1 Introduction

Airbnb in London operates in a liberal regulatory framework for short-term rentals (Boon et al., 2019; Ferreri & Sanyal, 2018, 3363). In corporate narratives, it is often presented as an innovative peer-to-peer platform that creates opportunities for entrepreneurial landlords to gain extra income by using unused spaces, for local communities to profit from the immersion of tourism into local economies, and for guests to take affordable and “authentic” holidays (Airbnb, 2021b; Lalicic & Weismayer, 2017; Mayor of London, 2019). As such, it appears as a representative institution of community interests legitimising the active involvement of hosts into local communities and executives in local governance structures (Van Doorn, 2020). Airbnb corporate narratives, however, silence the negative impact of the platform on vulnerable communities. Recent studies have demonstrated how the platform exasperates existing shortage of affordable housing and may be associated with the rise of long-term rental prices and housing precarity (Zahratu et al., 2021; Shabrina et al., 2019, Temperton, 2020). Although there are some emerging social movements that address its impact on gentrification (Brooker, 2020, Generation Rent, 2021, Simcock & Smith, 2016), public debates tend to silence and obscure the labour aspects of the platform. This is mainly because typical Airbnb-related tasks, such as cleaning, decorating, and caring for guests in private spaces are devalued and unrecognised activities because they are stereotypically associated with unpaid women’s and migrant’s work (Tremblay-Huet, 2018). Moreover, contrary to other sectors that are more visible in the public domain, there are no labour struggles or novel forms of activism against the spread of Airbnb in London, manifesting the continuous influence of the gendered private/public divide (Tremblay-Huet, 2018).

While Airbnb has a negative impact on vulnerable communities in London, it has from its inception used the terms “community” and “sharing” to denote a seamless group of producers and consumers that seemingly benefit from its mediation (Ravenelle, 2019; Schor & Vallas, 2021). Contrary to this claim, I argue that Airbnb in London has acquired—often unwittingly—the ambitious and complex task of regulating a platform economy that does not only operate by using unused material assets but also by organising affective labour relations. I understand Airbnb as a platform that produces unequal material relations, but also “affective economies” (Ahmed, 2004), in which the bodies of different users come together and interact with material objects—houses, rooms, furniture, roads, pavements, shops, transport vehicles—and with each other. In this context, I consider both private hosting (individuals managing their own rentals on Airbnb), and professional-corporate hosting (companies managing multiple short-term rentals and other activities such as guided tours). The inclusion of the latter is particularly significant as it adds different bodies and objects to the complex affective labour relations including those of migrant cleaners and maintenance workers that are usually hidden from academic and activist understandings of Airbnb as they are feminised and racialised.

The paper is based on the fieldwork that was carried out in London by the University of Hertfordshire from January 2019 to March 2020 as part of the EU Horizon 2020 project PLUS: Platform Labour in Urban Spaces. The fieldwork included 15 semi-structured interviews with Airbnb hosts (including private and professional hosts, guides, and cleaners, maintenance workers), 10 interviews with relevant stakeholders (representatives of local councils, labour unions, social movements, and migrant communities), 2 focus groups and participant observation in Airbnb spaces and neighbourhoods in London. Following the PLUS approach, the fieldwork and analysis focused on Airbnb hosting as labour. Moreover, I took into consideration both forms of labour that are directly mediated through the platform (hosting and guided tours) and non-platform mediated forms of labour (cleaning, maintenance) that are necessary for professional hosting. The research confirmed the findings of previous analyses that argued that there is a whole range of low-paid services carried out in and around Airbnb hosting, which prove that processes of precarisation and gentrification are interconnected (Gourzis et al., 2019). Airbnb constitutes a product and at the same time an accelerator of the urban restructuring of specific areas of London, which has, in turn relies on and intensifies the proliferation of precarious labour.

