The Superhost. Biopolitics, home and community in the Airbnb dream-world of global hospitality

Performing “home” in the sharing economies of tourism: the Airbnb experience in Sofia, Bulgaria

“…A tiring process that, in producing fatigue, drew me even further away from "home" but at the same time felt like a more ethical way to relate to these unknown others. Contrary to what Veijola and colleagues (2014, 3) suggest, stranger/guests may no longer be as messy as they have been theorized, especially in a reputation economy like Airbnb where hosting and guesting bodies are monitored, controlled and disciplined through its ranking modalities (Roelofsen & Minca 2018). Instead, they may have become increasingly complicit in reproducing that same old "tidiness" paradigm that tourism theorists, planners, activists and tourists have become so fixated on.…”

“…Although I tried to make up for my absence by inviting my hosts along for walks and meals outside, my alienating habits eventually left me feeling inadequate as a guest. A guest who -in the political economy of Airbnb -also gets rewarded (or disciplined) for their (un)homely performances through review and rating systems, and the algorithms that the platform operates to ensure "quality control" (see Roelofsen & Minca 2018, for a critical discussion of these systems of measurement).…”

Becoming Airbnbeings: on datafication and the quantified Self in tourism

“…What is more, and this our third theoretical proposition, the Airbnb calculative rationale cannot be taken to its most extreme consequences. This is confirmed by the ideal citizen of the Airbnb community, the Superhost, who represents a distilled and embodied abstraction of the deeper logic of its algorithms (see Roelofsen & Minca, 2018). While each hospitable resident of this community should aspire to obtain the condition/status of Superhost, at the same time this is an endlessly mobile condition, since the rules to maintain it are constantly changed by the platform.…”

“…Methodologically, this has implied a systematic analysis of our own experiences as hosts, as well as those of other Airbnb hosts. Accordingly, we have first carried out in-depth face-to-face interviews with 18 Airbnb hosts held during our empirical investigations of Airbnb in various European locations as part of a broader project whose main results are published elsewhere (see (Roelofsen, 2018a;2018b;Roelofsen & Minca, 2018)). In these interviews, we asked our participants about the importance of reviewing and rating, and what effects this form of user-driven auditing culture had on their hosting practices.…”

“…Rather than 'creating trust' between strangers, the market-based reputation that Airbnb users build up is, according to O'Regan & Choe (2017, p. 4), 'often about control, manipulation, and discipline rather than transparency and accountability'. A biopolitical analysis of Airbnb was recently offered by Roelofsen and Minca (2018) where they investigate some of the key technologies and calculative rationalities that drive the making of Airbnb's digital 'global communities', and how specific understandings of the 'spatialities of the home' are central to the quantification/qualification of living spaces generated by the platform. The present article thus speaks directly to this recent literature preoccupied with the political implications of Airbnb's digital technologies.…”