How the Rise in Digital Platforms Impacts Women in Tourism
Digital platforms increasingly manage work and monitor tasks in tourism and hospitality, a process known as platformisation. In July 2026, the FUTOURWORK Consortium published an article examining the impacts this is having on workers from a gender perspective. EIT Associate and project researcher Fiona Bakas (University of Lisbon) summarises it here for our Insights series.
The shift towards platform-mediated work across the tourism and hospitality sector brings new opportunities but also new challenges for workers, deepening existing vulnerabilities for women, young people, and migrants.
Our article aims to develop a framework to explain how digital platforms, gender and wellbeing are linked and together shape workers’ experiences. We use the critical review method, to examine scientific papers and identify underlying assumptions and connections amongst them.
Understanding Platformisation in Tourism
Even though we use platforms in our daily lives, it may be hard to understand how they work and their impacts on tourism workers. We define a platform as a digital tool that brings together economic agents, like customers and sellers, and actively manages networking between them. In tourism these platforms can be divided into three main categories:
1) Labour platforms connect tourism businesses with customers (E.g. Airbnb Experiences).
2) Recruitment platforms help employers, such as hotels, restaurants, and event organisers, find and recruit workers (E.g. Coople).
3) Surveillance platforms are used at workplaces to organise tasks and monitor employees during their shifts (E.g. Hotel Kit Housekeeping).
Platforms offer various advantages for their users since they connect different groups of users with more ease and reduce the costs of finding each other and doing business. However, they can also have negative impacts since they prioritise interests of the platform and its customers, which often comes at the expense of worker welfare. While “value” is created for customers and firms, this often comes at the cost of workers´ physical and mental wellbeing.
Platform workers fall outside long-standing definitions of work, workers, managers, and employers and in this context they are not afforded the same legal protections as formal employees. As well as being unprotected, platforms can impact workers´wellbeing as workers find it difficult to understand how decisions about their work are made, which can add stress to the employees.
Wellbeing of Workers in a Digital Future
A key finding in our research relates to how platforms impact tourism and hospitality workers´wellbeing. Wellbeing is more than simply preventing physical harm to workers. It also means making sure they are treated with dignity, autonomy, and feel they have a voice and purpose. Worker well-being is understood as multidimensional, encompassing physical security, psychological health, autonomy and voice, purpose and value alignment, and relational belong. In tourism, it is well known that labour is characterised by precarity, normally marked by unpredictable hours, low wages, physical fatigue and emotional demand. Women, young people, and migrant workers are often the most affected by poor working conditions.
Our findings suggest that platform workers’ interactions with their companies, customers and digital platforms can affect workers’ wellbeing negatively. For example, recent research on the effects of AI-driven human resource systems on hotel employees’ perceptions of wellbeing, found that employees managed by these platforms expressed anxiety, feelings of alienation and a lack of autonomy. Other research shows that platform algorithms that intensify the pace of work can compromise physical wellbeing by increasing the physical and emotional exhaustion of employees. Platforms also depersonalise employees’ interactions among themselves or with customers, leading to workers feeling objectified and disengaged from their work. These impacts vary depending on workers' intersectional characteristics, such as age, gender and migration status.
Platformisation Through a Gender Lens
Platforms and algorithms are not gender neutral. They have emerged from labour markets, organisations and datasets with gendered assumptions embedded, which means they are also shaped by social norms. For example, AI has been criticised as being trained on texts containing inherent gender-bias, such as Siri who was created as subservient female, and this translates into potential gendered selections. Also, AI systems often misunderstand what gender and race are, casting them as isolatable attributes rather than broader systems of power, whereas problems exist in terms of the actual programmers’ inherent gender biases.
Findings suggest that platforms often amplify inequalities and vulnerabilities for women across the workforce, such as exposure to harassment, lack of workplace protections, and algorithmic bias in recruitment and task allocation. We see this in how platforms for gig work are sold as a working opportunity with freedom where women can juggle children and childcare with paid work more flexibly. Meanwhile, in practice, this often involves no provision of social benefits, discrimination, and dependence on platform ratings. Also, tourism and hospitality platforms may be promoting a work ideology in which especially female platform workers learn to normalise fear and accept their precarious, unprotected jobs as ‘meaningful work’.
Applying the Framework in Policy and Practice
Our conceptual framework (Figure 1) maps the relationships between key stakeholders, IT companies, tourism and hospitality businesses, employees, and customers, and illustrates how gender operates in the industry’s platformisation and impacts worker wellbeing.
This emerging framework is not just theoretical, but also a call to action. Platforms increasingly shape how workers see themselves, so that being a ‘good worker’ means always being flexible and responsive. This pushes people to put their own wellbeing at risk, such as ride-hailing drivers urinating in bottles to avoid losing fares, or delivery riders running red lights to meet delivery times. This topic needs urgent attention from those who design and govern these systems.
Policymakers can apply the framework to assess the impact of digital systems on women and other vulnerable populations, while platform designers can use it to create systems that support worker dignity rather than just productivity. For example, since most platforms (eg ride-hailing and food-delivery apps) are not designed with gender in mind, adding more gender-aware elements could make them more inclusive. That includes checking digital systems for gender bias, making it clearer how workers are assigned tasks and evaluated, protecting workers from customer harassment, giving workers a say in how digital platforms are designed, and providing digital skills training, especially for those who have less experience with technology.
About the authors
This paper was developed as part of the FUTOURWORK project, a Horizon Europe initiative focused on social dialogue, digitalisation, wellbeing, and inclusion in the tourism sector.
Fiona Eva Bakas, PhD Tourism is a critical tourism researcher and lecturer with international teaching experience. She has 25 years of varied work experience (corporate and academic), and is currently a tourism lecturer at IGOT, University of Lisbon, Portugal. She is an Equality in Tourism Associate.