Airbnb is the most valuable tourism company in history and an epitome of the platform economy in tourism. Since 2020, together with the entire tourism sector, it has experienced the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper presents the context for the current international research on Airbnb by describing the origin, current state, and possible developments of the platform offer during and after the pandemic. The data on the global Airbnb offer in 2018, 2019, and 2020 comes from web-scraping the platform website. It shows that the dynamic growth of accommodation supply stopped in the last year. The platform offer has continued to disperse geographically towards less saturated markets and rural areas during the pandemic period. Entire flats and apartments have been continuously growing in dominance in the structure of the listing, while the slower growth in the percentage of multihosts’ listings indicates a slowdown in the process of the professionalisation of the platform offer.

This paper examines some key changes to Airbnb's travel philosophy, protocols and standards since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. It reflects on how the climate of uncertainty imposed by the global health crisis has induced Airbnb to promote among its users a new ethos of flexibility, adaptability, liability and long-term commitment. In particular, we discuss how new protocols and regulatory measures have engendered a culture of uniformity and transparency regarding issues of health and safety, but also concerning social interactions, personal communication, labour, and the conduct of everyday life of Airbnb's hosts and guests. The article also highlights that the changes implemented by the platform have not gone unchallenged and how some of the protests against the new measures and protocols were manifested via the Airbnb Community Center. We conclude with a few considerations about possible future directions of the Airbnb hospitality machinery and their potential consequences on the post-pandemic landscapes of travel and tourism.

The sector of urban passenger transport with tourism vehicles (taxis and vehicles for hire) is, surely, the one where the appearance of the sharing economy –or, we can choose to say, the digital platforms– has given rise to more heated controversies, more questionable regulatory measures and a greater number of disputes. In the work presented herein, a brief review is set out of the latest regulatory issues which have been outlined here, highlighting those which are still awaiting resolution, in a sense which is seemingly not easy to perceive.

The regulation of work has been built on a dependent/self-employed dichotomy, which is being overcome by the development of new forms of employment. Among these, those linked to new economic models, such as the collaborative economy, are becoming very relevant. In these forms of work people provide services with an economic value, but outside traditional markets and contractual schemes. These provisions of services find a faulty fit in this binary model, demanding their own regulatory framework. The objective of this work is to define this problem, and to propose some alternatives to solve it.

The evolution towards the network company and the resulting fragmentation of work increases the number of self-employed persons with intermittent relationships between various employers and with their potential co-workers. In this context, «collectives of the self-employed» emerge in contrast to the narrative that self-employed workers are isolated from each other. These collectives organise fights against algorithms, fights for labour rights, pool material and digital resources and even present themselves to the market under a unified brand without being a company. As emerging forms of organisation, they face challenges regarding their recognition as actors in social dialogue and are even accused of acting as cartels under the prism of free competition. Although their current forms are probably not the definitive forms, we can intuit that the «collectives of the self-employed» have and will have a relevant role in defining the ways of working and living in the future.

Platforms such as Glovo, Deliveroo and Uber Eats that operate in the field of food delivery have set up in cities all around the world. The expansion of these platforms has had an impact on workers’ rights in what is considered as platform capitalism. Even then, democratic alternatives connected to the social and solidarity economy and digital commons exist. This article analyses the democratic qualities of four alternative food delivery platforms with headquarters in Europe (CoopCycle, CILFé, Crow and Mensakas). On the one hand, the results show that these platforms consider their workers’ rights; that is the main reason why they form an alternative to platform capitalism. On the other hand, the analysis shows that these platforms face important challenges, especially regarding their economic sustainability and scalability.