Introduction

2The increasing numbers of tourists in cities since the 1990s has led to strong criticism from academics, citizens and politicians (Aguilera et al., 2019), denouncing the visible and lasting consequences on the transformation of neighbourhoods, the disruption of housing markets, or the daily life of long-term residents. In this respect, the recent development of platforms belonging to the “collaborative” economy (Fang et al., 2015) has profoundly modified the notion of tourism (Stock, 2005), participating in a mutation of uses related to tourist accommodation and even the modification of tourist inhabitation (Lazzarotti, 2018; Lucas, 2018; Stock, 2007, 2015). With its perceived contribution to processes of gentrification, Airbnb is symptomatic of the conflicts related to the deployment of such platforms, its digital nature also transforming accommodation rentals into a major political issue for most cities. Studying Airbnb from a geopolitical perspective thus leads us to analyse “the [emerging] conflicts around who has the ‘right’ to live in and make the most of the city, and to obtain a share of the benefits of ‘platform capitalism’” (Srnicek, 2017), and “around the rationale and conditions under which the right to use one’s property or to freely carry out an economic activity can be curtailed or regulated” (Aguilera et al., 2019). This deeply conflictual vision is reflected in the semantics employed by the main French-speaking media (television, radio, and national or regional dailies): “colonization”, “war”, “predation”, “confiscation”, “destruction”, “aggression”, “impacts”, “city disrupter”, “disintegration”, “destabilization”, “killer”, and so on.

3This paper continues on from this work. It focuses on the conflicts that emerge with the deployment of the Airbnb accommodation activity, the resulting diversity of situations depending on the actors involved, and the tensions and blockages inherent in each space studied. It also examines the status of the forms of control of “conflictualities” – understood here in the sense of latent rather than manifest conflicts – and/or regulatory measures, referred to as “a return to normal”.

4The mobilization of Airbnb within the framework of a study combining tourism and geopolitics presents several advantages. The multinational company places “the individual” – understood, depending on the context, as the tourist and/or the host – at the heart of its commercial and communication strategies. It is therefore a sound method for accessing the individual practices of tourists and especially of hosts, and of re-assessing them from a geopolitical perspective, endeavouring to determine the conflictual situations, the strategies of the various actors involved in these conflicts (from formalization to actual materiality), as well as the modes of regulation – and all this at different scales. Moreover, focusing on Airbnb also allows us to access the functioning of formerly or newly formalized tourist spaces – cities, neighbourhoods, apartment buildings, houses, etc. The other ways of tourist inhabitation of cities that Airbnb enables, as well as the different forms of latent conflict associated with said inhabitation, are good indicators for understanding any space that is geared towards receiving visitors.

5What are the conflictual aspects related to the deployment of Airbnb’s accommodation activity? At what scale(s) can they be seen? Is it possible to summarize them? How does the mobilization of geopolitical tools and concepts applied to micro-spaces (analyses at multiple scales, the roles of and interactions between actors, the study of “rivalries” that can take several forms, etc.) make it possible to account for original and additional conflictual situations associated with Airbnb?

6Several research hypotheses were thus developed to answer these questions:

• • 4 The globally present “sleep merchants”: Marriott International, OYO, Jing Jiang International, Hilt (...)
  • 5 The Couchsurfing platform created in 2004, Leboncoin, Booking.com, Abritel HomeAway, TripAdvisor, G (...)

  Airbnb is deeply conflictual and divisive, including in the design of its business model (Flichy, 2017). The company was established and then grew with respect to an already present and traditional commercial accommodation sector, made up of historical actors, including hotel chains4 and other digital players.5 Several authors describe this insertion as “brutal”, “direct” and “fast”, using a neologism taken from economics: disruptive (Guttentag, 2015). It occurred rapidly and quasi-synchronously throughout the world, taking advantage of legal and fiscal loopholes, and combined with a “surprise effect”. The other actors in the tourist accommodation sector, some of whom have been around for a very long time, followed a more “conventional” and much slower economic strategy (market studies, investments, takeovers, mergers, etc.), built over the long term, and the workings of which were more closely supervised.

