Hospitality Club

Hospitality Club

An unofficial logo represents "two people with arms over each other's shoulders in friendship and waving for you to join them" in the shape of the letters "HC". Designed in 2004 by Canadian Glenn Gobuyan in a style reminiscent of cave paintings to illustrate that "hospitality is as old as humanity."
Founded 2000
Founder Veit Kühne
Focus Hospitality exchange, international understanding, networking
Location
Area served
Global
Method Hospitality service
Slogan ...bringing people together!
Website www.hospitalityclub.org

The Hospitality Club is an international, Internet-based hospitality service of approximately 707,000 members in 231 countries[1] Its members use the website HospitalityClub.org to coordinate accommodation and other services, such as guiding or regaling travelers. Hospitality Club is currently the second largest such hospitality network.

History

Hospitality Club was founded by Veit Kühne in 2000 with the help of friends and family[2] as a general-purpose Internet-based hospitality exchange organization. The organization, open to anybody, followed from a similar network organized by Veit Kühne exclusively for members of the student exchange organization AFS. The concept for Hospitality Club was inspired by the SIGHT hospitality network of Mensa and it is the successor of Hospex, the first Internet based hospitality exchange network, established in 1992 and with which it joined forces in 2005.[3] Membership has since increased dramatically.

Since July 2012, Veit Kühne has a partnership with Airbnb and suggests the users of the website to go there.

Entrance to the Hospitality Club camp in Monnai, France. Banner reads: hospitality throughout the world

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 traveler may find possible hosts and contact them through the website. No money is involved — guests and hosts do not pay each other. 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 meeting, the host and guest may comment about each other. This provides a means to establish reputation which is the main security measure. 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.

Organization and policies

The club is based on the work of hundreds of volunteers around the world. The motivation behind it is the idea that bringing people together and fostering international friendships will increase inter cultural understanding and strengthen peace. It is one of the largest hospitality networks, and there is a mission to find 1,000,000 friendly people.

The policy of the club explicitly forbids alternative uses, such as dating, job-seeking, commercial use, and website promotions.[4] In order to protect members' mailboxes from spam and to keep trust in the network at high levels a volunteer team scans the messages being sent across the site. Members may also opt out of this service and receive all messages directly.

Website analysis

There is no registered company behind the website, and the domain name is directly registered to the founder of the site, Veit Kühne,[5] who in 2006 was working full-time on Hospitality Club.[6] The site contains advertising from Google's AdSense. 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.[7]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Based on statistics from Hospitality Club 'Main Menu' page visible for logged-in members only; retrieved on January 17, 2014.
  2. ↑ Hospitality Club About us page HospitalityClub.org
  3. ↑ "HOSPEXerver". Retrieved 1 November 2014.
  4. ↑ Stop Spam in the Hospitality Club
  5. ↑ Registration of hospitalityclub.org from WHOIS
  6. ↑ Christian Science Monitor: Backstory: Extreme vacation (at Christian Science Monitor)
  7. ↑ "Hospitality Club Forum rules". Retrieved 1 November 2014.
Wikinews has related news: Hospitality exchange organisation grows to 100,000 members
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Hospitality Club.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 9/17/2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.