Langbahn Team – Weltmeisterschaft

Hospitality Club

Part of a series on
Homestays
Hospitality exchange services
Hospitality for work
Hospitality for money
Home exchange and others
For other uses of "HC", see HC (disambiguation).
Hospitality Club
Area servedGlobal
OwnerVeit Kühne
Founder(s)Veit Kühne
ProductsHomestay
ServicesSocial networking service
LaunchedJuly 11, 2000; 24 years ago (2000-07-11)
Current statusOffline

Hospitality Club (HC) was a hospitality exchange service (a gift economy network for finding homestays whereby hosts were not allowed to charge for lodging) accessible via a website. HC's specified goals were to facilitate "intercultural understanding ... bringing people together ... travelers and locals".[1]

History

Hospitality Club banner; taken in July 2005 in Monnai, France.

Hospitality Club was founded in July 2000 in Koblenz, by Veit Kühne, who was inspired by a trip to South America.[2][3][4][5] It later incorporated technology from Hospex.org, a similar service.[6]

In 2005, a disagreement between some members of Hospitality Club and its founder led to the foundation of BeWelcome.[7] Many HC members, who became volunteers within Couchsurfing, left HC towards CS because of its missing legal status and insufficient management transparency.[8]

In February 2006, Kühne was working full-time on Hospitality Club.[9] In the spring of 2006, an event took place in Riga with 430 participants from 36 countries.[10]

As of July 2006, the site had 155,000 members.[11] This number grew by around 1,000 new members a week in 2006.[10]

In 2007, Google Trends search volume for hospitalityclub.org started to decline and was overtaken by the search volume for CouchSurfing.[12]

In 2008, HC had more than 400,000 members from 200 countries.[4]

In 2013, HC had more than a half of million members from 200 countries.[13]

By 2017, only one third of members were still active.[3]

By April 2022, the website was completely offline.[14]

Safety measures

Hospitality Club had a reputation system, whereby members left references for others.[10] For added safety, members were encouraged to check each other's passports, although it rarely happened.[4]

References

  1. ^ "The Hospitality Club" – via LiveJournal.
  2. ^ "Netzwerk eines Träumers" [Network of a dreamer]. Der Spiegel. 2 August 2006.
  3. ^ a b Calderara, Jesko (2 August 2017). "Ein umstrittenes Geschäftsmodell" [A controversial business model]. St. Galler Tagblatt (in Swiss High German).
  4. ^ a b c Baker, Vicky (27 June 2008). "Top 10 hospitality travel sites". The Guardian.
  5. ^ Rodemann, Julian (29 March 2016). "Couchsurfing mit Haken" [Couchsurfing with a hook]. Die Welt.
  6. ^ "Welcome to HOSPEXerver". Hospex.org.
  7. ^ Baker, Vicky (18 April 2008). "Going local in Caracas, Venezuela". The Guardian.
  8. ^ o'Regan, Michael; Choe, Jaeyeon (2019-04-01). "Managing a non-profit hospitality platform conversion: The case of Couchsurfing.com" (PDF). Tourism Management Perspectives. 30: 138–146. doi:10.1016/j.tmp.2019.02.018. ISSN 2211-9736. S2CID 150755845. Retrieved 28 May 2021.
  9. ^ Thomas, Amelia (28 February 2006). "Backstory: Extreme vacation". Christian Science Monitor.
  10. ^ a b c "Freunde in der Fremde" [Friends abroad]. Stern (in German). 27 January 2006.
  11. ^ Stellin, Susan (July 9, 2006). "Go to Strangers (and They'll Come to You)". The New York Times.
  12. ^ Rustam Tagiew; Dmitry I. Ignatov; Radhakrishnan Delhibabu (2015). Hospitality Exchange Services as a Source of Spatial and Social Data?. (IEEE) International Conference on Data Mining Workshop (ICDMW). Atlantic City. pp. 1125–1130. doi:10.1109/ICDMW.2015.239.
  13. ^ Локша, Анна Владимировна (2013). "О необходимости повышения социальной составляющей молодежного туризма в России". Телескоп: Журнал Социологических И Маркетинговых Исследований (in Russian) (5). ISSN 1994-3776.
  14. ^ "Der Hospitality Club – ein Nachruf" [The Hospitality Club – an obituary]. unsere-zeitung.at (in Austrian German). 24 August 2022.
Quelle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitality_Club