Homestay

Homestay (also home stay and home-stay) is a form of hospitality and lodging whereby visitors share a residence with a local of the area to which they are traveling. The length of stay can vary from one night to over a year and can be provided for free (gift economy), in exchange for monetary compensation, in exchange for a stay at the guest's property either simultaneously or at another time (home exchange), or in exchange for housekeeping or work on the host's property (barter economy). Homestays are examples of collaborative consumption and the sharing economy.[1]

For the film, see Homestay (film).
Part of a series on
Homestays
Hospitality exchange services
Hospitality for work
Hospitality for money
Home exchange and others
A homestay in Vietnam
Tibetan Argali Homestay, Tsokar, Ladakh

History

In 1949, Bob Luitweiler founded Servas International as a volunteer-run international nonprofit organization advocating interracial and international peace.[1]

In 1965, John Wilcock set up the Traveler's Directory as a listing of his friends willing to host each other when traveling.[2] In 1988, Joy Lily rescued the organization from imminent shutdown, forming Hospitality Exchange.

In 1966, psychologist Rubén Feldman González created Programo Pasporto for Esperanto speakers in Argentina. In 1974, with the help of Jeanne-Marie Cash, it became Pasporta Servo and published its first membership directory, which listed 40 hosts.

In 1971, Sue Coppard founded WWOOF ("Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms"), a network in which food, lodging, and education is provided to guests in exchange for housekeeping and farmworker services.

In 1977, Presbyterian minister Wayne Smith and U.S. President Jimmy Carter established Friendship Force International, with the mission of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, friendship, and intercultural competence via organized trips involving homestays.

In 1992, Hospex.org was launched online; it later was folded into Hospitality Club,[3] which was created in 2000 by Veit Kühne.

In 1993, the database of Warm Showers, aimed at providing hospitality for touring cyclists, was created by Terry Zmrhal and Geoff Cashmen. In 2005, it was launched as a website by Randy Fay.

In 2003, Snow Leopard Conservancy India Trust, a non-profit organization based in Ladakh, India, pioneered conservation-linked homestays where people trekking in the mountains stay in village homes instead of camping. This brings much-needed additional income to villagers, helping them offset livestock loss to snow leopards.

In 2004, Casey Fenton founded CouchSurfing, which offers free accommodation. In 2011, Couchsurfing, previously a non-profit, was turned into a for-profit corporation.[4][5] Beginning in March 2020, the website charges users a membership fee.

In 2007, the non-profit democratic hospitality network BeWelcome was founded by former Hospitality Club volunteers.[6][7]

In 2008, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk founded Airbnb, where hosts receive monetary payment from guests, paid online in advance, and Airbnb receives commissions from each transaction.[8][9][10]

In 2014, Trustroots was founded by Kasper Souren and Mikael Korpela in Berlin, Germany.[11]

Overview of services

The terms of a homestay are generally worked out by the host and guest in advance and can include items such as the type of lodging, length of stay, housekeeping or work required to be performed, curfews, use of utilities and household facilities, food to be provided, and rules related to smoking, drinking, drugs, and guests.

Homestays offer several advantages, such as exposure to everyday life in another location, the opportunity to live a local's life and experience local culture and traditions, opportunities for cultural diplomacy, friendship, intercultural competence, and foreign language practice, local advice, and a lower carbon footprint compared to other types of lodging; however, they may have restrictions, such as curfews and work requirements, and may not have the same level of comfort, amenities, and privacy as other types of lodging.[12][13][14][15][16][17][18]

A family that hosts a non-family member is a host family. Hosts can also be involved in au pair programs, in which a long-term guest stays with a family who provides accommodation in return for child care assistance and light household duties. Au pairs are treated as part of the family and participate in their day-to-day family routines. Homestays can also be arranged by academic institutions for students studying abroad or participating in student exchange programs.[19] Independent travelers typically arrange homestays via social networking services.[17]

Category Non-profit Unknown For-profit
Hosts do not expect to receive paymentBeWelcome, Pasporta Servo, Servas International, Trustroots, Warm Showers, Welcome To My GardenHospitality ClubCouchSurfing
Hosts receive farm work / choresWWOOFHelpxWorkaway
Hosts receive monetary payment9flats, Airbnb, GuestReady

Innclusive, 9flats, Airbnb and GuestReady are listed as platforms for purchasable homestay.[20] The number of paid homestay hosts on the Chinese mainland reached a total of 400,000 by the end of 2019.[21]

Homestay on farms

Farm stays are a type of a homestay, in which the visitor stays on a working farm. WWOOF, Helpx and Workaway are notable platforms for homestay in exchange for work.[22]

Hospitality exchange services
Part of a series on
Utopias
Mythical and Religious
Utopian fiction
Theoretical
Ideas
Reality related to utopia

