Peer-to-peer accommodation and resilient hosts in split: the case of Radunica Street.

Abstract Through a qualitative approach, including autoethnography and open-ended interviews, this study focuses on how offline peer-to-peer (P2P)-accommodation trading was used as a post-crisis recovery tool. We focused our study on Radunica Street, situated in the city centre of the Croatian city of Split. We identified the motives that led hosts to engage in offine P2P-accommodation trading and then, eventually, online P2P-accommodation trading and uncovered resilience attributes that characterize these individuals. Community networks and new relationships caused by offline P2P-accommodation trading and the cooperation between hosts and gatherers (locals who searched for tourists) were analysed. Our research explains how this arbitrary and unstable cooperation within the local community shaped its people. Moreover, it led us to a broader definition of the term 'peer-to-peer accommodation' since the results show that on Radunica Street this does not apply only to a 'host-to-tourist' way of doing business. Before paid-online P2P-network platforms entered the Croatian market, this 'peer-to-peer' relationship was actually based on a triangular 'gatherer-host-tourist' cooperation, which has changed the culture of everyday life in the street for good.