2 Gender, Gentrification and Precarisation

On the one hand, most of the critical literature on Airbnb has concentrated on the impact of the platform on urban spaces analysing how it piles on ongoing processes of gentrification of cities and neighbourhoods. In many cities, the spread of Airbnb has exaggerated the displacement of residents, the widening of rental gaps, overcrowding, tourismophobia and overtourism (Amore et al., 2020; Ardura Urquiaga et al., 2020; Cocola-Gant & Gago, 2021; Crommelin et al., 2018a, 2018b; Lee, 2016; Such-Devesa et al., 2021; Wachsmuth et al., 2018). More broadly, short-term rental platforms are considered as part of a “fifth wave of gentrification” that is embedded in the rise of financialised capitalism and is characterised by the dominance of the digital, the “naturalisation of state-sponsored” construction, and the rise of corporate landlords and transnational elite property investment (Aalbers, 2018, 1). Although the literature on Airbnb’s impact on gentrification provides valuable insights into the distractive impact of platform capitalism on urban spaces, it does not consider how processes of commodification and appropriation of space and social relations are interconnected with labour precarity. There are also some analyses, mostly in tourism studies, which focus on the interactions between users as hosts and as guests, who have different understandings and expectations of peer-to-peer hospitality (Farmaki et al., 2020; Lalicic & Weismayer, 2017), but they do not problematise Airbnb as labour. Moreover, affective interactions in Airbnb are linked to wider processes of commodification of social relations and cultural resources in anthropological and geographical studies. Airbnb is criticised for reinforcing racialised appropriation and extraction of societal and cultural resources (Törnberg & Chiappini, 2020). In tourist neighbourhoods, affective relations “overflood” the platform and disrupt the everyday lives of residents and other non-users living in proximity, who become unwittingly part of value making processes of the short-term rental economy (Spangler, 2019). On the whole, labour in Airbnb is under-researched and under-analysed in the literature that emphasises gentrification and this lack of consideration for labour issues is intertwined with the silences of public discourse and its absence from the agenda of labour movements, reproducing broader gender biases that obscure feminised and racialised labour (Kampouri, 2022).

On the other hand, in the literature on platform labour, Airbnb is usually categorised as a “location-based accommodation platform” (Schmidt, 2017), or as a “capital platform”, a digital intermediary for the rental of private assets (Ilsøe et al., 2021). Airbnb hosts are often perceived as somehow privileged homeowners or multiple job holders that complement their main income through short-term rentals (Ilsøe et al., 2021), which differentiates them from other platform workers who depend entirely on platforms for their survival. Usually the narratives of the “sharing economy” are criticised as they are being used as a tool to attract hosts to rent it short-term to guests, even if they have not previously used their property for profit (Schor and Attwood‐Charles, 2017). Nevertheless, there are others who argue that platform labour is much more diverse than many of these categorisations presume (Schor and Attwood‐Charles, 2017) and most platform workers across sectors use platforms to supplement other earnings (Huws et al., 2017, 2019). In that sense, Airbnb is not differentiated from other sectors of the platform economy: local regulations (Vallas & Schor, 2020), as well as class-based, race and gender inequalities amongst workers, determine the different ways in which platforms impact on work.

In this paper, I focus on Airbnb as labour. I follow analyses that have criticised the notion of “Uberisation” from a gender perspective, claiming that it obscures the diverse ways in which platforms operate, especially how they impact on feminised and racialised sectors, such as domestic and care work (Ticona & Mateescu, 2018). Labour carried out in the short-term rental sector, as in the hotel sector, has many common characteristics with domestic and care work, most notably that it is performed in private spaces and that it involves a wide range of material and affective relations that develop around these spaces. I approach Airbnb by using a social reproductive lens, which does not focus on the labour relation only on public spaces, formal “workplaces” and working hours. Instead, a social reproductive lens considers private places and times that are stereotypically associated with reproduction, time off, leisure, or the building of social and community ties. This shift in focus has two implications for the ways in which we conceptualise platform labour more broadly: first, it brings to the forefront complex forms of oppression of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and ableism and second it enables us to challenge the silences of more mainstream conceptions of labour and explore labour struggles that are more subtle and take place away from public workplaces (Bhattacharya, 2017).

This poses many challenges for labour organising, but also for research, as platform workers themselves may not even consider Airbnb-related tasks as work. In fact, considering Airbnb as labour requires a recognition that a whole range of unpaid or low-paid services is in fact work. To understand how precarisation works in and through platforms, like Airbnb, we need to go beyond the affective relationships between hosts and guests, and consider algorithms, professional managers, cleaners, and maintenance workers from a gender intersectional perspective. In this, the analysis follows critical gendered perspectives of digitalisation and precarisation in post-Fordism and problematises how gendered labour in platforms is embedded in feminist and postcolonial genealogies (Jarrett, 2015; Mitropoulos, 2005; Lorey, 2015; Armano et al., 2017). Gender and intersectionality are still marginalised subjects in the study of platform labour and whenever they are mentioned they are treated as secondary. In the literature, the gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and ableism of platform workers are factors that are hardly problematised, while research findings from interviews with male platform workers and observation in public spaces and male-dominated sectors are treated as universal. Very often, generalised statements about white male platform workers in the Global North are treated as the norm, while women’s, LGBTQ, migrant and Global South perspectives are silenced. Focusing on Airbnb as material and affective labour offers an opportunity to challenge some of these gendered and intersectional biases inherent in contemporary research on platform labour.

