Neighborhood Trip. How do guests’ neighborhood preferences shape the touristification process?

Urban tourists experience neighborhoods in a Peer-to-Peer context. However, literature overlooked the neighborhood concept in guests' accommodation location decisions, emphasizing the centrality (for a given quality) as the primary driver of urban touristification. This paper assesses how guests' preferences for neighborhoods could disrupt tourists' preferences for centrality. We discuss the exogeneity of the neighborhood tourism concept, verify its significance, and explore the relationship between neighborhoods and centrality in the urban touristification process. By extracting latent dimensions of 2,186 neighborhoods in 31 French cities and using a two-step hedonic approach (GW/2SLS regressions) on 45,600 Airbnb listings, we identify significant guests' preferences for neighborhood dimensions independently of embedded accommodation characteristics. Findings indicate that guests’ preference for touristy neighborhoods reinforces touristification but non-linearly (concavity), suggesting a touristification maximum threshold. With threshold effects, the other neighborhood dimensions (youthful-hub, popular, well-off) shape the touristification overflow, suggesting new regulations of the accommodations gathering.