Draft:BeWelcome

  • Comment: This article is promotional in tone - seen in things like the list of membership numbers throughtout the years to show growth, and sentences like "BeWelcome is committed to data protection and members' privacy". The external links in the list of founders also needs to be removed and replaced with their full names. -- NotCharizard 🗨 09:50, 29 April 2024 (UTC)


BeWelcome
Type of businessNon-profit
Available inArabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Greek [1], English, Esperanto, Spanish, Basque, Persian, Finnish, French [2], Galician, Hindi, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian Bokmål, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romansh, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Sundanese, Swahili, Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese [3]
Area servedGlobal
Founder(s)Marco Presti, Matthias Heß, Pierre-Charles Marais], et al. [4]
ProductsHomestay
ServicesSocial networking service
URLhttps://www.bewelcome.org/
Users207,160[5]
LaunchedFebruary 2007; 17 years ago (2007-02) [4]

BeWelcome is a non-profit[6][7] and open-source[8] online hospitality exchange service by which users can request free short-term homestays or interact with other members who are interested in travel. Hosts are not allowed to charge for lodging[9] and the use of the platform is free of charge. The platform focuses on direct interpersonal exchange in real life as well as online.

Core values are being free to use both for guests and hosts, being entirely run by volunteers, its code is open source and with a strict privacy policy.[10][11] Full transparency extends to financial aspects, budgets and expenses are publicly accessible. The platform is run purely on donations.

In 2008 a verification process amongst members was started which was omitted in the meantime for creating a false sense of safety.

  1. ^ "BeWelcome".
  2. ^ https://.wikipedia.orgview_html.php?sq=Envato&lang=en&q=BeWelcome
  3. ^ "BeWelcome". Retrieved 2023-03-29.
  4. ^ a b "History". BeVolunteer.org. Retrieved 2023-03-28.
  5. ^ "BeWelcome statistics". BeWelcome.org. Retrieved 2023-12-25.
  6. ^ "About BeWelcome". BeWelcome. Retrieved March 31, 2023.
  7. ^ Bosnic, Tyra (January 14, 2022). "Meet the Women Who Created a Facebook Group That's Helping Thousands of People Survive the Pandemic". BuzzFeed News. Retrieved March 31, 2023.
  8. ^ BeWelcome. "rox/LICENSE". GitHub. Retrieved March 31, 2023.
  9. ^ Schöpf, Simon (2015-01-25). "The Commodification of the Couch: A Dialectical Analysis of Hospitality Exchange Platforms". Triple-c. 13: 32. doi:10.31269/triplec.v13i1.480.
  10. ^ 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. S2CID 149344352.
  11. ^ Tagiew, Rustam; Ignatov, Dmitry. I; Delhibabu, Radhakrishnan (2015). "Hospitality Exchange Services as a Source of Spatial and Social Data?". 2015 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshop (ICDMW). pp. 1125–1130. doi:10.1109/ICDMW.2015.239. ISBN 978-1-4673-8493-3. S2CID 8196598.