Sharing Economy

Hei people! How is it going?

We are going to introduce you to one topic that I'm sure you know something about. We want to talk about a very popular concept this days, the shareable economy and it's application in tourism world.

The shareable economy isn't anything new. In fact, I like to see it as a way to comeback to the practices people used to do decades ago. In the last years of incredibly economic growth, we people got used to pay for anything we needed without any problem and we wanted everything new and shining just for us, but this wasn't sustainable and life put us back to the earth almost 10 years ago when the economy crashed.

Since then, some of us realized the way we used to do things before was sustainable and effective. I mean, we used to work with the exchange and reuse things and this is absolutely logical. If someone have something you need and you can offer some skills, knowledge or goods with them why don't do that instead of paying money for it?

This is what sharing economy is about, people exchanging skills, knowledge, goods or whatever in order to optimize their resources and producing like this a sustainable development. From this idea has appeared many companies or platforms in the recent years, like Couchsurfing, Bla bla car, Wallapop... which tries to help people to contact each other to do this exchanges. It is also really remarkable the role of social media in this context.

Simple view to sharing economy (pixabay: edstar23)

In tourism we can find lots of examples of this platforms such as Trip4Real or my favorite one, Couchsurfing, which I mentioned before. However, considered as part of sharing economy in tourism we also find the popular Airbnb. This company is the result of a perfect business model and it is a great way to do business, althought I wouldn't say that it represents the spirit of sharing economy. In this case the prices of this accomodation platform are quite near to the hotels average (or even higher sometimes), and is the company which receives almost all of the money. 

In addition, sometimes Airbnb contributes poorly to the sustainable tourism concept. The fact that people use their home like touristic apartments increases the tourism destination's depopulation. In my opinion, Airbnb is different kind of hotel service, nothing else. 

On the other hand, a great example of this shareable economy in tourism is once again Couchsurfing. This service is free and it is based on cultural exchange, totally representing the sharing economy spirit.

We encourage everyone to be part of the sustainable development by using sharing economy whenever is possible!

See you in a couple of days with our next post guys!