Course Insights – Sharing Economy is Here to Stay and Expand with the Help of Consumer Data

When I met Stuart at one of the orientation sessions on the GWU campus, he had presented a description of the course that would focus on sharing economy and peer-to-peer offerings. I was intrigued from that first ten-minute presentation by Stuart. Before starting the course, I wondered what makes services like Uber and Airbnb attractive to people. My then immediate thought was that the lower price incentive along with convenience are the reasons for the preference. I wanted to know more about why people today are inclined to use such services and whether a sharing economy is here to stay or if it is a modern and exciting concept that will dissipate in the not-so-distant future. 

All these questions and others have been answered in the best way possible – experiencing and researching the industry as a direct participant in it. Throughout the research of each of the peer-to-peer segments of the travel industry, one theme kept popping up – challenge for companies to provide instant and consistent customer satisfaction with an experience that starts with discovering a platform and ends with leaving a review of a completed journey. The well established companies like Uber and Airbnb are moving closer to minimizing the level of effort customer needs to exert to arrive at the positive end point of their experience, while smaller start-ups still finding their way to ensure that seamless process. What I have heard being repeated during office visits with Airbnb, Uber, and Feastly is the importance of data analysis in predicting consumer behavior and helping to streamline booking process to improve customer experience. 

While Uber and Airbnb have been gathering data on their vast consumer base, the task remains important for young start-ups. Companies entering the peer-to-peer market must ensure that tools and methods are in place from the beginning to identify consumer behavior during booking, gather consumer preferences of products offered across platforms, and analyze patterns within new markets. This knowledge will expand as more consumers enter the market and will enable companies to predict with greater accuracy what, when, and where consumers want. Maybe in the future, being able to predict a demand for a specific product will ensure more instant bookings especially for perishable offerings. Chefs who rely on a number of confirmations to host a dinner and to begin their preparations will be able to know the probability of the demand for a certain meal in advance and focus on meals that generate the most interest, leading to minimized number of cancellations and optimized instant booking.