The Airbnb Phenomenon under the Lens: Academic Research in Latin America

Abstract

The phenomenon unleashed by the U. S. company Airbnb, whose digital platform enables short-term room and home rentals, has been one of the great drivers of transformation, change, and conflict in cities worldwide since its appearance in 2008. Airbnb’s presence in large cities throughout Latin America has advanced similarly, in quantitative terms, to cities in the Global North. Faced with this situation, we pose the question: what does academia have to say about the Airbnb phenomenon? This article presents an exhaustive qualitative and quantitative survey of scientific studies in different directories of academic journals that investigate the Airbnb phenomenon, offering a complete state of the art. We analyze the attention that the subject has received in Latin America in comparison with other regions of the world, especially Western Europe and North America, from an urban-studies perspective, while also establishing similarities and differences between investigations according to their places of origin, to identify the principal approaches and concerns that have guided research to date. Among the main results, we note that despite being a deeply rooted activity in Latin America as an academic priority, the Airbnb phenomenon remains largely unexplored, especially in comparison with the extensive investigations stemming from the Global North. We detected a predominance of approaches concerned with tourism—which analyze the supply and demand relationships, and the development and competition of a new business model—but we also register a very scant presence of academic proposals that consider how the Airbnb phenomenon impacts on the urban habitat.