The economic impact of tourism in private homes: the case of the Lipari archipelago

Private homes are a particular form of tourist accommodation often used in seaside destinations, particularly on the islands. An increasing use of private homes for tourism in small and medium size islands could be due to the increasing levels of tourism, or used to offer a different accommodation service, or, often today, to satisfy an upcoming tourist need. Recent studies show that the importance of this phenomenon is no longer negligible. Tourism demand attracted by private accommodation offers an additional economic impact for the islands and a new challenge for sustainability programmes. The aim of this paper is to verify which are the main economic impacts of this kind of tourist accommodation and if there is any difference between the behaviour of tourists using private homes and those using registered accommodation structures. A matrix was calculated to analyze tourists' behaviour in the Eolian Archipelago (Western Mediterranean), and their expenditure patterns. The results seem to show that tourists choosing private homes have their own characteristics in terms of expenditure behaviour and have a strong impact as the tourists using traditional tourist accommodation. We will also look at strategies in order to increase benefits of this kind of offer, which is yet unsupervised.