The spatial logic of home exchanges: towards a new geography of the quotidian in contemporary tourism

Abstract

During the last decade, house swapping has been gaining relevance for a growing number of travellers as an attractive alternative to the commercial supply of hospitality. It is a new concept that could be framed within the emerging paradigm of “collaborative consumerism” fostered by the evolution towards the interoperability of the Web 2.0 and the proliferation of online social networks. Both mirroring social change and questioning established structures of power and agency, this phenomenon contributes to enrich the academic debate on mobilities, and in particular on tourism as a form of mobilisation of places though the temporal character of its livelihoods and the negotiation between different populations.
This article develops a conceptual and analytical approximation to this phenomenon from the geographic perspective, focusing on the singular structure of the house swapping “marketplace”, and its spatial articulation, both at the level of origin-destination mobility patterns and in relation to tourism activity at destinations. The analysis is based on data obtained through two on-line surveys, one of quantitative and one of qualitative character, among the members of one of the main house swapping web communities. The results, albeit exploratory, allow validating the hypothesis that the spatial dimensions of this phenomenon are different from that of commercially supplied tourism, which compels to align new geographic research in tourism to the study of social and cultural changes which characterise the new generation of 2.0 travellers.