BeWelcome

BeWelcome is a social networking service accessible via a website used to arrange homestays and hospitality. The platform is a gift economy; hosts are not allowed to charge for lodging.

For the community in Mississippi, see Bewelcome, Mississippi.
BeWelcome
Available in41 languages
HeadquartersRennes
Area servedGlobal
OwnerBeVolunteer
ProductsHomestay
ServicesSocial networking service
URLwww.bewelcome.org
Alexa rank527,698 (As of 13 April 2020)[1]
Users125,500, of which approximately 50 login per day and 10% have logged in within the last 12 months[2]
LaunchedFebruary 2007 (2007-02)

BeWelcome is operated by BeVolunteer, a nonprofit organization organized as a voluntary association registered in Rennes, Brittany, France, which is composed solely of volunteers. The software behind the website, the BW-rox platform, is free and open-source software.[3]

The site has about 125,500 users, approximately 50 login per day, and 10% have logged in 12 months.[4]

History

The idea for the website came in 2005 after members of Hospitality Club had a disagreement with its founder.[5]

The website was launched in February 2007.[6][7]

After CouchSurfing became a for-profit corporation in 2011, some members urged others to join BeWelcome.[8]

In May 2019, a redesigned website was launched.[9]

Homestay requests

BeWelcome grants trustworthy teams of scientists access to its anonymized data for publication of insights to the benefit of humanity. In 2015, an analysis of 97,915 homestay requests from BeWelcome and 285,444 homestay requests from Warm Showers showed general regularity — the less time is spent on writing a homestay request, the lower is the probability of success. Since both networks are shaped by altruism, low-effort communication, aka 'copy and paste requests', evidently sends the wrong signal.[10]

References
  1. "Alexa Internet: BeWelcome.org". Alexa Internet.
  2. "About BeWelcome: Statistics". BeWelcome.
  3. "About BeWelcome". BeWelcome.
  4. "BeWelcome Stats". BeWelcome.
  5. Baker, Vicky (18 April 2008). "Going local in Caracas, Venezuela". The Guardian.
  6. Baker, Vicky (26 August 2011). "Budget Travel: Not-for-profit Couchsurfing becomes a company (with a conscience)". The Guardian.
  7. Kugel, Seth (7 January 2014). "Tips for Travel Savings in 2014". The New York Times.
  8. Brown, Kristen V. (26 November 2014). "A rough ride to profit for CouchSurfing". San Francisco Chronicle.
  9. "BeWelcome Announces Launch of Platform Redesign" (Press release). May 2, 2019.
  10. Tagiew, Rustam; Ignatov, Dmitry I.; Delhibabu, Radhakrishnan (2015). Economics of Internet-Based Hospitality Exchange. (IEEE/WIC/ACM) International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT). Singapore. pp. 493--498. arXiv:1501.06941. doi:10.1109/WI-IAT.2015.89.
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