"The algorithms of tourism platforms can influence how, when, and where we travel"

The 2024 UOC Santander Award for the best postdoctoral stay at the UOC has been awarded to Maartje Roelofsen, a researcher in the Cultural Geography Group at Wageningen University, who conducted her research at the UOC in the New Perspectives in Tourism and Leisure (NOUTUR) group. From 2021, she has been participating in the project Adaptive Processes and Impacts of the Tourism Platform Economy in Spain in a Context of Continuous Change: An Analysis from a Territorial Comparison. Additionally, between 2020 and 2023, Roelofsen was part of the Challenging Platform Capitalism from Within: A Study of Digital Activism project, which explored how platform users mobilize their efforts and direct action to platform companies to bring about change to their practices and policies.

In this interview, Roelofsen reflects on the importance of awards such as the UOC Santander Award in supporting research and shares some of the key findings from her work.

How do you think the UOC Santander Award contributes to highlighting the value of your research?  

The award creates space and momentum to publicly reflect on the work that I have completed during a very specific time in my academic trajectory, and I am very glad to have that opportunity. This kind of acknowledgement for a postdoctoral project is not so common or self-evident. In many contexts, a postdoctoral stay is transitional in nature, it serves as a bridging period between the end of the PhD and the beginning of a job elsewhere. Some use that time, usually one or two years, to complete writing projects or to develop new research directions. For many postdocs, it is also an uncertain time in anticipation of future employment, marked by drafting funding applications and engaging in job interviews. Because my postdoc stay took place over a period of three years, I had the opportunity to actually develop and work on an entirely new project. When I received news about the prize, I immediately contacted my NOUTUR-UOC collaborators to share the acknowledgement. I say this because the award seemingly focuses on the single researcher, but all the work that I have done during my stay at the UOC rests entirely on the participation, encouragement, feedback and input of others. These ‘others’ are colleagues, research participants, mentors, family and friends. I owe a lot in particular to Julie Wilson, Soledad Morales Pérez, Lluís Garay Tamajon and Mar Alsina Folch who took me on board and worked with me on an almost daily basis.

Why is it important to award recognition to researchers, and what criteria do you think should be considered when evaluating their work? 

Recognition of the work that we do as researchers, through awards or otherwise, is very important. Particularly at moments when knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge is strongly curbed as part of political agendas in certain contexts. In such moments, but also in times of relative stability, institutional support and recognition is really crucial. As for criteria other than the ones used to allocate the award, perhaps the researcher could add their own criterion, something that they think is important to emphasize that really enabled their work positively. For example, being able to highlight the circumstances and collaborations that allow researchers to thrive.

You have carried out part of your research with the NOUTUR group: why did you choose the UOC, and how do you rate your time there?  

As a researcher of digital technologies, the history and teaching model of the UOC seemed like an immediate fit to me. And when I first met my future-colleagues-to-be at a conference a year before the postdoc, I thought that our research interests would be a perfect match if we were to work together. And indeed it was, also on the departmental level. But to work at an online university was entirely new to me and, coming from a somewhat analogue work environment, it took some courage to feel comfortable in a very digitized work environment. But after my first online meeting with my NOUTUR colleagues and the Faculty of Economics and Business, I was convinced that it is possible to create an open, stimulating and collegial environment in such a way. I felt at home. Of course, other parts of my work remained very “place based” and I loved working in the new Barcelona office in Poblenou, as I lived close by. What really marked my postdoctoral stay was that it coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic as I started in November 2020. It was an incredibly difficult time for many people, yet I felt supported in my work from the outset. Not just by my NOUTUR colleagues, but also by an institution that had that online infrastructure readily available to continue work and share that knowledge with others on how to do so. It pulled me through a difficult time.

Your field of study addresses the digitization of the tourism sector. How significant are digital platforms in this area?  

While platforms like Airbnb and Booking.com might still be considered new in public discourse, the basic digital infrastructures that underpin many of these platforms have their roots in the 1960s. For example, tourism-related sectors like aviation were historically one of the first sectors to digitize work processes in those years, starting with networked computerized systems for booking airline seats (the Computer Reservation System). If you look at those systems that were fundamentally aimed at efficiency-focused economies and maximizing company profits, there are many similarities with the tourism platforms that we see today. They take on the role of mediators in the monetary exchange of products or services that have long existed in the tourism industry, such as accommodation or tour guiding. But these platforms are also new in other ways. They have provided the means to monetize certain kinds of everyday labour that people would not have considered offering professionally before, like hospitality, driving or cleaning. And they have provided global networks for people to connect with each other and exchange, buy or sell. In many contexts, these platforms have also severely challenged and wrongly bypassed existing regulations related to labour or the use of residential housing for tourism. Additionally, the algorithms that underpin these platforms have become granted with significant power to reconfigure the tourism space and global mobility. They really have the capacity to affect how, when and where people travel. In that sense, these platforms are significant like never before.