3 Sharing with Strangers

Most platform work is feminised and racialised, not only because there are higher percentages of women and migrant workers employed in and around platforms, but because it reproduces gendered patterns of precarious and unpaid labour, that are typical of affective, domestic and care work (Huws, 2016). In Airbnb, however, the feminisation and racialisation of labour take a much more literal sense since women form a large percentage of hosts (Airbnb, 2017) and the labour required is predominantly invisible and affective, reproducing gendered patterns of reproductive work. Given the high representation of women amongst Airbnb hosts, a question to ask is what the statistical data on the gender segregation of platform labour would be if Airbnb was not excluded as an assets-based platform. Airbnb can be understood as part of a more widespread process of commodification of domestic and care work (Huws, 2019) in the context of which both female and male hosts need to transform themselves to enter into labour relations that sharing with strangers requires.

As Sarah Ahmed argues, affects and emotions are not static attributes that characterise specific individuals, but circulate amongst bodies and objects (Ahmed, 2004). Affects can be attached to specific objects and bodies through the repetition of discursive associations. In this context, Ahmed uses the term “affective economies” to describe the movement of emotional signs, which like money and commodities, acquire value as they circulate. In parallel to economies, the historical accumulation of emotions circulating amongst bodies and objects produces surplus value that is material and at the same time emotional (Ahmed, 2004, 120). Although Ahmed approaches affect and emotions from a psychoanalytical perspective, she emphasises that psychic dimensions are not neatly separated from the “outside world” but are interwoven with material, labour relations. I find Ahmed’s perspective particularly suitable to analyse affect as a central organising principle of labour relations carried out in Airbnb hosting, a rather fuzzy sector in which it is difficult to distinguish work from non-work, personal from social and professional from private relations and spaces. The crucial question that Ahmed (2004) asks is how “the circulation of signs of affect shapes the materialization of collective bodies” (121).

In ways that are typical of platform capitalism, Airbnb is presented as a technological mediator between hosts and guests engaging in practices of digital “sharing” rather than carrying out labour-intensive activities. “Sharing” is described as a seamless and effortless informal relationship that brings financial and cultural benefits to both hosts and guests, without any impacts on hosts' everyday lives.

Whatever your financial goals, hosting on Airbnb offers a unique way to meet them—whether it’s to help pay your mortgage, save for upgrades, or set money aside for vacation. And the rewards for opening your home go beyond your bank account. Hosts say the perks also include being able to share your culture and connect with people you wouldn’t have met otherwise, like professional musicians, drone makers, and circus performers (Inside Airbnb, 2021).

Airbnb is represented as giving “opportunities” rather than jobs. While it often boosts for its gender-sensitive campaigns and its positive impact on women, it has consistently resisted acknowledging the affective labour required to keep the platform going. As one female Airbnb host put it, the platform is very careful to ensure the proper usage of the term “work”:

When you say “people work for Airbnb”, … that creates the concept that we are employees of Airbnb and that’s what Airbnb really avoids: they make it very clear that we don’t work for them. (Air Lon F 6).

In a typically gendered way, labour is distinguished from affect obscuring and silencing forms of labour that are not taking place in public spaces. In effect, Airbnb capitalises on informal domestic and affective relations, while at the same time promoting misleading images of amateurish hosts who support voluntarily, enthusiastically and emotionally the platform and self-identify as digital micro-entrepreneurs.

