The Comparison of the United Kingdom and Indonesia on Airbnb’s Marketing Communication Strategy

Abstract

The objective of this research is to compare young adults in the UK and Indonesia regarding the most important factors that guided them to choose a lodging, brand awareness, and their opinions about Airbnb marketing communication to find out the reason behind the website traffic differences. The method was a mixed method, with an online questionnaire using snowball sampling to recruit young adult respondents from both countries and an in-depth interview with ten Airbnb users: five people from the UK and five others from Indonesia. The analyzed data used SPSS for the quantitative data and a thematic coding with NVivo for the qualitative data. Findings identified that reputation, review, website quality, security, staff behaviur, cleanliness, exterior appearance, location, and access to public transportation are the most important factors in choosing a holiday accommodation in both countries. People in the UK tend to care about the price, while in Indonesia the facility is more important. In the UK, they had discovered Airbnb mostly from Facebook and Snapchat, while in Indonesia they had heard it from Instagram before they decided to use and access the Airbnb website.