What are the main conclusions of your research so far?

In most countries, tourism was brought to a complete standstill from March 2020 onwards and continued to be severely restricted for years to come. This had major consequences not only for the established accommodation sector but also for those involved in platform economies. Professional hosts who had relied entirely on their residences to generate income had to immediately stop their activities for health and safety reasons and saw their income evaporate. What we found through interviews with Airbnb hosts is that the pandemic brought an important realization that running your own business through a platform entails certain risks that they had not considered before. They were working with software, not for a company that could provide them with income protection and backup in times of crisis. During the pandemic, the business models of these big platforms exposed the vulnerability of their users. Also, as a US-based company, Airbnb’s understanding of hospitality and cleaning was often unrepresentative of hosts’ own culturally desirable ideals of hospitality and cleaning. The majority of hosts that we interviewed accepted the platform’s terms and conditions only to be able to appropriate its digital infrastructure and operate within its market. But as they were doing so, they upheld their own cultural values and hosting practices. In many instances users think critically about the effects that their choices have and in some instances users of these platforms unite to lobby against platform companies in order to change their business models or against local authorities who aim to regulate platform activity. On a few occasions, hosts started to fall back on mid-term and long-term rent again during the crisis, but these were exceptions and usually temporary in nature. Most have gone back to business as usual or have stopped hosting altogether.

What initiatives are you currently pursuing? Or are you planning to continue along these same lines of work?  

My interest has turned towards the labour that sustains the short-term rental economy. Academic research still focuses a lot on how platforms like Airbnb and Booking.com incentivize short-term rentals and contribute to housing crises, which are both an important outcome of and incentive for platform capitalism. A lot less is understood about the ways in which short-term rental platforms draw on a labour force of cleaners and other service providers who sometimes work under insecure conditions. I would like to make this aspect more visible through my work, since it became such a prominent theme in the interviews I held with platform hosts in the last decade. With an interdisciplinary group of researchers, I now study what resources, services and support are needed for the wellbeing of cleaners who work in this sector of housing and hospitality more generally.

How can the current tourism sector benefit from the contributions of the projects you have been involved in? 

Despite regulations related to short-term rentals in contexts like Barcelona, I think it is important to not merely focus on the platforms and companies that enable short-term rentals but to think more broadly on how we will be addressing the overarching issue that housing is still seen and promoted as a form of investment and financialization. We can see that short-term rental housing is taking on different forms and target differently mobile people beyond tourists alone. There are many groups of people who have to rent under insecure and temporary conditions because there is still possibility to offer that kind of accommodation and there are limited alternatives.

Beyond this, how could platforms like Airbnb become a more sustainable part of our society?  

There already exist some platform companies that could be considered more sustainable compared to the bigger firms in the short-term rental sector. The cooperative Fairbnb or HomeExchange are smaller platforms in terms of user base and scale. Their understanding of hospitality focuses on meaningful encounters and stays, avoiding a mere exchange of keys. Some of these platforms first carefully investigate the contexts in which they want to operate and consider existing local regulations and issues at play regarding tourism density, housing, labour, taxation etc. Platform companies can also anticipate and question what possible negative consequences their actions will have in relation to sustainability, before they even conceive of and implement their software. What kind of unintended effects could their practices have and are they aware that they are accountable for that? Professor Mary Gilmartin brought the concept of ‘exnovation’ to my attention in a meeting last week, the process of discontinuing or eliminating a practice or technology that is unsustainable. It rings true in relation to some of the ‘innovations’ introduced in the tourism and hospitality sector, technologies that are promoted as a solution but actually only exacerbate bigger structural issues, like a housing crisis or unsustainable labour conditions. Exnovation also allows us to think much more about what is already there rather than focusing on newness or novelty.

How do you think your field of research can contribute to addressing the present and future challenges of the tourism sector?

My field of research assumes an important role in documenting the complexity of tourism-related issues that play out in places over time. It is a field of research that also shows how overarching societal themes are crucially interwoven with tourism such as housing, labour, migration, digitalization and many other topics that are strongly shaped by political tendencies. Contemporary crises such as the climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic have put new pressures on the future of tourism and have quite literally brought tourist mobilities closer to home. There is still a lot of scope for the tourism sector to benefit from research that boldly articulates a culture of hospitality that benefits a community beyond short term gains. And there is ample opportunity to refocus attention on the value that resides in the mundane and the unexpectedness that can be found in proximity. Carbon-low mobility, regenerative tourism and donut-economies, de-growth, dignity and a living wage for tourism workers… these are all inspiring topics currently addressing the future challenges of tourism.

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