ABSTRACT
A promising slogan welcomes Eatwith (https://www.eatwith.com">www.eatwith.com) website visitors: “Taste the World with Locals”. In the background, a 40-second-long sequence of quickly changing short video snippets in a repeating loop supports this virtual culinary tour around the world. It shows close-ups of different foods, people cooking or sharing a meal at what seems like a private home and places emblematic for certain cities like the Eiffel Tower (Eatwith 2018a). Online meal-sharing platforms such as Eatwith, BonAppetour (https://www.bonappetour.com">www.bonappetour.com) and Traveling Spoon (https://www.travelingspoon.com">www.travelingspoon.com) represent a new group of actors in the sharing economy. As such, they need to be addressed in the context of disrupting media technologies that not only transform traditional business models, but also enable new ways of touring a city. With the help of specific digital infrastructures, they connect hosts and guests online in order to arrange face-to-face group eating experiences, which typically take place at the host’s home. Meal-sharing platforms offer an innovative way to explore a city for all city users (Martinotti 1996), including but not restricted to tourists. As such, they are—like short-term rental providers—a driving force in the dedifferentiation processes that define new urban tourism (see Stors et al., Chapter 1 in this volume), but remain largely under-researched (Ketter 2017).
