Airbnb and taxation: Developing a seasonal tax system

Sara Dalir, Abror Mahamadaminov and Hossein Olya
Additional contact information
Sara Dalir: 111996Sheffield Hallam University Business School, UK
Abror Mahamadaminov: 35006Sejong University, South Korea

Tourism Economics, 2021, vol. 27, issue 2, 365-378

Abstract: This study applies tax planning theory to develop a seasonal tax strategy as an alternative to a fixed tax rate for shared lodging platforms such as Airbnb, to increase hosts’ revenue and to address seasonality in tourism. The annual revenue of the various types of accommodation is used to calculate a seasonality index by the moving average method, which is incorporated as a corrected coefficient in a seasonal tax formula. The sample includes data from 1258 active Airbnb listings in Boston, Massachusetts. Using a mean comparison test, this study reveals that the application of a seasonal tax strategy significantly increases the revenue of Airbnb hosts compared to a fixed tax rate system. Drawing on the flexibility tenet of tax planning theory, policymakers can use the proposed seasonal tax strategy as an instrument to revisit the taxation system for sharing economy businesses based on changes to the socio-economic, environmental and political conditions. Implications for all stakeholders are discussed.

Keywords: Airbnb; peer-to-peer accommodation; revenue management; seasonality; tax (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1354816620904894 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:toueco:v:27:y:2021:i:2:p:365-378

DOI: 10.1177/1354816620904894

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Tourism Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().