Sharing, however, is a practice that acquires specific meanings in different historical and cultural contexts (John, 2017). In London, hosts typically perceive Airbnb as a continuation of traditional income-generating activities of hosting lodgers. Unlike other cities in which Airbnb brought disruption (see Wang, 2018), Airbnb’s spread in the city did not lead to the utilisation of unused assets. Instead, it offered the opportunity to some hosts to rent their property for higher prices and shorter periods of sharing, which has the advantage of allowing hosts, who already had lodgers, to keep a distance from strangers—something not possible with lodgers. What the interviews showed, however, is that apart from some exceptional cases when hosts made new friends, “sharing” a private, intimate space for shorter periods of time, involves emotionally demanding and socially challenging labour, generating affectively charged and value-producing interactions. While initially, social relations with strangers may become a motivation to join Airbnb, and friendships may sustain attachment to the platform, as time goes by and especially as platforms turn into more professionalised sites of “sharing” with strangers, these affective relations become hard to maintain and users become “disenchanted” with the platform (Parigi & State, 2014; Schor & Attwood-Charles, 2017). The circulation of affects is particularly challenging as private spaces are differentially lived and experienced by hosts and guests. While hosts are attached to their private spaces emotionally and corporeally, the latter are only there temporarily to enjoy and take advantage of them. In effect, the intimacy of private spaces may be improved when “nice” strangers arrive, but is also under constant threat as short-term guests, unlike lodgers, are rarely able to develop emotional attachments.

The circulation of affects in Airbnb is fashioned by multiple factors ranging from excitement for the “exoticism” of guests from other continents to a sense of threat and fear for one’s safety for suspicious and secretive strangers (Ladegaard, 2018). Negative feelings are often linked to gender, age, race, culture and ethnicity. Female hosts develop strategies to protect themselves from male hosts who resist house rules, including locking their doors or checking guests’ bedrooms when their guests leave the house (Farmaki, 2019). Also, our interviews showed that hosts very often feel threatened by younger guests who party, take drugs and cause damages, while older guests may also be threatening because they do strange things destroying and damaging property without explanation. In many interviews British hosts described feelings of fear and distrust towards Asian guests, who were perceived as having different cultural codes and difficulty in communication with Londoners. Therefore, sharing with strangers often reproduces racist, sexist, and homophobic perceptions of others.

“Sharing” is also about affective relations to material objects that determine how affects circulate amongst hosts and guests (Ahmed, 2004), especially because objects are manifestations of the unseen labour that hosts put into Airbnb. In long-term rentals, there are a lot of shared activities between hosts and lodgers aimed at keeping homes in a good condition. In Airbnb, as in hotels, on the contrary, hosts become over-stretched as they are the only ones responsible for keeping material objects in a good condition. In many cases, objects become manifestations of overburdening affective labour and broken relationships with guests, who do not respect the efforts hosts put into keeping spaces clean and well decorated. This often leads hosts to decide to quit the platform. For example, a 52-year-old male British host that was doing all the cleaning in the Airbnb rooms that he rented because—as he explained—he “couldn’t trust professional cleaners”, explained why he was considering quitting the platform.

I tried thinking of stopping it because sometimes the headache is just …sometimes the people make a noise. Yes, they make noise, they make too much noise. And sometimes, if you see it, the burns in the carpet. You tell people, “Don’t smoke”’ they come, and they smoke, and you know, they don’t respect you, I’m thinking, “Oh, maybe I should stop this; it’s just too much headache”’ I’m still debating in my mind whether I should stop it or not. I’ve been thinking about it six months: should I stop it, should I stop. (Air Lon M 1)

In effect, the noise and marks that guests leave become reminders of strained and conflictual affective exchanges in Airbnb. Damaged, stained, destroyed objects bring to the forefront all the invisible labour required to keep Airbnb income coming and increase hosts’ anxieties over the loss of intimacy of their private spaces. One female host told me that she decided to switch to a hosting relationship, where guests offer few days a week helping with the garden in exchange for a free stay, in order to avoid the constant pressure of having to mend broken objects (Air Lon F 4).

