Constructing Urban Tourism Space Digitally

Abstract

Over the past decade, Airbnb has emerged as the most popular platform for renting out single rooms or whole apartments. The impact of Airbnb listings on local neighborhoods has been controversially discussed in many cities around the world. The platform's widespread adoption led to changes in urban life, and in particular urban tourism. In this paper, we argue that urban tourism space can no longer be understood as a fixed, spatial entity. Instead, we follow a constructionist approach and argue that urban tourism space is (re-)produced digitally and collaboratively on online platforms such as Airbnb. We relate our work to a research direction in the CSCW community that is concerned with the role of digital technologies in the production and appropriation of urban space and use the concept of representations as a theoretical lens for our empirical study. In that study, we qualitatively analyzed how the two Berlin neighborhoods Kreuzkölln and City West are digitally constructed by Airbnb hosts in their listing descriptions. Moreover, we quantitatively investigated to what extend mentioned places differ between Airbnb hosts and visitBerlin, the city's destination management organization (DMO). In our qualitative analysis, we found that hosts primarily focus on facilities and places in close proximity to their apartment. In the traditional urban tourism hotspot City West, hosts referred to many places also mentioned by the DMO. In the neighborhood of Kreuzkölln, in contrast, hosts reframed everyday places such as parks or an immigrant food market as the must sees in the area. We discuss how Airbnb hosts contribute to the discursive production of urban neighborhoods and thus co-produce them as tourist destinations. With the emergence of online platforms such as Airbnb, power relations in the construction of tourism space might shift from DMOs towards local residents who are now producing tourism space collaboratively. close to major sights and tourism-related facilities, and venture into residential neighborhoods-a phenomenon called off the beaten track or new urban tourism [55,85,94,95,121]. Short-term rentals seem to foster this development [53,55,67]. They enable all kinds of temporary city-users [86], such as cultural tourists, exchange students, temporary migrants, or business travelers, to stay in private apartments. However, only a fraction of urban residents participates in the practice of renting out rooms or apartments. Some of them are annoyed by the large influx of visitors to their neighborhood and the consequences for the urban structure resulting from large-scale short term rentals [33,56,91]. The impact of the fast-growing number of Airbnb listings, particularly in residential neighborhoods, has been controversially discussed in many cities around the world. Central topics of this debate were, among others, Airbnb's contribution to the transformation of residential neighborhoods and resulting gentrification processes [56,60], coming along with rent increase [89,106], changes in the social structure of ...

Research trends of digital tourism: a bibliometric analysis

“…Collaboration in developing tourism destinations can also be conducted using social media applications, and every smartphone user has a social media account (Adi and Heripracoyo, 2018). Since the tourism industry cannot stand alone, good cooperation is needed for promoting and marketing digital tourism (Stors and Baltes, 2018). In addition, this study explains potential future research regarding four topics, namely, millennials, marketing strategy, metaverse tourism and virtual tours which are quite far apart and not connected.…”

“…Examples are TripAdvisor, Airbnb, MakeMy Trip and other local apps. Additionally, the benefits of digital tourism attract tourists to digital experiences by building an environment that can be conducted interactively (Stors and Baltes, 2018). Innovation, especially with information technology, has a positive impact on several sides of tourism.…”

PSR_ti model, an adapted pressure-state-response (PSR) framework for measuring tourism impacts: the case of Madrid

“…However, the exponential growth of tourism in cities in the past decade and the characteristics of this tourism have caused significant adverse impacts, especially on historical centres and their residents (Dodds & Butler, 2019). The process of touristification (Bianchi, 2003;Stors & Baltes, 2018) is exacerbated by the concentration of tourism in historical centres, which results in the relocation of traditional activities (Coccossis & Mexa, 2002;UNWTO, 2005) and local businesses (Gy odi, 2019). Thus, tourists concentrate on specific areas in their search for authenticity (Zukin, 2016), generating a new urban landscape that endangers the cities heritage, not only from a physical preservation perspective but also from a possible loss of uniqueness (Barrera-Fern andez, Hern andez-Escampa, & Balbuena, 2016).…”

15 years of Airbnb's authenticity that influenced activity participation: a systematic literature review

“…In Private and shared rooms, guests care about host friendliness (Lee, 2022). In a study by Stors and Baltes (2018), it was found that hosts encourage their guests to visit places in their neighborhood, leading to the promotion of local tourism. Accordingly, customers value their interaction with hosts; thus, to improve customer satisfaction, Airbnb hosts should interact with guests and respond to guests’ inquiries quickly (Zhang, 2019a, b).…”