Benchmarking bed and breakfast industry in a sharing economy: a frontier-based technology forecasting approach

The sharing economy affords new opportunities to the global tourism industry, accelerating the development of tourism at a striking rate. This paper examines productivity of the bed and breakfast (B&B) industry and how to improve the performance of the B&B industry in a sharing economy. A modified global Malmquist index using slack-based measures is developed to measure productivity, and benchmark selection models using technology forecasting are proposed to improve future performance. The future technology is forecasted by averaging the frontier shifts (technology changes) in previous periods. This study challenges the implicit assumption that the technology will be stationary in traditional benchmarking, and suggests that how the information of frontier shifts derived from Malmquist index can be used to forecast future technology in a rational manner. The empirical results inform that there is a productivity growth in the B&B industry in a sharing economy, and the main driver of the growth is technology progress rather than performance improvement. In particular, a counterintuitive but interesting result is that the B&B industry experienced a slight productivity growth after the outbreak of COVID-19. The benchmarks in 2021 and 2022 are forecasted to improve the performance of the B&B industry.