| 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. HC's specified goals were to facilitate "intercultural understanding ... bringing people together ... travelers and locals".[1]
Hospitality Club was founded in July 2000 in Koblenz, by Veit Kühne, who was inspired by a trip to South America.[2] [3] [4] It later incorporated technology from Hospex.org, a similar service.[5]
In 2005, a disagreement between some members of Hospitality Club and its founder led to the foundation of BeWelcome.[6] Many HC members, who became volunteers within Couchsurfing, left HC towards CS because of its missing legal status and insufficient management transparency.[7]
In February 2006, Kühne was working full-time on Hospitality Club.[8] In the spring of 2006, an event took place in Riga with 430 participants from 36 countries.
As of July 2006, the site had 155,000 members.[9] This number grew by around 1,000 new members a week in 2006.[10]
In 2007, Google Trends search volume for hospitalityclub.org started to decline and was overtaken by the search volume for CouchSurfing.[11]
In 2008, HC had more than 400,000 members from 200 countries.[3]
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]
By April 2022, the website was completely offline.[14]
Hospitality Club had a reputation system, whereby members left references for others.[10] For added safety, members were encouraged to check each other's passports, although it rarely happened.[3]