New sharing economy experiments

The sharing economy was born with the great economic crisis of 2007-2009, absorbed the blow of the pandemic (in some cases managing to transform some consequences into opportunities), and even if it divides the economic debate between supporters and perplexed, the numbers it has reached in the last years make it one of the most practicable responses on a large scale both to the environmental emergency and to the widespread sensitivity towards conscious consumption. In Italian we speak of collaborative economy, or sharing economy: the one for which, as a joke that runs in the environment goes, while once they taught us not to accept passages from strangers, today we are the strangers to look for them with an app, to go there by car (dividing costs and journey) but also for a bunch of other services.

From 2008 onwards the sharing economy has taken up more and more space in contemporary (especially urban) everyday life and in 2015 the definition was definitively celebrated with its inclusion in the prestigious Oxford Dictionary. In the United States alone, adults using sharing services went from 44.8 million in 2016 to (estimated) 86.5 million in 2021. It must be said that its detractors mainly criticize the legislative order not always perfected, and the aspects related to safety in a system in which feedback from previous users is often the main evaluation parameter.

What’s mine is yours, was the title of one of the first texts (by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers) that analyzed the very rapid spread of this consumption model which has as its main strengths the economic advantage (both for those who make the property available and for those who rent it), the speed and flexibility of the exchange, the lowering of the environmental impact, the sense of community and the creation of an enlarged smart context. And in fact the theoretical principle behind it all can really be summed up with “what’s mine is yours»: Understood as long as you need it, and in the way that suits both of you. In a certain sense it is the evolution at supersonic speed, and on a global scale, of what in a distant world was represented by the single and disconnected realities of rentals, exchanges and rentals. And that, then, the turning point of a technology capable of connecting anyone at any time with any part of the world – combined with a switch in the collective approach to the relationship between possession & use of resources – has transformed it into the phenomenon of current dimensions. But what exactly are the contours of this reality?

In the first place of this way of doing and living the economy there are still the sightseeing and theaccomodation, from which it all started: the birth of Airbnb is generally considered the first brick that started construction between 2007 and 2008. Then they come there mobility (bike and car sharing but also electric scooters and car pooling) and the food delivery. Then, to follow, there are now all kinds of goods and services that can be offered and used through direct sharing or the use of marketplaces that function as facilitators. Which means, in the 4.0 interconnected world, that every good is a potential object of sharing: the luxury accessory which can be rented on the fly for a particular occasion, as well as the provision of a freelancer. The workspace (according to some estimates, before Covid around 1.7 million people used a coworking environment every day) but also the search for funding for a project or a start-up: usually in these cases it is the start-up itself that returns advantages or profits to those who, through crowdfunding, allowed its birth.

Thanks to a data sharing agreement signed last year by Eurostat and the 4 main platforms in the accommodation sector (Airbnb, Booking, Expedia Group and Tripadvisor), today we also have a fairly precise idea of ​​the increasingly extensive dimensions of the sharing phenomenon in this area, despite the fact that tourism has been one of the sectors most affected by the health emergency, and the physiognomy of the typical stay (in terms of distance and duration) is being strongly redefined based on the habits of the Covid era. The fact is that in 2019 in Europe over 554 million nights were spent in accommodation booked online through one of the four sites, i.e. around 1.5 million guest on an average day (and the studio does not consider bookings made through smaller companies). The number of nights booked for short stays grew by 14% from 2018 to 2019 and top city destination were Paris, Barcelona, ​​Rome in third place, Lisbon and Madrid. And again from this Eurostat study it emerges that in Europe two out of three of the overnight stays were booked by tourists who came from a different country.