4 The Production of Algorithmic Affects

Although hosts in London often perceive Airbnb hosting as a continuation of long-term lodging, platform labour is mediated by algorithms. Airbnb relies, first, on a system of reviews and ratings generated by guests, who are expected to assess the quality of services by posting reviews and awarding hosts 1–5 stars for cleanliness, punctuality, reliability and affordability. Most hosts believe that if they are consistently awarded five stars over a certain period, they will be ranked as “super hosts”, appearing at the top of listings in relevant searches and that bad reviews and complaints by guests will automatically bring their score down to the level of simple “host”. The platform keeps algorithms non-transparent and opaque to protect software intellectual property rights and prevent potential gaming of the system by users (Jhaver et al, 2018). It neither confirms nor denies perceptions that are popular amongst hosts. What makes it even more frustrating for hosts, is that guest reviews are usually arbitrary, reflecting personal tastes and habits, but also social and cultural norms, unrealistic expectations (Farmaki et al, 2020; Zhu et al, 2019), or even fraudulent attempts to gain compensations, or “free holidays” (Air, Lon, M 5). Although hosts can review guests, they can only respond to negative reviews by posting comments but cannot challenge negative ratings (stars). Through this asymmetry, the platform externalises the risks of customer dissatisfaction blaming the hosts in cases when relations with hosts break down. In effect, hosts, who are aware of the impact that guests’ assessments and ratings, must constantly strive to promote informal and intimate relations with guests to avoid negative reviews.

As the relationship becomes filtered through algorithms based on uncertain and unequal criteria, the interactions between host and guests become more asymmetrical too, manifesting platform inequalities of gender, race and class (Cansoy et al., 2021; Cotter & Reisdorff, 2020; Schor & Vallas, 2021). Hosts who are not dependent on the platform and only use it to supplement their income are not as vulnerable as those who use it as their main source of income. Moreover, studies have shown how racial disparities in earnings and racial discrimination are embedded into Airbnb making Black and Muslim hosts more vulnerable than white ones (Schor & Vallas, 2021). In addition, increased competition reduces hosts’ chances of being treated favourably by the algorithms. For example, according to some hosts, ratings are based on the number of reviews rather than on their quality. Hosts who have multiple listings or who have entered Airbnb during its early stages build stronger profiles because of the accumulation of reviews, whereas newer ones tend to struggle more even if they have good reviews. As in Uber, Airbnb’s automated system has the power “to incentivize, homogenize, and generally control how workers behave within the system despite claims to systematic freedom or flexibility” (Rosenblat & Stark, 2016, 3777).

Studies have demonstrated affective responses to technologies, most notably “algorithmic anxiety” that requires one to constantly negotiate uncertainty over the automatisation of client-based quality assurance, while at the same time negotiating relationships with guests (Jhaver et al., 2018). This anxiety is reinforced by cultural and racial norms and representations of hosting that increasingly abide to hotel standards, while also exhuming an air of local authenticity. For example, Airbnb in London imposes on hosts to post photographs based on normalised standards, high-quality resolution and specifications, which can only be attained by professional photographers. Photographic representations of people and spaces are crucial for the circulation of affects in tourist environments (see Balomenou & Garrod, 2019; Ert & Fleischer, 2019). Aestheticised pictures of ideal hospitality that determine algorithmic control impose unattainable standards of hospitality exasperating hosts’ algorithmic anxieties, and by extension also impact on both their private and working lives.

Although algorithms mediate the relationships between hosts, guests, and objects, hosts often find it difficult to problematise algorithmic interventions in their relationships with guests, but inevitably “encounter the workings of algorithms in everyday life” and develop emotional relationships with them that shape their understandings the platform (Bucher, 2017, 30). In Airbnb, the realisation of the impact that algorithms have on the pace of every-day life comes mostly when hosts understand that the “sharing” that they do is in fact feminised labour. A retired single woman in North London described how this realisation made her question the platform and pushed her to return to long-term rentals:

Airbnb was just an awful lot of work. I began to feel as if I was running a hotel. I would have to prepare the room, clean it, put on fresh bedding. I have a little fridge in there and I used to stock it up with bits of food and make sure they had tea and coffee and things and so it was quite a lot of work, very time consuming … I didn’t find the bookings time consuming. It was quite time consuming, sometimes, waiting for people to turn up if they didn’t turn up when they said they would. But it was really preparing the room and keeping it looking nice and fit for letting that took the time. (Air Lon F 3)

The standardisation and intensification of labour is not the result of coercion but of the circulation of material and affective resources. As labour becomes invisible, hosts are not only asked to do things differently but also to be different. Life becomes a “self-managed project”, and the self becomes “a site of labour” (Ouellette & Wilson, 2011).

