Difference between revisions of "Hospitality Club"

Revision as of 14:06, 27 June 2006

The Hospitality Club is an international, Internet-based hospitality service of approximately 140,000 members. Its members use the website HospitalityClub.org to coordinate accommodation and other services, such as guiding or regaling travellers. Hospitality Club is currently the largest such hospitality network.

History

Hospitality Club was founded by Veit Kühne in 2000 as a general-purpose Internet-based hospitality exchange organization. This organization, open to anybody, followed from a similar network organized by Kühne only for members of the student exchange organization AFS. The general concept was inspired by the SIGHT hospitality network of Mensa.

The Hospitality Club had 100,000 members in January 2006 (See: Hospitality Club - frontpage), and from various indications on user profiles it can be estimated the number of members actually exchanging hospitality in real-life is in the order of tens of thousands.

Functioning

Membership in the organization is free and is obtained simply by registering on the website. The core activity of the organization is exchange of accommodation. Acting as a host, a member offers the possibility of accommodation at his leisure. As a guest, a traveller may find possible hosts and contact them through the website. No money is involved — guests and hosts do not pay each other.

Entrance to the HC camp in Monnai, France. Banner reads: "hospitality throughout the world"

The duration of the stay, whether food is provided for free, for a fee or not at all, and all other conditions are agreed on beforehand to the convenience of both parties.

After using the service, the host and guest may comment about each other. This provides a means to establish reputation, which is the main security measure. However, normally members with bad comments aren't deleted. For full authentication, users have to provide their real identity, which is screened by volunteers, and protected against changes.

Apart from accommodation, members exchange other forms of hospitality, such as guiding visitors or providing travel-related advice. There are also wiki-like Travel Guide sections and forums where members may seek partners for travels, hitchhiking etc.

Volunteers within the club often arrange meetings or camps which are events that last several days that bring people together.

User Growth, Jul 2000 - Apr 2006. Data since Dec 2004 sampled daily. Data prior to Dec 2004 based on approximations published by the Hospitality Club.

Organization

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The club is based on the work of hundreds of volunteers around the world. Claimed motivation of the founding father is the idea that bringing people together and fostering international friendships will increase intercultural understanding and strengthen peace. It is the largest hospitality network, and there is a mission to find 1,000,000 friendly people.

There is no registered organisation behind the website in Germany or other countries, and the domain name is directly registered to the founder of the site, Veit Kühne. (See: Registration of hospitalityclub.org from WHOIS), who is working full time on Hospitality Club (See: Christian Science Monitor: Backstory: Extreme vacation, at Christian Science Monitor).

As for sustainability, the site contains advertising in the form of Google's AdSense.

The policy of the organization explicitly forbids alternative uses, such as dating, job-seeking, commercial use, and website promotions. (See: Stop Spam in the Hospitality Club) In order to prevent spam and keep trust in the network at high levels, a volunteer team scans the messages being sent across the site to protect members' mailboxes from spam. The website includes a Forum with certain rules - for example it is forbidden to post personal data of other members, and volunteers prefer not to discuss the organization's strategy on the forum, but encourage members to contact them directly. (See: Hospitality Club Forum rules)

References

• Detailed Volunteer Information

External links

• Hospitality Club website
• Hospitality exchange organisation grows to 100,000 members at Wikinews