Background | airbnbexperienceldn

Project Background & Methodologies

Airbnb as a Marketplace

In November 2016, Airbnb, an online marketplace for hospitality services, launched the city tours and “exclusive experiences” led by “local experts.” According to Airbnb, the project aimed to give its patrons “unprecedented access to local passions and interests” while allowing hosts to “make money from their passions.” CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky said the experience is supposed to bring together “where you stay, what you do and the people you meet all in one place.”

At the same time Airbnb launched its experiences, the American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA) (oligopoly) drafted a document to combat Airbnb in 2017. According to The New York Times, the objective is to “ensure comprehensive legislation in key markets around the country and create a receptive environment to launch a wave of strong bills at the state level while advancing a national narrative that further the focus on reining in commercial operators and the need for commonsense regulations on short-term rentals.” Though the accommodation part of Airbnb lies beyond the scope of this project, the AHLA’s legal actions against Airbnb ironically solidify Airbnb’s place in the hospitality market. Some of Airbnb's competitors in the "experience" market include traditional walking tours, food tours, and other kinds of curated tours that are scattered on different platforms (i.e., TripAdvisor, MeetUps, Craigslist, local tourist board websites, etc.). With that said, Airbnb may be one of the first and most curated and centralized platforms for such a diverse range of experiences.

How I Found The Trips

In early October 2017, one month after I arrived in London, I started getting frustrated that I wasn't seeing much of London besides the UCL anthropology department and various libraries. Though at this point I wouldn't have classified myself as a tourist anymore, I went on websites such as TripAdvisor, Booking.com, and the like to look for "recommended things to do." As I browsed through the overly structured and obviously commercial trips that were advertised on these platforms, I started becoming more and more annoyed, "Can't I just find something that's a little more personal and accessible?" That's when Airbnb popped into my head.

I had been using Airbnb for 3 years at this point and had recently used the relatively newly launched "experience" when I visited some friends in Tokyo. I thought to myself, why not explore some of the experiences in London and take my camera out for a day? While this project does not focus on the guest side of the experiences, I was pleasantly surprised that most of the guests I encountered were not technically tourists—some lived close to London, some had recently moved to London, and others were on their n-th business trip to London.

In the following video, I will demonstrate how I found the three trips that I went on. In order to participate in this market, both the hosts and guests must have the digital infrastructure and literacy to do so. For more information on the market and its accessibility, read The Market. I ended up choosing three trips: an architectural-photo tour at the City of London, a walking-photo tour with a blogger in Notting Hill, and a street photography tour in Soho. Though all three marketed themselves as photography-related, the ways photography featured itself in these experiences were very different. You can read more how London is constructed and experienced in "Experiencing London" and more details about the roles that photography played in "Photography as ?" I chose the trips heuristically—I chose a few that seemed interesting, considered their prices, and picked the ones that aligned with my interests the most. Since I've always loved architecture, people, and considered myself a "blogger" (I curate a coffee blog and a food Instagram), these trips seemed fitting. Here's a video showcasing how I found the trips (excuse the sniffling and slow talking pace...I was sick...):

You can find more information on all three of the trips here:

Photographing the City of London

Snap picturesque photos with a blogger

Capture The Moment Street Photography

Research Questions

An hour before my first Airbnb photography experiences, a few questions popped into my head. These questions prompted me to learn more about these trips, their relationships with the Airbnb marketplace, London, and photography. Instead of focusing on the guests, I'm interested in the experiences of the hosts. Here are some of the research questions that guided my investigation in both my participant observation and interviews.

The Market

What role does Airbnb play in the experiences?
Airbnb has built a marketplace based on their users' desire to "live (travel) like a local." Do the hosts echo Airbnb's language of "uniqueness" and "localness"? Do they see themselves as "local experts"?
Airbnb markets their experiences as personal and unique. Do they conflict with the fact that these are paid experiences (i.e., they are commodities)?

Experiencing and Constructing London

What kinds of stories and narratives do the hosts want to tell about London?
Are the hosts presenting the London they've experienced or is London being constructed and reconstructed every time they host a trip?
Why did the hosts choose the area that they chose? Do they do other trips in other areas of London? Why or why not?
What is an ideal Airbnb experience for the hosts? What do they want to achieve?

Photography

What role/roles do photography play on these trips?
How or does camera change the experience of walking around London on foot?
What is photography? Are there expectations regarding how photographs should be taken or used?

Selected Methodologies

Participant Observation

All of the trips were arranged and paid through Airbnb. I informed all three hosts that I will be there to enjoy the trips while researching how these trips are delivered and experienced. One trip highlighted the architectures in the "square mile," another focused on experiencing the mews and markets of Notting Hill, and the other zoomed in on the people of Soho. I participated in the trips, paid attention to how the trips were delivered, shifted my gaze and my camera as I was directed to, asked questions when I was curious, posed when I was prompted to, and bought food when I was suggested to. I took cues from both my hosts and other guests to figure out what the norm was and behaved like any other guests would. In other words, I wanted to play my role well in these experiences. My hosts wanted me to be able to "get something from the trip." Here's an example of a message I got from one of my hosts:

My photos should also reflect this—instead of understanding photographs as "raw data" (click here for a more detailed discussion) or approaching photography in an ethnocentric way (i.e., assuming photography exists for the sake of capturing and documenting research process and field site), they were taken, edited, and presented in ways my hosts would identify with and approve of. My photos are simultaneously art and souvenirs, just like what my hosts imagine these photographs to be.

Interviews

I interviewed all three of my hosts. Two of the interviews were arranged a few weeks after the experiences and one of the interviews took place right after the experience ended. These semi-structured interviews lasted between 60 to 90 minutes and were all recorded. This is the interview guide I used for the semi-structured interviews:

References

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Lee, Jo, and Tim Ingold. 2006. "Fieldwork On Foot: Perceiving, Routing, Socializing". Locating The Field: Space, Place and Context In Anthropology, 67-86. doi:10.5040/9781474214148.ch-003.

Myers, Misha. 2010. "‘Walk With Me, Talk With Me’1: The Art Of Conversive Wayfinding". Visual Studies 25 (1): 59-68.
doi:10.1080/14725861003606894.

Riles, Annelise. 2001. The Network Inside Out. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.

Schüll, Natasha Dow. 2014. Addiction By Design. Princeton University Press.

Sontag, Susan. 2005. On Photography. New York: RosettaBooks.

Tsing, Anna. 2013. "Sorting Out Commodities: How Capitalist Value Is Made Through Gifts". HAU: Journal Of Ethnographic Theory 3 (1): 21-43. doi:10.14318/hau3.1.003.

Van Dijck, José. 2008. "Digital Photography: Communication, Identity, Memory". Visual Communication 7 (1): 57-76.
doi:10.1177/1470357207084865.