Hospitality Club (HC) was a

hospitality exchange service Social networking services where hosts do not receive payments are called hospitality exchange services (HospEx). The relationships on hospitality exchange services are shaped by altruism and are related to the cyber-utopianism on the Web in its ...

(a gift economy network for finding

homestay Homestay (also home stay and home-stay) is a form of hospitality and lodging whereby visitors share a residence with a local of the area (host) to which they are traveling. The length of stay can vary from one night to over a year and can be p ...

s whereby hosts were not allowed to charge for lodging) accessible via a website.

History

The first hospitality exchange service based on internet technology was Hospex.org in 1992 from Poland, which was later folded to Hospitality Club. Hospitality Club was founded in July 2000 in Koblenz, by Veit Kühne. In 2005, a disagreement between some members of Hospitality Club and its founder led to the foundation of BeWelcome. Many HC members, who became distinguished volunteers within

Couchsurfing CouchSurfing is a hospitality exchange service by which users can request homestays or interact with other people who are interested in travel. It is accessible via a website and mobile app. It uses a subscription business model, and while ho ...

(so-called ''CS ambassadors''), left HC towards CS because of its missing legal status and insufficient management transparency. In February 2006, Kühne was working full-time on Hospitality Club. In the spring of 2006, the hitherto biggest HC-Party took place in Riga counting 430 participants from 36 countries. As of July 2006, the site had 155,000 members. This number grew by around 1,000 new members a week in 2006. In 2007,

Google Trends Google Trends is a website by Google that analyzes the popularity of top web search query, search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. The website uses graphs to compare the search volume of different queries over time. ...

search volume for hospitalityclub.org started to decline and was overtaken by the search volume for

CouchSurfing CouchSurfing is a hospitality exchange service by which users can request homestays or interact with other people who are interested in travel. It is accessible via a website and mobile app. It uses a subscription business model, and while ho ...

. In 2007, HC's specified goals have been to facilitate ''"intercultural understanding ... bringing people together ... travelers and locals"''. In 2008, HC had more than 400,000 members from 200 countries. In 2012, HC made a partnership with AirBnB, inviting its members to join AirBnB. In 2013, HC had more than a half of million members from 200 countries. By 2017, only one third of members were still active. Maintenance of the portal stalled in 2019, since early 2021 Hospitality Club was unusable, since April 2022 it is not possible to access the website.

Safety measures

Hospitality Club had a

reputation system Reputation systems are programs or algorithms that allow users to rate each other in online communities in order to build trust through reputation. Some common uses of these systems can be found on E-commerce websites such as eBay, Amazon.com, ...

, whereby members left references for others. For added safety, members were encouraged to check each other's passports, although it rarely happened.

References

External links

A podcast about hospitality club
on German RTL {{Sharing economy Hospitality exchange services German social networking websites