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Hospitality Club
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Hospitality Club is an international, Internet-based hospitality service of over 260,000 members. Its members use the website HospitalityClub.org to coordinate accommodation and other services, such as guiding or regaling travelers. Hospitality Club is currently the largest such hospitality network.
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Hospitality Club was founded by Veit and Kjell Kühne in 2000 as a general-purpose Internet-based hospitality exchange organization. This organization, open to anybody, followed from a similar network organized by Veit Kühne only for members of the student exchange organization AFS. The general concept was inspired by the SIGHT hospitality network of Mensa.
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 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. 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.
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 the largest hospitality network, and there is a mission to find 1,000,000 friendly people.
There is no registered organization behind the website in Germany or other countries, and the domain name is directly registered to the founder of the site, Veit Kühne. [1], who is working full time on Hospitality Club [2].
As for financial 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. [3] 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. 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. [4]
- ^ Registration of hospitalityclub.org from WHOIS.
- ^ Christian Science Monitor: Backstory: Extreme vacation (at Christian Science Monitor)
- ^ Stop Spam in the Hospitality Club
- ^ Hospitality Club Forum rules
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