• Airbnb is a geopolitical actor in its own right. This is true at the local and micro-local levels, in host/non-host, tourist/non-host, and host/tourist relationships. The spatialization of Airbnb-related conflicts can also be studied at a detailed scale – inter- and intra-housing, in spaces belonging to the private sphere and thought to be exempt of any major problems, notably because the actors who participate and interact there do so in a “voluntary” and “consenting” way. Moreover, the types and forms of conflict differ depending on the rental model. These differences and discrepancies can be explained by the spatial, socio-economic, rental and regulatory contexts.

7In this paper, we first look at the general characteristics leading to the assertion that the nature of Airbnb is highly conflictual, especially when it comes to its deployment in cities, and we present a typology of conflicts related to the company. We then change scale to focus on conflicts at the local and micro-local levels caused by the hosting of tourists in Airbnb rentals in the city of Bordeaux. Based on semi-directive interviews, we highlight the difficulties encountered by some hosts and permanent residents due to the multiplication of the short-term stays offered by Airbnb.

Methodology

8Between September and October 2019, we conducted some 50 semi-structured interviews with Airbnb hosts in Bordeaux, as well as a few interviews with non-hosts. These interviews aimed to characterize and measure the associated and in theory conflictual relationships between hosts and non-host residents (Survey no. 1), and between hosts and tourists (Survey no. 2). The scientific approach adopted with a view to understanding the new disruptions linked to the existence of Airbnb-style accommodation (disruptions audible in the discourses of some and visible in the spatial and/or behavioural adaptations of others) demonstrates conflictual situations of various natures. As regards the analysis of relationships between hosts and non-host permanent residents within both collective and individual housing, and among a large set of rental situations observed, we selected a few that appeared to us to be the most significant in light of the number of Airbnb hosts concentrated within the space studied and the potential conflicts associated with them. These rental situations concerned an apartment building and some traditional Bordeaux houses known as échoppes. We discarded from our study rental examples with the least assertive conflictualities in order to focus on highlighting one of the realities of the controversy related to the presence of Airbnb. However, these few fragments of research cannot be generalized and considered as the “normal” Airbnb situation within a territorial context. Concerning the study of the forms of cohabitation between hosts and tourists within the private space of an apartment, we retained hosts welcoming tourists directly into a part of their own homes. These host profiles present a stronger and more stereotypical sense of conflict since private and intimate spaces are shared with strangers (Feldman, 2016).

94 retirees

2 teachers	4 people working in the arts
3 entrepreneurs	2 people from the building trades
5 nurses	5 real estate agents
2 teacher-researchers	5 wine merchants
4 waitresses	4 computer specialists
1 sales assistant	3 general medical practitioners
5 retailers	1 senior civil servant

Document no. 1: Rental and conflictual situations of the interviewed hosts

Survey	Number of hosts interviewed	Scale selected	Rental situations	Conflictual situation(s)
Survey no. 1	39	- Apartment building - Private rooms	- Entire places - Private rooms	- Non-host permanent residents / tourists - Non-host permanent residents / hosts
Survey no. 2	11	- Apartments	- Private rooms	- Tourists / hosts

I. The conflictual geography of Airbnb: situational analysis

A. The “Airbnbization” of the world

10The short-term rental of tourist accommodation as a business and economic activity is not a new phenomenon. It has long been regulated in most Western European countries, including Spain, Italy, Greece, France and Portugal. Controversies around it only arose following the transformation operated by the emergence of digital platforms that encouraged more people to rent out their homes, resulting in the “industrialization” of hosting travellers on a global scale. Airbnb is a new form of company (Beckouche, 2019; Edelman and Luca, 2014) but that draws on a practice as old as the invention of tourism itself.

12The reasons for the platform’s success are numerous, and the benefits derived by those who use it are very real. Where the tourists are concerned, the main arguments legitimizing the assiduous use of the platform are the associated cost savings and the desire for contact with “locals”, even to the point of living directly in their homes (Tussyadiah and Pesonen, 2018). The practices related to the use of Airbnb participate in a certain democratization of travel. Where the hosts are concerned, this activity generates additional income (an ambition summed up by the leitmotiv “entrepreneurship for the poor”), making it possible for them to preserve or even constitute financial or real estate assets (Andrieu, Devaux and Oppenchaim, 2019) and promotes social encounters, while contributing to a better distribution of tourist accommodation in the city and producing “trickle-down effects” for local economies (Airbnb, 2018).