Services where hosts do not receive payments are called hospitality exchange services (HospEx).[23][24][25] Hospitality exchange services are basically social network services for the arrangement of accommodation during travel.[26] The relationships on hospitality exchange services are shaped by altruism.[27][28] The conversion of the biggest of hospitality exchange service, CouchSurfing, to a for-profit corporation in 2011 was objected to by many of its members.[29] This was an instance of commodification.[30] CouchSurfing had previously been financed by donations and built using volunteer work.[29][31] Non-profit hospitality exchange services offer trustworthy teams of scientists access to their anonymized data for publication of insights to the benefit of humanity. Before becoming for-profit, CouchSurfing offered four research teams access to its social networking data.[32][33][34][35] In 2015, non-profit hospitality exchange services Bewelcome and Warm Showers also provided their data for public research.[36]

HospEx platforms are related to the cyber-utopianism on the Web in its beginnings and to utopia in general.[30][37] The biggest HospEx platform in 2012, "CouchSurfing appears to fulfil the original utopian promise of the Internet to unite strangers across geographical and cultural divides and to form a global community"[38] CouchSurfing used utopian rhetoric of "better world," "sharing cultures," and of much better access to global flows and networks of all sorts.[39] It was featured as a means to achieve a cosmopolitan utopia.[40] Commodification of CouchSurfing terminated "the existence of a project run as a flourishing commons, a cyber-utopian dream come true; an example of genuine exchange outside and free from the dominant logic of capital, a space highlighting cultural instead of monetary values, understanding instead of commerce. This space still exists, but instead of outside, now within the market."[30]

The divergence between the for-profit and non-profit versions of hospitality exchange has drawn greater attention.[41][42] After CouchSurfing became a for-profit corporation in 2011, some members urged others to join BeWelcome.[43] Many so-called "CS ambassadors," who had become volunteers within CouchSurfing left to BeWelcome and other non-profit platforms because of the change in legal status and insufficient management transparency.[44]

Hospitality Club was an early hospitality exchange platform. In 2015, CouchSurfing is the largest,[7] for profit C Corporation hospitality exchange platform. Warm Showers is a platform for cyclists, while Servas International and Pasporta Servo are platforms for Esperanto speakers.

BeWelcome

BeWelcome (BW) is a non-profit, open-source hospitality exchange service accessible via the BeWelcome website or Android app. The platform is a gift economy; hosts are not allowed to charge for lodging. BeWelcome is operated by BeVolunteer, a nonprofit organization organized as a voluntary association registered in Rennes, Brittany, France, which is composed solely of volunteers. Membership in BeWelcome is motivated by the absence of for-profit pressure, democratic decision making, and a strict privacy policy.[45][36] The site had 180,000 users in 2021, across 216 countries.[46][47]

BeWelcome was formed by members of Hospitality Club who had had a disagreement with its founder.[48][49][50]

CouchSurfing

Couchsurfing is a hospitality exchange service, where guests do not pay for homestays. Members in some developed countries pay a monthly subscription.[51]

Trustroots

Trustroots.org is a non-profit hospitality exchange service featuring “circles” for hitchhikers, cyclists, buskers, train hoppers, vegans and vegetarians, climbers and others.[52][53] The platform is a gift economy — hosts are not supposed to charge for lodging.[54] In 2020, Trustroots had 44,000 members, from 220 countries.[55] [56] Trustroots was founded by Kasper Souren and Mikael Korpela in 2014 in Berlin, Germany.[11]

Warm Showers

Warm Showers is a non-profit hospex platform for travelling cyclists.

