Purpose-Although networked hospitality businesses as Airbnb are a recent phenomenon, a rapid growth has made them a serious competitor for the hospitality industry with important consequences for tourism and for tourist destinations. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the nature of the phenomenon, its potential further development in the next five years and the impact this developments will have on tourism, on hotels and on city destinations. Design/methodology/approach-A literature study, combined with scenario workshops and a Delphi panel, were used to map current trends and uncertainties. With this input, future scenarios were elaborated using the Global Business Network ("scenario cross") method. Findings-Network platforms as Airbnb are often classified under something called the "Sharing Economy", a denomination that obscures their true nature. Airbnb is a challenging innovation to which traditional hospitality will have to respond. Its impact has at the same time led to a call for regulatory policies. The definition of these policies and the evolution of tourism are variables that determine future scenarios. Attempts to ban the phenomenon mean a disincentive to innovation and protect oligopolistic markets; more receptive policies may have the desired results if tourism grows moderately but in booming destinations they may lead to a harmful commercialization. Originality/value-Until now, Airbnb has been described in conceptual studies about the so-called "Sharing economy", or more recently in empirical studies about isolated effects of holiday rentals. This paper contextualizes the evolution of networked hospitality and seeks to synthesize the sum of its impacts, thus enabling businesses and local governments to define positions and strategies.

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Travel and hospitality were among the commercial sectors profoundly changed by the massive use of the Internet since the 1990s. Whilst initially predictions were that the platform would lead to disintermediation, after the first decade, a new type of intermediary appeared that represented a new value proposition to end users and substantially reduced the marketing power of hotel companies. We will analyse this evolution as a ‘two-sided market’ phenomenon. The understanding of how the Internet environment affects business models will then be used to elaborate plausible scenarios for the future of hotel distribution following the Framework Foresight method. The article proposes a baseline scenario with the Internet evolving in its current form and an alternative scenario in which an oligopolistic market emerges.

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The so-called ‘sharing’ movement emerged during the 2008-2013 financial and economic crisis, with a discourse that proposed an alternative to the economic system that had caused it. The businesses and platforms that identified with the movement also adopted the claim that they would represent a more benign and more ‘human’ economic model than the centralized power that had proven to be harmful to society and to the environment. In other words, ‘sharing’ introduced a discourse about good and evil that pervaded the commercial performance, the regulation and the academic study of the movement. This chapter will first look at the programmatic texts of ‘sharing’, to subsequently analyse how its ethical principles manifested itself in the social debate.