CouchSurfing and network hospitality: 'It's not just about the furniture'

Abstract

This article introduces a collection of ethnographies that develop innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to CouchSurfing.com, a free online hospitality exchange network. The growing popularity of CouchSurfing poses significant questions about the way hospitality is performed in an era of digital communications, online social networking and alternative travel. The studies in this issue bring fresh insights to the sociological and cultural significance of hospitality in a networked world by offering detailed accounts of the new possibilities and new problems that emerge when complete strangers encounter one another online and accommodate one another offline. This article introduces the concept of 'network hospitality' to highlight some of the features that make CouchSurfing and similar social networking sites such a compelling topic of research for critical hospitality studies.

The Sharing Economy: Why People Participate in Collaborative Consumption

“…The development of CC platforms, have thus far primarily been investigated from a service design perspective (e.g., Hamari, 2013;Lamberton & Rose, 2012;Suhonen, Lampinen, Cheshire, & Antin, 2011). For example, Couchsurfing, a community for sharing accommodation among travelers and one of the most successful sharing services to date, has received the most attention (Molz, 2012;Rosen, Lafontaine, & Hendrickson, 2011). Sharing has been studied in the context of digital goods (e.g., music files-see e.g., Shang, Chen, & Chen, 2008) and open source software.…”

Market escape through exchange: home swap as a form of non-commercial hospitality

“…Moving to the contemporary world, the most researched form of non-commercial hospitality is couch surfing which has been explored from various perspectives such as hospitality exchange networks (Leung, 2010;Molz, 2012;Pultar, Raubal and Goulias, 2012), authenticity (Priskin and Sprakel, 2008;Steylaerts and Dubhghaill, 2012); trust (Rosen, Lafontaine and Hendrickson, 2011;Tan, 2010), information disclosure (Peterson and Siek, 2009), as well as, on the way that couch surfing is practiced in non-western societies (Chen 2012). On the other hand, a few authors (see for example Kotůlek, 2011;McIntosh and Bonnemann, 2006;McIntosh and Campbell, 2001) have explored negotiated exchange by undertaking research on Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF) and in more detail, willing workers' volunteer offer of manual labour in exchange for food and accommodation, as well as, decommodified experiences in a living organic farm.…”

The sharing economy: Why people participate in collaborative consumption

“…The development of CC platforms, have thus far primarily been investigated from a service design perspective (e.g., Hamari, ; Lamberton & Rose, ; Suhonen, Lampinen, Cheshire, & Antin, ). For example, Couchsurfing, a community for sharing accommodation among travelers and one of the most successful sharing services to date, has received the most attention (Molz, ; Rosen, Lafontaine, & Hendrickson, ). Sharing has been studied in the context of digital goods (e.g., music files—see e.g., Shang, Chen, & Chen, ) and open source software.…”