See also

References
  1. Koszewska, Julia Maria (2008). Gift, Exchange and Trust: Information (its role, management and access to information) in modern society on the example of free-hospitality networks (Masters thesis). University of Warsaw. 175528 – via Academia.edu.
  2. Kirk, Robert William (1985). You Can Travel Free. Pelican Publishing Company. p. 100. ISBN 9780882894379.
  3. Koszewska, Julia Maria (2008). Gift, Exchange and Trust.
  4. Lapowesky, Issie (29 May 2012). "Couchsurfing Dilemma: Going for Profit". Inc.
  5. Longenecker, Justin G.; Petty, J. William; Palich, Leslie E.; Hoy, Frank (15 January 2016). Small Business Management: Launching & Growing Entrepreneurial Ventures. Cengage. ISBN 9781305405745.
  6. "Not-for-profit Couchsurfing becomes a company (with a conscience)". the Guardian. 2011-08-26. Retrieved 2022-04-18.
  7. Tagiew, Rustam; Ignatov, Dmitry I.; Delhibabu, Radhakrishnan (November 2015). "Hospitality Exchange Services as a Source of Spatial and Social Data?". 2015 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshop (ICDMW): 1125–1130. doi:10.1109/ICDMW.2015.239. Retrieved 20 April 2022.
  8. Roy, Srestha (2 April 2022). "Airbnb Suit Over Host's Spying on Couple Goes to Arbitrator". TechStory. Retrieved 18 April 2022.
  9. "As Airbnb grows, so do cleaning fees". The Hustle. 14 April 2022. Retrieved 18 April 2022.
  10. "10 Jahre Airbnb: Am Anfang war die Luftmatratze". Handelszeitung (in Swiss High German). Retrieved 18 April 2022.
  11. "Trustroots". tracxn.com. Retrieved 19 June 2021.
  12. Prasher, Kalyani (January 7, 2016). "7 Reasons To Choose Homestays Over Hotels On Your Travels". HuffPost.
  13. Green, Molly (January 30, 2016). "How a Homestay Will Make Your Experience Abroad Richer". HuffPost.
  14. "7 Benefits of Living with a Local Host Family". Go Abroad. October 30, 2013.
  15. Andres, Elaine (April 25, 2012). "The Pros and Cons of a Homestay Abroad". Go Overseas.
  16. McDaniel, Kelly; McDaniel, Ryan (January 29, 2016). "Airbnb vs. Hotel: Which is Right For You?". TravelPulse.
  17. "Experience South America And Find The Perfect Homestay". Forbes. November 18, 2014.
  18. Rivers, William P. (1998). "Is Being There Enough? The Effects of Homestay Placements on Language Gain During Study Abroad". Foreign Language Annals. 31 (4): 492–500. doi:10.1111/j.1944-9720.1998.tb00594.x.
  19. Clarke, Alan (June 2014). "Homestay Lodging: The Next Disruption in Travel". Wired.
  20. Wong, Venus. "These Are The Best Alternatives To Airbnb". www.refinery29.com. Retrieved 18 April 2022.
  21. Zhao, Yimin; Chau, Ka Yin; Shen, Huawen; Duan, Xialei; Huang, Shizheng (December 2020). "The influence of tourists' perceived value and demographic characteristics on the homestay industry: A study based on social stratification theory". Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management. 45: 479–485. doi:10.1016/j.jhtm.2020.10.012.
  22. Katsoni, Vicky (2017). "An Investigation into the Sharing Economy Phenomenon in the Greek Tourism Industry in the Accommodation Sector". Turystyka i Rozwój Regionalny. 7 Współczesne problemy rozwoju turystyki: 25–35. doi:10.22630/TIRR.2017.7.3. ISSN 2353-9178. Retrieved 20 April 2022.
  23. Ikkala, Tapio; Lampinen, Airi (15 February 2014). "Defining the price of hospitality: networked hospitality exchange via Airbnb". Proceedings of the Companion Publication of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. CSCW Companion '14. Association for Computing Machinery: 173–176. doi:10.1145/2556420.2556506. ISBN 9781450325417. S2CID 39491376.
  24. Spitz, Tara (2017). The commodification of hospitality An analysis of tourism encounters between interculturality and difference in regard to Turkish couchsurfing experiences (Graduate thesis). Kadir Has University.
  25. Håvardsholm, Angelica Kolstad (June 2016). How does gender influence couchsurfers behaviour intentions based on trust and perceived risk? (Masters thesis). Universitetet i Stavanger. hdl:11250/2413810.
  26. Ronzhyn, Alexander (2020). "Online identity: constructing interpersonal trust and openness through participating in hospitality social networks". The Journal of Education, Culture, and Society. 4 (1): 47–56. doi:10.15503/jecs20131.47.56. ISSN 2081-1640. S2CID 213038501. Retrieved 29 March 2021.
  27. Rosen, Devan; Lafontaine, Pascale Roy; Hendrickson, Blake (1 September 2011). "CouchSurfing: Belonging and trust in a globally cooperative online social network". New Media & Society. 13 (6): 981–998. doi:10.1177/1461444810390341. ISSN 1461-4448. S2CID 14552636. Retrieved 29 March 2021.
  28. "Value co-creation in Couchsurfing - the Indonesian host perspective". www.cabdirect.org. 2020. Retrieved 29 March 2021.
