Hospitality, Home and Life in the Platform Economies of Tourism

Download or read book Hospitality, Home and Life in the Platform Economies of Tourism written by Maartje Roelofsen and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-05-20 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how digital platforms in the realm of tourism and hospitality have shaped social and material worlds. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with hosts and guests, the book analyses the impacts of platforms on the scale of the city, the home, and the everyday life of individuals. The book first situates platforms within the broader history of digital developments in tourism and questions what is essentially new about these socio-technical formations? The following chapters demonstrate how platforms have affected urban housing, challenged the tourism sector, and transformed understandings of hospitality and home. This is illustrated through a case-study of Airbnb’s development and impact in Sofia, Bulgaria. The final chapters of the book reflect on the political dimensions of datafication processes and digital systems of measurement that underpin the platform’s workings, showing how the platform economies of tourism benefit their users in highly uneven ways.