13Document no. 3 highlights the complexity and diversity of the actors involved in the Airbnb system. Several spheres (judicial, legislative, political, economic, activist, citizen, etc.) coexist and interact with each other and “with” Airbnb – in the sense of being either for or against the platform. The platform is “yet another” tourist operator to be included into an already existing tourism, financial, technical and regulatory system. The vast majority of the actors are well known, as they were present long before Airbnb was created.

14We can therefore sketch out a conflictual geography of Airbnb by creating three groups of actors who find themselves in the spaces taken over by the company, depending on their relationship with it, and distinguishing the place they occupy in the Airbnb system.

Document no. 4: Position of the groups of actors in relation to Airbnb

Actors	Direct or indirect interest/disinterest in the development of Airbnb	Position with respect to Airbnb	Strategies developed to deal with Airbnb
Hosts, tourists, “subcontractors” (concierges, translators, property managers, cleaning professionals, etc.), accommodation professionals, local retailers, etc.	- Economic - Fiscal - Cultural - Political, etc.	Somewhat pro-Airbnb	Make the most of [...] Benefit from [...] Make good use of [...] Use [...] Share in [...]
Non-host residents, tourists, etc.	None	Somewhat neutral	Go with the flow [...] Adapt to [...] Lose interest in [...]
Non-host residents, elected representatives, local authorities, associations, public housing bodies, etc.	- Economic - Fiscal - Political - Strategic - Social, etc.	Somewhat anti-Airbnb	Oppose [...] Restrict [...] Prevent [...] Limit [...] Regulate [...] Denounce [...]

16(A) Between actors who are anti-Airbnb and Airbnb itself (bottom-up logic).

17(B) Between actors belonging to different groups (inter-group logic).

18(C) Between actors belonging to the same group (intra-group logic).

19Some examples include conflicts between one or more cities (whether or not they are part of a coalition) and the Airbnb platform (A). The legal battle waged by Paris against Airbnb over the past few years is a case in point. These conflicts can take visual, more sporadic and concrete forms, for example posters in public spaces, anti-Airbnb slogans tagged on urban furniture, and so on. Global conflicts (B) also exist between cities and Airbnb hosts who do not respect the regulations in force. This is the case in Barcelona, which is stepping up its checks by means of agents on the ground; or again in Paris, which, after noticing irregularities or evidence of non-compliance in certain listings, decided to go through the legal system, first nationally and then internationally by taking the case before the European Court of Justice in February 2021. It can also involve conflicts between landlords and tenants subletting their accommodation on the platform, which is considered to be “against the rules”. Other examples can shed light on this situation, such as the protests organized by residents opposed to the rental of apartments on Airbnb in their neighbourhood. Finally, we can mention conflicts between hosts and tourists (C) through the mobilization of the regional or local press, reporting, for example, on the damage caused by tourists in a Bordeaux rental. Situations (A) and (B) represent the most mediatized types of conflict, and reveal major blockages and tensions between several opposing realities: increase in the number of rentals vs. control and limitation of tourist numbers, profitability of short-term rentals vs. access to residential housing, record profits vs. low tax rates, etc. The conflicting situations (C) concern actors with similar goals – whether in accepting or limiting the development of Airbnb – but whose means of achieving these goals diverge.

B. Data, the “sinews of war”?

20Data are of fundamental importance when discussing the geopolitics of Airbnb. Like all digital platforms, Airbnb established its model on the creation and management of millions of data (Gallagher, 2018; Beckouche, 2019), considered as a “resource” in their own right and exploited: geolocalization and addresses of rentals, profiles of hosts and customers, behaviours and digital breadcrumbs, reviews and comments, photographs, payment details, etc. One of the main values of the company therefore lies in its ownership, control and then use of said data (Cardon, 2015, 2018). Some authors refer to “datapower”, this “control of data flows [...] related to the everyday commerce of data between the platform and its users where data and code are controlled by the platform” (Mermet and Söderström, 2020). To date, these data have never been shared with city stakeholders. The policy of opacity regarding the sharing of this key information prevents the public authorities from conducting an exact analysis of Airbnb’s presence on their territory. It becomes complicated for these stakeholders to develop an effective strategy to control and limit the tourist accommodation activity (identification of hosts, limitation of the rental period, taxation, etc.). Moreover, the regulations established by the cities concerning limitations on the number of overnight stays per year, implementation of a registration number, etc., are not fully “integrated” into the Airbnb algorithm (which remains legally debatable, if not reprehensible), seeking to “hide everything that looks like a series of numbers” (Ibid.).