Hosts are expected to spend more and more time on Airbnb, while guests are expected to do unpaid quality control as part of their “sharing” experiences. After leaving Airbnb spaces, the latter are bombarded by automated messages asking them to leave reviews, making more visible another form of affective labour that is embedded into the ways in which platforms are structured to externalise risks. Although leaving reviews and assigning stars to hosts may seem like a gratifying experience, it effectively feeds the system with—often unreliable—information on Airbnb labour, which in turn enables automatic decision making. The intensification of labour, however, is not so much experienced by hosts as a cause of algorithmic control, but as emotional pressure caused by ungrateful strangers. The invisibility of labour is, in turn, normalised as an integral aspect of the economy that develops in and around Airbnb. Algorithmic affective labour generates emotional entanglements that make it difficult for both hosts and guests to protect their intimate spaces and objects, but also themselves from strangers.

Airbnb is not only about productive, but also about reproductive labour. For many hosts, working on Airbnb makes it hard to find and maintain a job or carry out reproductive labour outside the platform (Kerzhner, 2019). Algorithmic control exasperates work-life imbalances (Benvegnù & Kampouri, 2021). Although hosts of all genders carry out affective labour, female hosts tend to be more conscious of the complexities involved in sustaining a successful profile, partly because they are the ones doing most of this type of work and partly because they carry gendered histories and experiences of reproductive labour that provide them with the emotional tools to recognise domestic-affective labour for what it is. Domestic work carries a “negative affective burden” for women, which reflects cultural perceptions of labour as devalued, banal, boring, uncreative, draining, exhausting and unrecognised (Gutierrez-Rodriguez, 2014, 48). Moreover, it complicates other reproductive tasks, such as caring for children or elderly relatives. Women are in a better position to realise this because they carry the “baggage of female experience” (Morini, 2007, p. 43), which results into “the end of the separation between different social times and to the introduction of a perception of the day where there is practically no end” (p. 47).

Male hosts, on the contrary, seem to be much more reluctant to acknowledge that affective labour is labour, as carrying out typically feminine tasks (like cleaning, decorating, or caring for others) is usually a new experience associated with digital micro-entrepreneurship. Although this is usually impoverished and precarious, it also generates feelings of pride for the digitality, creativity, flexibility and independence that platform work involves (Rossi & Wang, 2020). This re-consideration of care and domestic work as part of the entrepreneurial self is reinforced by Airbnb algorithms and reviews of cleanliness and hygiene, which transform unpaid or badly paid tasks within households into crucial performance indicators. Male subjectivities in this context become trapped into the blurring of the separation of work and life, private and public that are all-too familiar for female workers.

5 The Professionalisation of Affect: Manufacturing Intimacy

Looking at the broader picture, the Airbnb economy is not limited to private local hosts that manage their own properties, but there is an entire spectrum of labour that balances between the professional and the unprofessional, the formal and the informal, the private and the public (Bosma, 2022; Katsinas, 2021). While the platform relies on informal emotional interactions between hosts and guests to develop what it is mostly famous for, i.e. “sharing with strangers”, it also pushes both hosts and guests towards more labour-intensive interactions. The professionalisation of sharing forces private hosts to struggle, as they lack the resources, skills and the technical capacity to increase their ratings. Hosts’ performances become disciplined to conform with corporate interests that attract more guests (Dissing, 2022), which results in either into abandoning the platform or giving the management of their properties to corporate Airbnb management agencies.

In London, most top hosts are brokers or specialised real estate agencies that maintain properties across the city and often run apartments and houses transformed into pseudo-hotels (Crommelin et al., 2018a, 2018b; Demir & Emekli, 2021). Almost half of the London Airbnb market is composed of hosts with multi-listings, indicating that there is an accumulation of rented property into th, e hands of professional agencies, who manage them seemingly without “the presence of a host” (Airbnb, 2021a, 2021b; Inside Airbnb2021). The percentage is probably even higher than these statistics suggest, since hosts who hand over the management of their Airbnb profile to companies often keep their existing private host accounts, and professional hosts keep multiple profiles in order to ensure that in case of a complaint, they can avoid the suspension of a large percentage of their activities. Professional hosting implies the usage of several apps to adjust their prices and multi-listings, or “channel managers”, such as Guesty, that automatically connect different platforms together and synchronise their calendars and send automated responses.

The limits, however, between private and corporate hosting are not always clear as professionals often start their careers as private hosts. For example, a single 47-year-old professional, that we interviewed had begun her career as a private host, but eventually quit her job and transitioned to a professional career investing on renting property in order to re-rent it on platforms like Airbnb (Rent2Rent). Before COVID-19, there was a market encouraging such transitions, including books, seminars, courses and apps indicating best locations devoted to Rent2Rent in London and several of the private hosts that we interviewed considered this to be a viable future professional career. (Air Lon F 15).

