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

History

The idea for the website came in 2005 after members of Hospitality Club had a disagreement with its founder.
The website was launched in February 2007.
After CouchSurfing became a for-profit corporation in 2011, some members urged others to join BeWelcome.
In May 2019, a redesigned website was launched.

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.