Hospitality service
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The concept of Hospitality Services, also known as “accommodation sharing”, “hospitality exchange”, and “home stay networks”, refers to centrally organized social networks of individuals who trade accommodation without monetary exchange. While this conceptualization could also include house swapping or even time share plans, it has come to be associated mostly with travelers and tourists staying with one another free of charge. Since the 1990s, these services have increasingly moved away from using printed catalogues and phone trees to connect users towards Internet websites to store info in databases. They have grown exponentially since 2000 and today it is estimated that well over 100,000 people are registered users of these networks. These vary in operational structure, place different emphasis on graphical vs. textual formatting, and cater disproportionately to specific geographic regions. They include:
- Hospitality Club [1] -- currently the largest community
- CouchSurfing [2]
- GlobalFreeloaders [3]
- Servas International [4] - human rights and global peace oriented
- Pasporta Servo [5]- for Esperanto speakers
- TravelHoo [6] - a smaller international service
- Agritourism [7]
- Homeshare International, charity organisation providing exchange of housing for help in the home
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History
In 1949, Bob Luitweiler founded the first hospitality service called Servas Open Doors as a cross national, non-profit, volunteer run organization advocating interracial and international peace. The next earliest began in 1965 when John Wilcock set up the Traveler's Directory, originally as a listing of his mutual friends willing to host each other when traveling. This later became the Hospitality Exchange in 1988 when Joy Lily rescued the organization from imminent demise. Hospitality Club is the direct successor Hospex, the first Internet-based service, operating out of Poland since 1992. Just as all the individual services have their own individual creation stories and organizational histories (often including demise and resurrection), many also have specific niche markets that they cater to including students, activists, religious pilgrims, and even occupational groups like police officers. However, the trend in recent years points to a greater consolidation of users in networks without an overt group, value, or lifestyle affiliation.
How They Work
In essence, these systems employ fundamental reciprocity – users gain access to other users’ information only by posting their own. Requisite fields normally include name and contact information, though newer services encourage users to include more detailed personal material, including likes and dislikes, hopes and dreams, and even photographs. Of course, more information included tends to improve the chances that someone will find them trustworthy enough to host or stay with while traveling. It is very much akin to today's online dating services.
Benefits
Monetary Savings
Staying in private homes means that travelers can save lots of money on accommodation that they would usually be spending on hotels or hostels. Used over a long period of time (2 to 4 weeks), this strategy can cut overall travel budgets in half. These savings can then be passed on towards more generously patronizing local establishments or simply staying abroad for longer periods of time, which is said to make the tourist experience significantly more authentic.
Local Economic Sustainability
Many tourist vacations today are sold in package form, often including flights, hotels, rental cars, sightseeing tours, and coupons for chain restaurants and bars. While this makes purchasing more convenient, it also puts more money in the hands of large multinational corporations exploiting the synergy strategy of marketing their products in the context of their subsidiary companies operating in other markets. Many years ago, this might have been termed collusion, today, it is the norm. This comes at the expense of locally owned independent businesses. Accommodation sharing helps to break apart this monopoly and hopefully redirects some of the tourist revenue back to the local or national economy.
Ecological Sustainability
While this is especially important in more rural travel venues where hotels are often built in very picturesque, though fragile environments, every night stayed at a local’s home means that much less demand for such hotel rooms. Also, if accommodation sharing does in fact increase the length of average stays, it may reduce the amount of trips to and from different locations and back home again, thus reducing the overall fuel expenditures in the process.
Local Contact
Ostensibly, one of the primary reasons we travel is to experience what life is like for people living in other countries. Making interpersonal connections and fostering understanding of different cultures may in the long run also be important to international relations. However, even in our increasingly globalized world supposedly rife with diversity, in many popular travel destinations we find tourists milling around “tourist enclaves” where the companies they patronize back home have set up shop to cater to their desires while they are abroad. Sociologist George Ritzer has referred to this phenomenon as the "McDonaldisation of society" and the more recently, the "globalization of nothing". The location of hotels near these centers only fosters more convenient envelopment of the tourist dollar. During hospitality exchanges, hosts want to show off their local knowledge and exciting “off the map” venues. Not only will travelers get a distinctly different experience, but they will also get a feel for the everyday lives of local residents.
Reciprocity
These systems foster richer and more convenient travel experiences not so much on the premise of altruism, but on the basis of social exchange theory. Implicit in the agreement to host travelers is the ability to ask to be hosted by them in the future. If one enjoys having interesting guests in their home, this works out well for both parties. It works comparatively better if you are visited by travelers from a locale you find particularly attractive. Thus, hosting someone from New York City in Gainesville, FL seems to be an unbelievable opportunity. Moreover, if you are a Westerner visiting someone in a developing nation, your stay might be the only way that this individual or family could afford a trip to a rich nation. This may mean more than just a relaxing vacation for such disadvantaged parties.
Authenticity and Adventure
Tourism has always searched for these two qualities, but much like Midas and his golden touch, the reach of tourism has to a large extent destroyed the opportunity to encounter them in most places. Unluckily, the experience has been thoroughly commodified by everyone who wanted to secure their opportunity to make a buck in the process. Accommodation sharing offers a way out of this bind and a viable alternative to having one’s desires manipulated by corporate conglomerates who never had the best interests of the place or the people foremost in their minds.
Drawbacks
Lack of Guarantee
There is no contractual agreement between users in these systems. Reservations are made, but if they are for some reason broken, there is no higher authority to which one could plead for a refund or other compensation. The only repercussion will be the poor rating you give that user and your only consolation will be that your warning will deter others from visiting or hosting them. For those who feel insecure unless their travel arrangements are written in stone before departure, this system will not be comforting.
