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The purpose of this paper is to analyse the disruption potential on the daily life of Barcelona’s residents of HolaPlace, a new peer-to-peer (P2P) marketplace for terraces and rooftops. Specifically, it describes its listings’ characteristics and examines their geographical overlapping with signs of tourism-related disruption on residents’ quality of life.

Available data of the listings in this P2P platform has been scraped in November 2019. This data has been combined with two other sources of information that provide information on the tourism intensity in the different neighbourhoods of the city. The obtained information has been examined using quantitative and qualitative techniques.

P2P rooftops and terraces tend to be located in the same neighbourhoods that were already experiencing a high concentration of tourism activity. Moreover, the identified characteristics of the listings suggest that the rental of these terraces and rooftops might impact on the daily life of the residents.

This study has only examined the offer of P2P terraces and rooftops in Barcelona. Further studies should also take into account how this business model affects other cities, and how it impacts on residents.

The conducted analysis highlights the importance of a proactive regulation of this new P2P phenomenon that anticipates the potential socials costs on the daily life of residents.

The rental of terraces and rooftops in a P2P fashion is a novel phenomenon and, consequently, it has not been previously studied from an academic point of view.

This study aims to propose and estimate the urban tourism performance index (UTPI), an index that can measure and track the month-by-month tourism performance on main tourism cities since the initial outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The UTPI is estimated for the following urban destinations: Bangkok, Paris, London, Dubai, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, New York, Istanbul, Tokyo, Seoul, Osaka, Phuket, Milan, Barcelona, Bali and Hong Kong.

Monthly based data measuring the tourism industry’s performance for these urban destinations has been collected. This data includes airlines’ and hotels’ performance, as well as potential tourists’ online searches. The obtained data has been combined using a principal component analysis, generating the UTPI.

The UTPI shows that all urban areas analyzed in this study experienced a devastating negative impact because of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. However, the tourism recovery evolution follows heterogeneous patterns.

The proposed index can be estimated using additional variables. Moreover, the index is only estimated for 16 tourism cities. Future studies can reproduce the methodology by incorporating further variables and amplifying the geographical coverage.

The UTPI might be useful for researchers and policymakers interested in using a measure of tourism performance during the COVID-19 pandemic in some of the most important urban destinations. Likewise, the UTPI index may serve as a suitable aggregated measure of tourism performance in a post-COVID-19 era or to monitor tourism during future crises.

This study analyzes the tourism performance during the COVID-19 pandemic from an urban perspective.