millennials, peer-to-peer accommodation and the hotel industry

Today’s world market is a buyer’s market and the new customers, the millennials, are thoughtto be distinctively different than others. Technologically comfortable, the most educated generationever, multitaskers, and strongly influenced by friends and peers, millennials have a different buyingbehaviour and other expectations from service providers. Thus, companies from the hospitalityindustry and policy makers face a number of challenges in trying to meet their (future) demands. Atthe same time, the “sharing economy” has led to the rise of the peer-to-peer accommodation sectorand to a new business model (Airbnb). The aim of this paper is to present these challenges for the hotel industry, because there has notbeen significant research concerning the trends and changes this new generation / new businessmodel will bring to the hospitality industry. Finally, it suggests how hoteliers could adapt to thesenew expectations and proposes several questions for future research.