Commodifying travel: Where does freedom lie?
Hitch-hiking and Couchsurfing are popular ways of enabling people to travel on a budget and get to know locals albeit bearing certain risks to them. In a sense one is asking for a gift, a kind of charitable act that is essentially immaterial and maximally convenient to the giver and thus creates fewer obligations at the receiving end. One might even argue that it is ‘balanced out’ by the largely one-sided risky character of the circumstances of exchange. Precisely this inherent quality might be identified as the driving force behind recent commoditization of these services. AirBnB emerged as Couchsurfing’s biggest profit-based counterpart, hitch-hiking and communal car sharing have been replaced by official urban car sharing networks or online platforms such as BlaBlaCar. While these services provide excellent alternatives to other means of transportation and types of accommodation, they have changed the ways in which people travel and interact – taking away the non-binding freedom of adventurous travel whilst at the same time providing the everyday journeyer with more flexibility.
Contributed by AlinaBerg on 21/01/2018
