Valérian GEFFROY, Université de Lausanne, Switzerland
Mosè COMETTA, Université de Lausanne, Switzerland
Far from their promises of disintermediation, where users would be able to freely and easily access services and products, the tech companies, we argue, tend to create a model of digital hypermediation in many areas of consumption and daily practices. The tourist experience is such an area: by offering to cater to every need and desire in a quick, efficient and personalised way, and increasingly concentrating this offer of services in a single device, the smartphone, digital companies such as Google, Uber, Airbnb, TripAdvisor and so on create a powerful web of mediations between tourists and the service providers, made of algorithms, of platform interfaces, of trust mechanisms, etc. For many tourists, digital hypermediation has become the new normal when travelling.
Here, we propose to examine the effects of this model on the politics of urban tourism. We argue that it contributes to a standardisation of tourism services, the destruction of previous tourism governance, and even more generally to the merging of tourism services and urban services (for instance, by opening the housing market to tourist accommodation). We argue that digital hypermediation also reinforces trends of globalisation and liberalisation, by increasingly integrating local labor and infrastructure in a global market governance. We examine how digital hypermediation of tourism relates to concepts and models of platform urbanism (Leszczynski, 2020), algorithmic governance (Smith, 2020) and the smart city (Rose et al., 2020); and how it tends to erode the public coordination of urban tourism services. However, we also present cases of resistance of local political arrangements (e.g. the regulation of short-term accommodation rental), and show how they operate in particular by regaining some control on the (digital) mediation between tourists and service suppliers.
Mots clés : digital hypermediation|tourism|urban|politics
A104924VG