its goal is to bring members an incredible depth of experience in travel and a sense of belonging in the global community. What airbnb surpasses homeAway and
4. Conclusion
1.The development level of China's sharing economy is still far away from the United States. Most of the ideas of China's major shared economy entrepreneurship projects come from the inspiration or replication of similar projects in the United States. Tujia's business volume, internationalization level and business diversification level are far behind airbnb. At the core goal and fundamental vision level, Tujia is far less than airbnb in touching the essential relationship and spiritual world of human beings. All these show that there is still a gap in the development of China's sharing economy compared with the United States.
2. China’s sharing economy needs to find its own development path and model. Airbnb and Tujia have formed different development models. The development mode of airbnb is hard to copy in China, so Tujia has to choose a "homeAway + airbnb" development path with heavy assets. This is an inevitable choice, but it is also the right corporate strategy based on China's economic and social development. Because of this, Tujia has been able to surpass the business scale of airbnb China so far.
3. Sharing economy is an accelerator to promote China's economic and social development and progress. Airbnb can completely abandon the B2C model and adopt a thorough asset light model, because the United States has formed a standardized and mature housing rental system, a perfect social trust mechanism, a developed network credit rating, and a relatively civilized quality of citizens. China will accelerate the development of the sharing economy, while achieving economic benefits, it will also focus on the construction of social trust mechanism, and promote the rapid progress of citizens' quality and social civilization.
