At home with Airbnb: the fragility of a homeliness shared with guest and platform

Abstract

For a number of years, the concept of short-term letting via online platforms has been emerging very visibly. Amongst the platforms that make up this success, none has seen such large growth and emergence into public consciousness as much as Airbnb. With this has come the commercialisation of the home. As private room hosts, individuals prepare spaces in their home for hosting, redecorating and purchasing items for guests, and dividing their home between the spaces for themselves and the spaces for guests. Following this, they market their home and themselves online to attract guests, before welcoming guests through the door. This project focusses on this process of private room Airbnb hosting, considering the material, social, spatial, emotional, sensorial, and performative aspects of hosting. This is used to examine the impact that Airbnb hosting has on the home.

To investigate this, face to face interviews with private room Airbnb hosts were conducted in both Newcastle and Devon, visiting both the urban and the rural, with some photos taken during the interviews, while data was also gathered from internet sources including the hosts’ listings, host forums, web pages offering advice to hosts, and Airbnb advertisements. This research sought to draw out how the home has changed materially, how hosts socialise with guests and their attitude towards this, and how this affects the spaces of home, amongst other elements that consider control and autonomy.

This PhD explores home using the notion of assemblage. This consideration understands the home to be formed through the interconnectedness of elements that come to continually inform and shape each other. With this, it finds the home to exist as a very fragile assemblage that can be interrupted and unmade through its socialities, materialities, spatialities, emotions, and senses. It finds commercialised hospitality and the influence of Airbnb to sit in tension with the performance of home, while the commercial home itself becomes conflicted with boundaries, hostilities, and anxieties. Hosting, through the performance of hospitality and acts of impression management, changes and curtails how home is performed as well as changing the reality of home as a negotiated assemblage.

The contribution of this PhD is the examining of the various ways in which home becomes unmade for private room Airbnb hosts. It explores how the assemblage of home becomes unmade through the influence of Airbnb and the presence of the guest, leaving home to become hidden away with tentative attempts to perform home limited to the peripheries of the space. This contribution also looks to sit more widely part of a discussion on how the sharing economy, as part of the capitalist system, commodifies almost every area of life.

Airbnb can be considered just one example of the entanglement between sharing economy and people’s lives, changes how people are in the world around them and how they engage with the world around them. This seeks to make contributions to the fields of tourism, hospitality, the sharing economy, and spatial geographies, tying them together with sociological and cultural studies insights in a transdisciplinary study. These findings hold an importance as Airbnb private room hosting has become a very large industry, touching many homes and many lives. As there are numerous avenues that this unmaking can be experienced, there exists the potential for many hosts to be affected in a variety of ways that revolves around their own subjective assemblage of home. This paper seeks to provide insight into something that could be a common situation amongst the hosting community before offering some comments on the wider role of the sharing economy in society and suggesting some future avenues of research.

Date of Award	25 Jul 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Northumbria University
Supervisor	Pau Obrador Pons (Supervisor) & Peter Varley (Supervisor)