When two San Francisco university students came up with the idea to establish an ‘AirBed & Breakfast' website to advertise their apartment for conference attendees who were looking to avoid high hotel prices in the city (Guttentag, 2015) they were unaware that their idea would turn into a multi-billion-dollar internet company in years to come.

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Since its establishment in 2007, the room-letting brand Airbnb has grown substantially, and through its emergence in the digital economy, it has become a global multi-billion-dollar internet company which gives users the opportunity to both lease out and rent rooms through a simple online application. The successful internet company has grown into a way of the future and is a strong result and representation of mainly the sharing economy but also represents the digital and attention economies.  Airbnb has become one of the most prominent accommodations and tourism companies, but it is even more than this in the way that it represents the emergence of internet-based companies which permit ordinary everyday people to offer up tourism and accommodation services (Guttentag, 2015). Like other share economy internet-based companies such as the ridesharing application Uber, Airbnb has not yet been publicly traded. However, this is not stunting the rapid growth of Airbnb across the internet.

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This website will specifically examine the success of Airbnb and how and why it has gotten to be as big as it is today through analysing and discussing the emergence of Airbnb in the Digital Economy, the ways that Airbnb maximises the Attention Economy and how Airbnb leverages the Share Economy. The overall purpose of this report is to further understand and conclude on how Airbnb has become the most successful internet-based accommodation business that it is today.