Airbnb in tourist cities: comparing spatial patterns of hotels and peer-to-peer accommodation

In recent years, what has become known as collaborative consumption has undergone rapid expansion through peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms. In the field of tourism, a particularly notable example is that of Airbnb, a service that puts travellers in contact with hosts for the purposes of renting accommodation, either rooms or entire homes/apartments. Although Airbnb may bring benefits to cities in that it increases tourist numbers, its concentration in certain areas of heritage cities can lead to serious conflict with the local population, as a result of rising rents and processes of gentrification. This article analyses the patterns of spatial distribution of Airbnb accommodation in Barcelona, one of Europe’s major tourist cities, and compares them with the accommodation offered by hotels and the places most visited by tourists. The study makes use of new sources of geolocated Big Data, such as Airbnb listings and geolocated photographs on Panoramio. Analysis of bivariate spatial autocorrelation reveals a close spatial relationship between the accommodation offered by Airbnb and the one offered by hotels, with a marked centre-periphery pattern, although Airbnb predominates over hotels around the city’s main hotel axis and hotels predominate over Airbnb in some peripheral areas of the city. Another interesting finding is that Airbnb capitalises more on the advantages of proximity to the city’s main tourist attractions than does the hotel sector. Finally, it was possible to detect those parts of the city that have seen the greatest increase in pressure from tourism related to Airbnb’s recent expansion.