In the last years the tourist hospitality sector faced substantial changes due to the digital revolution carried on by platforms such as Airbnb. In almost a decade Airbnb consolidated its position as ...a principal channel in the short-term rental market. Over this period, it faced a series of internal changes regarding the composition of the hosts. Property managers, real estate firms, and tourism hospitality professionals used Airbnb as a preferential channel to their business establishing a professional offer within the platform. This dynamic highly disadvantaged smallest and non-professional hosts. This article analyzes the category of professional host highlighting how, even during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic (2020), they had maintained their leading position experiencing the best performances.
•Frame professional hosting in STR platforms to contribute to regulation discourses.•Professional hosts are the leading figures in STR market.•Southern European cities suffer for the massive presence ...of Airbnb listings.•Cluster analysis aims recognizing several business-oriented approaches within hosts.•Propose of a new methodology to help structure shared regulative frameworks.
Professionalisation in accommodation platforms is changing the short-term rental market worldwide. During the past decade, till today, Airbnb has been the leader in this economic sector, its spread has been a central issue in urban dynamics related to the several discomforts it has caused in cities. Recently, the professionalisation of its users has popped up as an additional issue to be dealt with. The professionalisation process has changed the internal structure of Airbnb from a peer-to-peer platform to a business-to-consumer one. Despite the growing attention to this trend, regulatory frameworks across cities still do not have policies to deal with this specific issue. This article proposes a data-driven methodology to identify the different economic approaches of professional hosts for contributing to the debate on professionalisation in short-term rental studies and provide new insights into the regulation debate. The proposed methodology consists of a cluster analysis applied to 2019 Airbnb data (from the AirDNA dataset) in eight Southern European cities: Lisbon, Porto, Madrid, Seville, Rome, Naples, Athens and Thessaloniki. The results highlight four clusters that describe different economic approaches of Airbnb hosts recognisable in each city. The findings offer a novel and clear entry point to understand the professional hosts' economic strategies, which can inform policies to regulate their market, as well as advancing knowledge in the field of critical geographies of housing.
In this section, we reflect, both empirically and speculatively, on the perspectives for STRs and related digital platforms in the (post-)pandemic city, on the grounds of early signals of change in ...relation to spatial justice and institutional arrangements. The discussion is opened by Tulumello and Cocola-Gant, who, by investigating the case of Lisbon, Portugal, reflect on the flexible nature of platforms vis-à-vis the (neoliberal) cloud of de- and re-regulation in housing and rental markets, discussing how this intersection allows STRs to adapt and succeed, also during the pandemic. Similarly, Iacovone explores the professionalisation of platform-mediated STRs and their adaptability to increasingly more flexible and malleable requests from the market – dimensions that allow them to successfully outcompete smaller actors. Finally, Pettas and Dagkouli–Kyriakoglou, by focusing on the case of Athens, Greece, discuss the ways STRs could be transformed into housing infrastructure for remote workers in connection to the restructuring of the post-pandemic labour market.
Lo spazio virtuale rappresenta la nuova arena politica ed economica contemporanea, attraverso le nuove forme di accumulazione capitalistica e di strumentalizzazione culturale, le piattaforme digitali ...hanno il potere e la possibilità di influenzare le dinamiche di produzione di città alterandone le geografie e influenzandone i flussi. L’articolo si focalizza nell’analisi di queste dinamiche evidenziando quanto questo sfruttamento insisti maggiormente nelle aree del Sud del mondo, ricalcandone la classica dicotomia. Attraverso la lettura critica di questi meccanismi si passerà ad una rassegna delle realtà che si stanno muovendo per contrastare questo fenomeno ancora quasi del tutto deregolamentato, facendo emergere l’importanza e la complessità di un’appropriazione consapevole della sfera digitale per incrementare processi di partecipazione attivi nel territorio.
In this commentary, we reflect on the limitations, somber difficulties, and possibilities of new geographies of care that have emerged as a result of our limited personal geographies during the time ...of COVID-19.
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