Oppenchaim, Nicolas
Airbnb accommodation outside major cities
- 2023.
6
While many studies have focused on the consequences of the proliferation of Airbnb offers on the social composition of territories, particularly in large city centres, very little attention has been paid to the diversity of host behaviours in relationship to the local context. This article proposes to fill this gap by focusing on the strategies of Airbnb hosts in the Centre-Val-de-Loire region, France, in various geographical contexts: a metropolis, small and medium-sized towns, and peri-urban and rural communes. It shows that the diverse ways in which Airbnb accommodation is offered vary according to the degree of rationalization of the practice and the meaning attributed to it: a source of income or a fully-fledged activity. The ways in which Airbnb activity is embedded in the neighbourhood also differ widely. All these variations seem to depend not only on the hosts’ careers but also on the territories in which they live.