The professionalisation of Airbnb creates opportunities for female entrepreneurs who can overcome gendered prejudices because of low barriers to entry compared at least to the hotel sector (Airbnb, 2017), but it also generates demand for feminised and racialised poorly paid domestic labour. The other side of the coin can be seen in the story of the single 40-year-old Romanian female artist, who worked as a cleaner for Airbnb management companies. She described the exploitation that takes place in the outsourcing of cleaning to such companies.

“Airbnb companies, there are like a couple of big competitors, you know and for these companies, they are employing people; it’s like modern slavery and let me explain it. Nobody is lasting there for long; people are just coming and going all the time because nobody wants to stay … Around 4½ years ago and they were offering £10 for one hour, but it is in the Central line and again, you have to carry the very heavy bag with you to get there and they don’t pay for it… and it is the same money, like even 10 years ago; it’s just … it does not increase at all. But everything goes expensive, you know, in the last few years, especially after the Brexit. (Air Lon F 10).

Domestic physical labour is outsourced to precarious workers—mostly undocumented migrants and women. As one female professional host explained, managing this precarious labour force becomes a task on its own, which includes training and even surveillance practices, like “before” and “after” videos to ensure hotel standards of cleanliness (Air Lon F 14). The exploitative strategies that Airbnb agencies use vis-à-vis precarious cleaners and maintenance workers usually recruited via other platforms shed light on the multiple ways in which platformisation may impact on the world of work. As the interviewee above explains, cleaners are only hired during peak periods and are fired once these periods are over. When they make labour demands, professionalised Airbnb hosts try to silence them.

They want everyone to be quiet, you know. They don’t like people there in these companies who speak for themselves. Yes, there is nobody speak English there’ (Air Lon F 15).

Completely hidden from platform narratives of sharing, but also from most accounts of platform labour, these workers’ experience includes invisibility, which is tied to deportability (De Genova, 2002). This dynamic may explain why migrant women who clean Airbnb spaces appear to be the least excited of all the workers that we interviewed about entrepreneurialism. Studies on migrant women’s activism in platforms in the USA and in South Africa demonstrate that despite the invisibility of their labour, migrant cleaners and domestic workers are not helpless victims but seek to create alternative possibilities for themselves and their communities (Hunt & Samman, 2020; Hunt et al., 2019, National Domestic Workers’ Alliance, 2021). Our analyses of platform labour would remain incomplete unless professionalisation and these exploitative labour relations, but also feminist and migrant struggles come to the forefront of the theory and practice of platform labour. Eventually we must face the fact that female and migrant experiences come through the backdoor to haunt Airbnb on—and off-line spaces and their seamless narratives of “sharing”.

6 Conclusion

The COVID-19 crisis has delivered a big blow on Airbnb in London causing numerous cancellations that initially the platform promised, but later refused, to reimburse in full. “Sharing with strangers” became a source of fear, associated with the threat of disease and death, that paralysed the platform, manifesting that affects are essential for its survival (Schor & Vallas, 2021). The pandemic also produced outrage by previously docile and content private and corporate hosts for its handling of the crisis that made more visible the labour needed to make it sustainable and profitable leading to online organising of all those who saw their income diminishing and their prospects of recovery destroyed (Neate, 2020; Wisniewska, 2020). While these events made it clearer that Airbnb involves income, labour remained obscure as most feminised and racialised labour is. To consider Airbnb as labour, however, forces us to reconsider the gender biases of contemporary writing about platforms. Including or excluding platforms, like Airbnb, in quantitative studies, may transform completely the statistical findings as women are the majority of hosts and migrant women are the majority of workers. Moreover, questioning the gender of the platform worker may disturb analyses of platform subjectivities. What would our analysis be if the platform worker is a middle-aged retired black woman renting a room in her house on Airbnb or a precarious migrant cleaner who is employed by short-term rental agencies and aspires to become an artist? Thinking of the Airbnb host or cleaner as a platform worker forces us to go beyond the places and spaces of production, unpack the binaries of public/private, masculine/feminine and open the study of platform labour to multiple sites in which Fordism was never the norm. These gendered openings will enhance our understandings of platform capitalism and of the contradictions and intersection resistances that emerge within it.