Potential Interpersonal Conflict or Awkwardness
There is a chance that guest and host will not get along. Perhaps there will be scheduling or ideological conflicts. Maybe you will find that hosts or visitors have misrepresented themselves. Perhaps the experience will not live up to your expectations. Intense interpersonal communications in advance and a flexibility once you have arrived is your best bet. These experiences require additional planning and courtesy towards the demands of your host. Thus, your living conditions, length of stay, and overall experience will be circumscribed by the living conditions you enter into.
Digital Divide and Demographic Segregation
The average user is a young white male who speaks English and lives in a developed nation. (see couchsurfing.com statistics [8]) While there are many users who do not fit this description, the more different they are, the less likely they will be involved. This is especially true for persons living in the developing world who likely do not have easy access to the fundamental prerequisite for using these services: computers and the Internet. Thus, the sample population found in searches of these databases are really much less diverse than a geographical representation of worldwide users might suggest.
Security
Everyone realizes there is a distinct possibility that someone will abuse the system and that innocent users (especially women) will get hurt. All services include disclaimers that require users to waive their rights to hold anyone but themselves responsible for any harm that may come to them in using the system. They advise that the best defense mechanism is to only involve oneself with users that have extensive personal information and interpersonal networks within the system that have been verified by others. It does seem entirely plausible that someone clever and patient enough might be able to invent an entire group of complex user identities and build histories convincing enough to fool even more cautious patrons. Still, the difference between these systems and the other social networking platforms popular nowadays on the web (MySpace, Tribe, Orkut, LiveJournal, Ebay) is that any agreement reached hrough the accommodation sharing medium is contingent on actually meeting other people face-to-face. Other web scams are easier because interpersonal interactions rely so much on putative identities that are never actually verified in the real world. However, this does not diminish the greater risk to physical well being that this kind of traveling by definition must entertain. The best advice is to meet unknown persons in public spaces first, and try to meet some of their acquaintances in person before agreeing to a hospitality exchange.
Potential as a charitable service
The concept
At present, the hospitality exchange phenomena is very much enclosed within the purview of highly advantaged populations in the global North. However, it would seem that the kind of people who are at present most interested in using this system: young, educated, idealistic, trusting, liberal, and international in nature, would be very much inclined to convert at least some of their tourist time to volunteering overseas in a worthy cause.
Let's just say group of Americans students from Austin, Texas wanted to drive across the U.S.-Mexico border, travel for a couple of months on their summer break in Central America, and do some good works along the way. If they went to the Internet to try and find some locations conducive for volunteers in their position, they would be summarily disappointed. There are options available for volunteers, but they remain highly formalized. In fact, most programs require that you pay a fairly large nonrefundable fee (often exceeding $300) up front and stay for an extended period (at least ten days or so). Furthermore, they require extensive documentation and institutional references. These restrictions would likely deter these students from pursuing volunteer efforts at all and they would likely fall back onto the hosteling/tourist circuit exclusively. There are many worthy causes to be found (educational, environmental, organizational, structural), especially in poor nations, but they aren't well publicized outside of the local community in which they take place.
A potential issue could be that the training required for many volunteer opportunities is extensive, but there are certainly jobs that require far less. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) may be reluctant to involve short term, non-paying volunteers because they have more structured continuous programs requiring many extraneous adminstrators who must receive a salary. However, there are many needs in poor countries that cannot be filled by NGOs and their programs. This is especially true with short term projects. Many of these services are organized by local churches, which may attract some faith-based volunteers from abroad, but may also put off potential non-religious volunteers. Accommodation sharing could connect truly grassroots community development projects with potential volunteers from the developed world. During their stay, they could lend skilled and unskilled labor and reap the benefits of a truly rewarding relationship with local peoples in need.
What needs to be done
An action research approach will be used to test the feasibility of integrating accommodation sharing with community-based development projects. The first step would be to choose and screen different potential programs with different environments, requirements, and themes. It would be necessary to sample a diverse array of settings in order to determine how differences would affect the overall experience of hosts, volunteers, and the projects themselves. This demostration project would be undertaken with the support of one accommodation sharing site which would create a special link on their home page with an explanation of the project and links to the profiles of different host organizers. Volunteers would be screened through the same accommodation sharing format as the general user population. The organizers would have full discretion on who to invite, but the process they use to select invitees would be recorded. Perhaps it would be possible to line up a potential "volunteer circuit" through multiple programs in the region.
The variables in programs would include: wealth of nation and locale, rural vs. urban settings, nature of work performed, its purpose and ideological justification, size of project, skills and funding of organizers, skills and demographic background of volunteers, linguistic conditions, living conditions for volunteers, and the duration of their stay. The data collection would be decentralized, having no lead researcher in charge at specific sites. Participant observation and personal journaling would comprise the primary methods for gathering information about ongoing activities. The local organizers and volunteers would both be required to keep these kinds of detailed records of their experiences, which they would duly record each evening on an individual basis. In addition, all participants and organizers would be asked to write an autoethnography about themselves and their expectations before participating in the program and the conclusions they came to about their experiences after they had left. These materials would then be sent to a team of qualitative data analysts who would code the information for specific themes and call participants to discuss/clarify their experiences in a debriefing session. When emerging themes reached a near saturation point, their analysis would inform an in-progress research report that would be shared with organizers at the specific sites. Furthermore, this information would then lead into face to face interviews with organizers/participants and on site focus groups including both groups.
When all programs had reached completion, the data would be compiled into a comprehensive report assessing their benefits and shortcomings of the programs along with concrete policy proposals for the future. This information would be first distributed to the organizers, who would be given the opportunity to review and comment. These suggestions would be taken into account in the final version which would then be made fully public and translated on the Internet.
