Homestay Collaborative Economy: How to Upscaling Homestay Businesses in Malaysia?

Abstract

Digital networks have been the most significant players in the global sharing economy, turning big corporations like Airbnb, Booking or TripAdvisor into intermediaries handling and profiting from most business transactions. Focused on homestay businesses, this paper conceptualizes the sharing economy of the wider collaborative economy for sustainable homestay business development. This study is of an exploratory in nature. The methodological approach stakeholder inquiry was conducted consisted of three groups: (1) Registered Homestay Operators (2) Unregistered Homestay Operators and (3) Officer of Government Authorities to elicit stakeholders’ views on the homestay businesses. The result demonstrates that huge expectations have been put on the sharing economy to deliver new business model focused on peer-to - peer (P2P) exchanges of under-utilized properties. Homestay collaborative economy was supposed to be a model making major contributions to sustainability, creating new opportunities for entrepreneurship, more sustainable resource use, and stakeholder collaboration in strong economic networks. Hence, this study includes some suggestions for enhancing the current Homestay Business Guidelines for authorities, in particular The Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, and local authorities that issue homestay business licenses. The findings of this study can therefore contribute to the importance of homestay business sharing economy via collaborative economy model among homestay stakeholders that gives energy practice the longevity of traditional homestay business model in an effort to better serve the customer from competition to network collaboration.