22The structural difficulties in quantifying and qualifying the Airbnb phenomenon reflect the latter’s stranglehold on data that are deemed strategic. Airbnb has been recently required to communicate its data to certain cities in the wake of bitter negotiations and/or court rulings, testifying to the evolution of the conflictual situation between the platform and the city stakeholders concerned. After being a factor of conflictuality, data can thus become a means of regulation used by public authorities, as was the case in Amsterdam between 2016 and 2018 following the signing of an agreement with Airbnb (Mermet and Söderström, 2020).

C. Cities, the primary breeding ground for conflict

24D. Attempts to resolve conflicts

25The Airbnb situation has led city stakeholders to adopt new regulations aimed at controlling the proliferation of the company and its activities (Document no. 7). On a European scale, the diversity of these regulatory initiatives (in terms of the degrees of the constraints imposed, the multiplicity of the measures implemented, the assessment of their effectiveness, etc.) can be explained by the “type of actors who politicized the issue in the first place”, by the “political-economic conditions” specific to each area studied, and by “a product of the struggle between collective actors with various interests [and] modes of action” (Aguilera et al., 2019). These regulations reflect the deep imbalance of power between local policymakers and platforms such as Airbnb (Nieuwland and Van Melik, 2018; Mermet and Söderström, 2020). The differentiated implementation by city stakeholders of coercive measures – both spatially and over time – with a view to controlling or limiting the tourist accommodation offer promoted by Airbnb has contributed to modifying the different and already existing conflictual situations. This has taken several forms. It enables certain actors to enter into conflict with others, as in the case of the city of Paris, which can now take legal action against certain landlords and/or hosts who do not respect the 120-day limit per year, or who have not requested authorization to change the use of the rented accommodation. It can also facilitate contact between actors, or it can crystallize the roles of certain actors, “confining” them to sensitive ideological or ethical positions. This is the case of certain hosts, for example, today hesitant with respect to continuing their rental activity in the face of new regulatory constraints, which often come on top of other difficulties specific to each host.

Document no. 7: Scales, major types of conflict, regulations

Scale	Types of conflict	Regulatory mechanisms
Worldwide	- Competition in the acquisition and control of markets - Takeovers/sales	- Controls - Legislation - Economic partnerships
European (supranational)	- Judicial (trials)	- Legislation - Court decisions - Data sharing
National	- Judicial (trials)	- Legislation - Court decisions
Metropolitan (city and its constituent municipalities)	- Judicial (trials)	- Controls/fines - Limited and restrictive legislative arsenal (regulatory regimes specific to each city) - Increased governance - Court decisions - Data sharing - Partnerships
Infra-urban (property co-ownerships)	- Conflicts with neighbours - Conflicts of use and representations of public or semi-public spaces - Damage	- Recourse to an external mediator - Rules of co-ownership - Complaints and/or pressing charges
Micro-local (within individual properties) (infra-property ownerships)	- Conflicts of use and representations of the residential space - Damage - Threats and physical violence	- Systems specific to each space and each host - Reinvention of the rules of living together - Complaints and/or pressing charges

26Document no. 8 shows the main cities concerned by the Airbnb phenomenon with some of the regulations in force to limit its development. The spatial nature of the platform more or less reflects the country’s tourism geography, being located in well-known tourist hotspots (cities, seaside resorts, mountain resorts, etc.).

II. The local and micro-local levels: the emergence of new conflicts related to Airbnb

A. The place of the platform in Bordeaux

28Capital of the Gironde department, Bordeaux has been largely taken over by Airbnb, which has established itself permanently in the local tourism landscape there and contributes, as in other major cities, to a form of “cannibalism” of the accommodation sector. The interpretation of conflicts previously employed (see Part I.B) can therefore be very legitimately applied here, and scientific papers on the place of Airbnb in Bordeaux are increasingly numerous. Various studies have thus already analysed the Airbnb phenomenon in Bordeaux, examining the “disruption of the private rental market” created by the platform (Ayouba et al., 2019), the role of the company in the evolution and formalization of housing prices on a city-wide scale (Décamps and Gaschet, 2013), or the various impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the local rental system and its direct effects on Airbnb (Piganiol, 2020). These studies also address the global imbalances in cities associated with “platform capitalism” as practised by Airbnb and described by G. Pouyanne in 2017, the growing economic and social fragility of the populations most exposed to changes in the rental market and all associated consequences (Dagorn and Rouveyre, 2021), and the methodological renewal of hedonic studies already conducted using Airbnb data in Bordeaux (Faye, 2021).

