Urban Transformations as an Indicator of Unsustainability in the P2P Mass Tourism Phenomenon: The Airbnb Case in Spain through Three Case Studies

Salvador Garcia-Ayllon

doi:10.3390/su10082933

Abstract

Globalization and the development of the so-called “collaborative economies” has coincided with an important transformation of mass tourism in the last decades. This phenomenon has been accentuated enormously in many European cities in recent years, generating a new P2P tourist model. The situation is having a strong social impact on the urban transformation of cities, and its characteristics are closely related to real estate speculative movements. In this sense, the analysis of urban transformation can offer interesting conclusions about the sustainability of these new tourist models in large touristic cities. In this article, we will analyse the effect associated with of so-called phenomena of “tourist flats” from the Airbnb portal in the cities of Madrid, Barcelona, and Palma de Mallorca. Through the use of GIS indicators and geostatistic analysis of spatial correlation, the current incidence of this phenomenon in these cities, and possible future scenarios of maintaining the current trend, will be evaluated and discussed. The results obtained show worrying indicators in relation to the economic and social sustainability of the current urban-tourist model created in the city which are linked to gentrification processes.

Highlights

In this segment of mass tourism are included cases in which the accelerated growth of a tourist destination in the short term has resulted in the loss of natural and scenic areas, which have diminished the area’s appeal to tourists [10,11]
The first develops a comparative analysis of the impact of the Airbnb tourism model in the three cities based on static indicators
The results obtained shed some light on the Airbnb phenomenon and its consequences

Summary

Introduction

Many cases with important financial benefits in the short term but which have perpetuated a prematurely-instigated model with little added value in the long term can be noted in the bibliography [8] Within this field, we can find, for example, the development of urban models of sun and beach in which the disproportionate growth of second residences around tourist infrastructures ended up generating a tourist destination prematurely [9]. We can find, for example, the development of urban models of sun and beach in which the disproportionate growth of second residences around tourist infrastructures ended up generating a tourist destination prematurely [9] In this segment of mass tourism are included cases in which the accelerated growth of a tourist destination in the short term has resulted in the loss of natural and scenic areas, which have diminished the area’s appeal to tourists [10,11]. These phenomena have given rise in to the standardization of the well-known concept of the tourist area life-cycle (TALC), and of the mature tourist settlements ([12,13,14,15,16] for example Butler since [17])

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Conclusion