Airbnb
I returned to Leipzig in the summer of 2015 and stayed at an Airbnb. Leipzig has overcome a recent history of decline, and consisted with this development, my Airbnb hostess was fond of travel. I argue that Airbnb hosts and guests resemble each other, a m
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Airbnb
Abstract I returned to Leipzig in the summer of 2015 and stayed at an Airbnb. Leipzig has overcome a recent history of decline, and consisted with this development, my Airbnb hostess was fond of travel. I argue that Airbnb hosts and guests resemble each other, a mirroring that alters the power dynamics between them. The value of advising the guests has been reimagined in response to the digital revolution, and the value of allegiance to local authorities has been greatly diminished. Interestingly, there was no place for the expression hostility, except online through Airbnb’s rating mechanism. I conclude by considering what Airbnb horror stories, or failed hospitality, can tell us about Airbnb’s unique contribution to hospitality. Keywords Airbnb Hospitality Rating mechanism Allegiance to local authorities Failed hospitality Horror
HOSPITALITY
IN THE
DIGITAL AGE
In June 2015, I took a Singapore Airlines flight from New York City to Frankfurt. Upon my arrival in Germany, I boarded the first intercity express ICE train to Leipzig. I was eager to return to Leipzig for another extended stay. The purpose of this trip to Leipzig was not to investigate hospitality, but rather to revisit the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and learn about the persistence of the East German intelligentsia after © The Author(s) 2017 A. Touval, An Anthropological Study of Hospitality, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42049-3_2
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AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY OF HOSPITALITY
reunification. After returning home to New York several weeks later, however, I realized that the Internet had transformed the experience of hospitality in a manner that I could not have predicted, casting hospitality in a new light. The first part of this manuscript refers to events that took place in 1996. At that time, accessing the web meant dialing a local number that belonged to an Internet provider (such as AOL) and patiently waiting to connect as the computer emitted syncopated, insect-like chirps. By 2015, this soundtrack had vanished, its closest descendent being the whale-like sounds of Skype. Likewise, the digital age has seen the emergence of a robust ecosystem of new forms of hospitality, including global online platforms such as Airbnb that propagate hosts and guests in neighborhoods and buildings in which they might clash with neighbors and housing advocates.1 The spatially nested concepts of household, city, and country remain valid for contextualizing the interaction between hosts and guests, as valid at an Airbnb in 2015 as they were at Herr Klaus’s inn in 1996. At the same time, Airbnb facilitates the virtual flow of ideas, media, and money, making it necessary for both participants and observers to create a narrative that is less bound by time and place.2 Thus, in this second part of my book, I analyze my interaction with an Airbnb hostess by exploring our virtual interaction on Airbnb’s online platform and our face-to-face interaction over the six days I spent as a guest in her apartment. To provide a broader account of both my Airbnb hostess and A
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