B. A (very) large-scale case study

30Local or micro-local conflicts emerge because “Airbnb-style” accommodation disrupts and recomposes the daily lives of permanent residents, requiring them to deal with cohabitation (Delaplace and Simon, 2017; Crozat and Alves, 2018), co-presence, and even competition for spaces, uses, values, timeframes, etc. Airbnb tends to mix the boundaries of “everydayness” with those of “the travel experience”. The tourist is the person who is “just passing through”, the person who makes light of local problems, who escapes somewhat from the governance of tourism spaces (including the discourses linked to said governance), and who uses and, in a way, abuses the spatial mechanisms available without ever being affected by their maintenance or replacement requirements. In order to better understand the effectiveness of these conflicts, we produced several computer graphics: a cross-section of an apartment building (Document no. 11) and of a number of adjoining échoppes (Document no. 12), as well as the layout of three apartments rented out on Airbnb (Documents no. 13, 14 and 15).

32The two situations we uncovered differ in the gradients and forms of latent conflicts associated with them. In the first survey, which takes into account the inter-property space and defines the relations between hosts and non-hosts, the cohabitation and the differences in uses, practices, representations, etc., that can exist between temporary tourists and permanent residents are essentially forced. Neither population ever desired to share a part of the space or a moment with the Other. Encounters and exchanges – or non-exchanges – between them are perceived as restrictive and/or completely “artificial”. The desire for contact with “locals” (Tussyadiah and Pesonen, 2018) discussed earlier, and touted by Airbnb, is somewhat undermined. “Tourists don’t care about your neighbours at all, or whether or not you are on good terms with them. They don’t see them as residents like everyone else. To them, the ‘real’ residents are the ones you find outside the apartment building, as soon as you walk out the front door. It’s those locals they want to meet, not the others! [...]” (Loïc, host of an entire apartment in Bordeaux). Tourists would thus appear to operate a certain “selection” of the local populations to whom they will address themselves, engage in conversation, and even dare have their picture taken. The dissociation between resident populations is fundamental in understanding the conflicts generated by Airbnb short-term rentals and the issues associated with them. Conversely, the second survey conducted among hosts offering a room in their private homes, and dealing exclusively with host/tourist exchanges, highlights desired and consented relationships. The host decided to “embark on the Airbnb adventure” by creating an ad, distributing photographs of their apartment, and welcoming tourists every week. The tourist chose the place to stay and agreed to follow and comply with the rules and conditions of the stay.

33This difference between the two groups of hosts and their two ways of using Airbnb contributes to formalizing separate conflictualities. In Survey no. 1, both the hosts and non-hosts interviewed alerted us to the uncontrolled nature of the rental accommodation. Tourists are “left to their own devices” or even “left alone” in the residential space. There are no rules, and there is no-one to control what they do. And despite the use of financial disincentives such as a deposit or even threats to involve the police, incidences of damage to property and clashes with the neighbours have not diminished. On the contrary... “I have tried to reduce the noise and the problems related to tourists coming and going at all hours, [...]. I spoke with the tourists [...], I printed out and put up posters with advice and even bans on slamming the door, talking too loudly in the lobby of the apartment building, coming in too late... But nothing works” (Pierre-Henri, host of an entire apartment in Bordeaux). Conflicts are exacerbated in the absence of spatial policing, and only the operator is legitimate as the sole mediator between the tourists and the accommodation. In Survey no. 2, the relationships between the hosts and the tourists are better managed and regulated. The intrinsic characteristics of the territory of intimacy and of privacy, combined with a shared use of the space, contribute to erasing some of the latent conflicts. We nevertheless witness the emergence of other types of conflict, even if they are on the margins and do not make it possible to question the very essence of the rental activity. “I am not entirely comfortable when I welcome tourists to my home [...]. I don’t like coming face to face with them when I’m having breakfast or when I’ve just finished showering. I’ve even developed ‘techniques’ to get away from them, or at the very least to avoid bumping into them in the first place: I know the layout of my apartment much better than they do, after all (laughs), and I always manage to fit my comings and goings around theirs [...]” (Hugo, host of a private room in Bordeaux). The presence of the hosts in the accommodation, and the “artificial” but sincere relationships established with the travellers, “tend to prevent” the latter from coming into conflict with the neighbours, from “behaving badly in the lift or the corridors”. The conflict prevention or regulation strategies deployed by accommodation providers are evidence of a stricter control over the practices and behaviours of tourists. The imposition of rules of conduct in residential spaces requires monitoring tourists and reminding them of the basic rules. Far from preventing latent conflicts, these strategies help to mitigate their effects. In the end, tourist inhabitation as manifested in the renting of a room is less “destabilizing” for the neighbours and relations with them than the renting of an entire place without the presence of the owner(s) and/or tenant(s) in the property. The disruption to the local neighbourhood “ecosystem” is therefore greater with a rental of an entire place than with a rental of a private room. On the other hand, for the latter situation, this does not mean that conflicts between hosts and tourists are non-existent, as we can see from the maps at the apartment scale.