  29. DeAmicis, Carmel (10 January 2015). "How Couchsurfing became the Friendster of the sharing economy". GigaOm.
  30. Schöpf, Simon (2015-01-25). "The Commodification of the Couch: A Dialectical Analysis of Hospitality Exchange Platforms". TripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. 13 (1): 11–34–11–34. doi:10.31269/triplec.v13i1.480. ISSN 1726-670X. Retrieved 26 June 2021.
  31. Vivion, Nick (11 October 2013). "CouchSurfing CEO steps down amid layoffs, uncertainty". Phocuswire.
  32. Victor, Patricia; Cornelis, Chris; De Cock, Martine; Herrera-Viedma, Enrique (2010). "Bilattice-based aggregation operators for gradual trust and distrust". World Scientific Proceedings Series on Computer Engineering and Information Science. World Scientific: 505–510. doi:10.1142/9789814324700_0075. ISBN 978-981-4324-69-4.
  33. Dandekar, Pranav. Analysis & Generative Model for Trust Networks (PDF). Stanford Network Analysis Project (Report). Stanford University. Retrieved 21 January 2020.
  34. Overgoor, Jan; Wulczyn, Ellery; Potts, Christopher (20 May 2012). "Trust Propagation with Mixed-Effects Models". Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.
  35. Lauterbach, Debra; Truong, Hung; Shah, Tanuj; Adamic, Lada (August 2009). "Surfing a Web of Trust: Reputation and Reciprocity on CouchSurfing.com". 2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering. 4: 346–353. doi:10.1109/CSE.2009.345. ISBN 978-1-4244-5334-4. S2CID 12869279.
  36. Tagiew, Rustam; Ignatov, Dmitry. I; Delhibabu, Radhakrishnan (2015). "Hospitality Exchange Services as a Source of Spatial and Social Data?". ICDMW: 1125–1130. doi:10.1109/ICDMW.2015.239. ISBN 978-1-4673-8493-3. S2CID 8196598.
  37. Latja, Piia (2010). Creative Travel - Study of Tourism from a socio-cultural point of view - The Case of CouchSurfing (Masters thesis). University of Tampere. Retrieved 26 June 2021.
  38. Molz, Jennie Germann (2012). Travel Connections: Tourism, Technology, and Togetherness in a Mobile World. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-68285-5. Retrieved 26 June 2021.
  39. Picard, David; Buchberger, Sonja (2014-03-31). Couchsurfing Cosmopolitanisms: Can Tourism Make a Better World?. transcript Verlag. ISBN 978-3-8394-2255-7. Retrieved 26 June 2021.
  40. Chen, De-Jung (March 2018). "Couchsurfing: Performing the travel style through hospitality exchange". Tourist Studies. 18 (1): 105–122. doi:10.1177/1468797617710597. ISSN 1468-7976. PMC 6294175. PMID 30595668.
  41. "Money causes schism in sharing economy". sgpress.ru. 22 May 2019. Retrieved 5 February 2022.
  42. "Paradise lost: The rise and ruin of Couchsurfing.com". nputmag.com. 15 November 2021. Retrieved 5 February 2022.
  43. "A rough ride to profit for CouchSurfing". sfgate.com. 26 November 2014. Retrieved 5 February 2022.
  44. "Managing a non-profit hospitality platform conversion: The case of Couchsurfing.com". Tourism Management Perspectives. 30: 138–146. 2019-04-01. 2019. Retrieved 5 February 2022.
  45. Ossewaarde, Marinus; Reijers, Wessel (21 August 2017). "The illusion of the digital commons: 'False consciousness' in online alternative economies". Organization. 24 (5): 609–628. doi:10.1177/1350508417713217. ISSN 1350-5084. Retrieved 18 February 2022.
  46. "Alternativen zu Hotels und welche Vorzüge sie haben". www.derwesten.de (in German). 21 May 2019. Retrieved 18 February 2022.
  47. "Ditch The Hotels: Stay In Someone's Home On Your Next Vacay". outlooktraveller.com. 28 January 2020. Retrieved 5 February 2022.
  48. Baker, Vicky (18 April 2008). "Going local in Caracas, Venezuela". The Guardian.
  49. Baker, Vicky (26 August 2011). "Budget Travel: Not-for-profit Couchsurfing becomes a company (with a conscience)". The Guardian.
  50. "Tips for Travel Savings in 2014". nytimes.com. 7 January 2014. Retrieved 5 February 2022.
  51. Ferrarese, Marco (24 June 2020). "Pandemic hits 'couchsurfing' travel bug". Nikkei Asian Review.
  52. "The Best Websites For Finding Free Lodging During Your Next Vacation". TravelAwaits. 2021-01-10. Retrieved 19 June 2021.
  53. Ryals, Mitch. "Derailed". Inlander. Retrieved 19 June 2021.
  54. "Suicidal teen learns world isn't a 'big bad place' through travel". South China Morning Post. 2021-04-02. Retrieved 19 June 2021.
  55. "Pandemic hits 'couchsurfing' travel bug". Nikkei Asia. Retrieved 19 June 2021.
  56. ПРОСКУРЯКОВ, Евгений (2021-03-20). "Пять вещей, которые вы покупаете, а могли бы получить бесплатно". kp.ru (in Russian). Retrieved 19 June 2021.
  • Media related to Homestays at Wikimedia Commons
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.