Hospitality exchange service

[7][8] On HospEx, members typically create public profiles that describe themselves and their travel plans, and then searching for potential hosts or guests based on various criteria such as location, interests, and availability.

[11] 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".

[14] 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.

[15][16][17] Many volunteers, who had become brand ambassadors of CouchSurfing, left to BeWelcome and other non-profit platforms because of the change in legal status and insufficient management transparency.

[18] Non-profit hospitality exchange services have offered scientists access to their anonymized data for publication of research on trust and cooperation.

The number of users on Hospitality Club in the years 2000 to 2006.
Hospex members in Brussels in 2008
The picture was taken in front of the Berlin Wall during the Berlin Beach Camp (an annual gathering of all the Hospex communities) in 2008.
Couchsurfing meeting in 2009