34Renting a room directly in the inhabitant’s home, when the latter is present, leads to specific conflicts and modes of regulation, more “hushed” and less “violent” in their form and intensity. “I don’t know if I can talk about ‘conflicts’ as such with tourists, it’s a bit of a harsh word. Sometimes I feel like I’m a stranger in my own home! These are more micro-events or even epiphenomena. [...] the mess, dirty dishes left on the table, products put away but not in the right place, a lack of hygiene in the bathroom or the toilet, sleeping hours that are not necessarily observed, and so on” (Martial, host of a private room in Bordeaux). Rentals take place with few actors present and conflicts remain “limited” to the private sphere, confined to the perimeter of the apartment, while their resolutions appear “simpler” and “quicker”. Renting out an entire place without the host being present leads to “tougher” conflicts, less certain to escape regulation “from outside” by recourse to a mediator.

35Few hosts use the term “conflicts” to describe their rental activity, preferring to talk about “difficulties”: last minute cancellations, late or non-existent refunds, booking errors, property damage, fines for non-compliance with the law, etc. They are not overly bothered by the bad relationships that can exist with the tourists or their neighbours, or by the implementation of avoidance strategies. On the contrary, they are relatively comfortable with the situation and consider it to be “normal”. They all recognize the discrepancy between the official discourse of the multinational company and the “behind the scenes” of the Airbnb rental business, but appear to accept it quite well. In this case, the economic aspect (the desire for additional income, the constitution of financial and/or real estate assets) seems to take precedence over the conflictual aspects related to the rental. The formalization of a certain degree of compromise also explains the a priori hesitant attitude of some hosts regarding the cessation of this activity.

Conclusion

36Short-term tourist accommodation as offered by Airbnb is “completely” conflictual. The conflicts provoked by the company are numerous and diverse, and can be analysed at all levels, mobilizing multiple actors and unfolding in many heterogeneous spaces. Airbnb systematically grows through the competition it creates with other tourist accommodation, and most of the time to the detriment of the areas in which it is present. Forms of regulation are also tending to become more widespread, at all levels, initiated by public operators who are becoming increasingly frustrated with and “experienced” in their “fight” against Airbnb.

37In this paper, our aim was to uncover new conflicts related to the sharing of private domestic spaces (apartments) or public spaces to access said private sphere (apartment building lobbies, streets, pavements, etc.) following the irruption of Airbnb. We achieved this through an analysis at a local and micro-local scale, through the mobilization of new actors (the host and the tourist, the host and the resident next door, the tourist and the permanent resident), with sometimes contradictory practices and representations, through the discovery of new forms of conflict and their regulation, etc. These conflicts are described as being on a micro scale, not only because they unfold in small and even very small spaces, but also because they remain “confidential” phenomena, confined to the private and intimate sphere, whose repercussions do not go beyond said spaces.

38These conflicts can be added to those already identified and analysed by politicians, geographers, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, architects, etc., and that have been denounced for some years now via various channels. In the ideas and examples developed, this paper does not claim to be exhaustive. While it cannot be generalized to all Airbnb situations, it does provide a complementary interpretation of the Airbnb phenomenon and offers some food for thought when analysing the multinational company in the cities and regions in which it is present.