Hospitality Club | |
Area Served: | Global |
Owner: | Veit Kühne |
Founder: | Veit Kühne |
Products: | Homestay |
Services: | Social networking service |
Current Status: | Offline |
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.
The first hospitality exchange service based on internet technology was Hospex.org in 1992 from Poland, which was later folded to Hospitality Club.[1] [2] Hospitality Club was founded in July 2000 in Koblenz, by Veit Kühne.[3] [4]
In 2005, a disagreement between some members of Hospitality Club and its founder led to the foundation of BeWelcome.[5] Many HC members, who became distinguished volunteers within Couchsurfing (so-called CS ambassadors), left HC towards CS because of its missing legal status and insufficient management transparency.[6]
In February 2006, Kühne was working full-time on Hospitality Club.[7] 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.[8] This number grew by around 1,000 new members a week in 2006.[9]
In 2007, Google Trends search volume for hospitalityclub.org started to decline and was overtaken by the search volume for CouchSurfing.[10] In 2007, HC's specified goals have been to facilitate "intercultural understanding ... bringing people together ... travelers and locals".[11]
In 2008, HC had more than 400,000 members from 200 countries.[3]
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.[12]
By 2017, only one third of members were still active.[13]
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.[14]
Hospitality Club had a reputation system, whereby members left references for others.[9] For added safety, members were encouraged to check each other's passports, although it rarely happened.[3]