The World Cup 2014 hasn't been great for Brazil -- in many ways. But with so many visitors flooding into the country, and an internet-savvy Latin American population, hospitality has become a big force for change in the last month in Brazil, particularly for small-time room rental through the popular lodging app Airbnb.

Even before kickoff of the World Cup, as we previously reported, Brazil was seeing an influx of Airbnb usage, with Brazil becoming the top country in the world for the app. Airbnb, for the uninitiated, is a website and mobile app that provides a marketplace that connects hosts and travelers, enabling entrepreneurial individuals to essentially turn their extra space into a small-time bed and breakfast.

Airbnb: The "Largest Hospitality Company" During World Cup

In June, a survey compiled by GlobalWebIndex found Latin America to be popular among users of Airbnb-style platforms, with 30 percent of Internet users aged 16-64 responding that they'd most likely use Airbnb for renting rooms in Latin America. The same survey found that 40 percent of Airbnb users were using the service this Spring, specifically to find a place to stay in Brazil.

Aided by the influx of nearly 600,000 tourists the World Cup has brought, along with expensive and hard-to-find hotel accommodations in many of Brazil's World Cup cities due to poor planning and preparation, Airbnb's business has skyrocketed in the country, even in the favelas -- the so-called urban "slums" or low-income barrios that sprawl up Rio de Janeiro's hillsides.

In fact (via SF Weekly blogger Rachel Swan), just as the World Cup was getting underway, Airbnb's Global Head of Hospitality and Strategy, Chip Conley, excitedly tweeted that, based on the number of individual Airbnb listings, the company had technically become Brazil's largest hospitality company.

Airbnb Visitors, Favelas, and the Double-Edged Sword of Gentrification 

Ever since the Brazilian crime drama "City of God" -- a gritty, violent, and fascinating film set in Rio's titular Cidade de Deus favela -- became a critically acclaimed, worldwide hit film, Brazil's favelas have been painted with a broad, and sometimes overblown, image of being dangerous places. Airbnb entrepreneurs in Brazil are showing visitors that favelas, while cheap to stay in and certainly an authentic local experience, are not all that scary.

Fast Company's senior editor Ariel Schwartz, for example, stayed in Rio's largest favela (Rocinha) for $38 per night through a homestay service called The Favela Experience. She described how basic amenities and services were there in the community she visited -- bars, restaurants, medical services, Internet, water, sewage, and electricity -- though the utilities were not "always reliable."

And she found her experience to be "relatively safe," considering that even wealthier, touristy parts of Rio de Janeiro, like Copacabana, can still occasionally be sites of street violence or riots. "I never feared for my safety in Rochina," remarked Schwartz, "though I was just there for a day." She later added, "The reality is that Rio is not a particularly safe city in general, and even tourists staying in $300 per night hotel rooms by the beach need to be just as wary as those staying in places like Rocinha and Vidigal."

Run by Elliot Rosenberg -- an ex-pat Los Angeleno entrepreneur who leverages favela residents with basic English skills to rent out their spare rooms for a cut of the profits -- The Favela Experience and other companies using the Airbnb service or business model are opening up favelas for true cultural exchange between residents and tourists.

And through hosting, even at such relatively cheap rates, favela residents who are otherwise left out of the booming month-long FIFA World Cup economy have a chance to make pretty good money. One favela resident that stayed at his girlfriend's mother's house and booked both rooms of his favela apartment completely throughout the World Cup expects to make almost $2,000 by the end of the tournament.

But of course the influx of money and tourism could lead to a downside for poor residents of Rio's self-made urban communities. As Rachel Swan noted, the Airbnb phenomenon has been one of many forces amplifying the gentrification and affordable-housing crisis in San Francisco, since it encourages landlords to displace permanent rental residents with higher paying, higher turnover-rate vacationers and visitors.

And in Rio's favelas, the influx of tourists, well-moneyed foreign entrepreneurs, increased investment in real estate, and the Brazilian government's controversial "pacification" efforts to eradicate gangs, drug trafficking, and essentially occupy favelas with highly trained and heavily equipped police units, could conspire to out-price long term residents.

When the neighborhood gets more expensive, rents go up, and those who can't afford it must find a new place to live -- which could mean an influx of poorer Brazilians into "unpacified," less-developed, and potentially much more dangerous barrios, essentially restarting Brazil's decades-long cycle of poverty, crime, violence, and eventual gentrification in new favelas.

Most reports of gentrification in favelas brought on by Brazil's entry into hosting world events have been mostly positive, though sometimes bizarre, as radical economic change often brings about uncanny juxtapositions and paradoxes: like the NPR report of a Sushi restaurant's success in Rio's Vidigal favela; Vocativ's visit to Bar do Alto in the hillside favela of Bibilônia, which features panoramic views of Copacabana beach from high above, along with flat-screen TVs constantly playing the World Cup for buzzed tourists; or the very existence of the term "favela chic."

The FIFA World Cup 2014 and the upcoming 2016 Rio Olympics guarantees that, for Brazil's well-positioned professional class, business is, and will continue to be, booming. But with Airbnb as tourists' gateway to some of Rio's once-inaccessible, fearsome favelas, it looks like that boom is slowly climbing up the hills from its epicenter at Maracanã Stadium.

 

For more stories like this, follow us on Twitter!