Hospitality & Society - Volume 1, Issue 3, 2012

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 aim of this study is to analyse the production of space in the CouchSurfing hospitality network in Russia. The article proposes the notion of xenotopos, which literally means 'the place of strangers', in order to capture the relational dynamics of host and guest interactions and their co-present experience of space, time and life rhythms. The article examines the interaction between the spatial knowledge of the host and of the guest in order to see how the sharing of this knowledge affects the spatial trajectory of the guest. The article also considers the potential applicability of the concept of rhythm in the analysis of CouchSurfing as a spatial practice. The findings suggest that CouchSurfing allows users to open up new spaces of hospitality situated away from conventional tourist circuits by accessing local knowledge and grasping local life rhythms, both of which become essential intangible aspects of the CouchSurfing experience.

New technologies in use today like CouchSurfing.com are allowing people to create planned encounters, en masse, between other strangers. These 'technologies of hospitality' are producing new rules of engagement, and new relationships that blur the boundaries between friend, acquaintance, stranger and enemy – boundaries that are yet to be defined. This article will show that while mobility inevitably causes strangers to collide and interact, certain technologies of hospitality in use today create conditions for strangers to meet one another and engage in acts of hospitality – moments of intimacy, closeness or mutual understanding. This article outlines the process by which two strangers become close using one such technology: CouchSurfing.org. While such encounters foster trust, mutual learning and 'personal growth', closeness is not always altruistic and technologies of hospitality also allow people involved to exert their status and power during interaction, creating moments of tension, awkwardness or distrust. Using multi-method ethnography, this article provides an in-depth account of these technologies of hospitality, focusing on the relationships being created as well as the problems that arise for the way in which we define friendship and closeness today.

The work presented here first outlines and then theorizes the emergence of CouchSurfing as a trend, as well as an allegedly more authentic form of travel. This article attempts to trace a line from globalization to authenticity, navigating the delicate binaries evident in current tourism research in an effort to fuse the macro-level theorizing to the individuated reflections by CouchSurfers on the phenomenon itself. We discuss homogenization, positive and negative experiences, and how participants individuate their CouchSurfing experience, so that it is uniquely theirs. Examining circumstances and experiences from the perspective of CouchSurfers themselves, an endeavour undertaken too sparingly, we consider the presence of a latent paradox, concerning the degree to which an individual can individuate his or her CouchSurfing experience, within the host/guest dichotomy.

Hospitality exchange tourism is a new type of niche tourism, which is highly dependent on the Internet. Through participating in global hospitality exchange networks, such as CouchSurfing, tourists can meet local people who are willing to offer free accommodation, and hosts can also meet people around the world by hosting them. CouchSurfing works as a system of reciprocity, in which hospitality as well as cultures is exchanged between hosts and surfers. Through hospitality sharing and cross-cultural interactions, a global community with diverse cultures is envisaged in CouchSurfing. Although CouchSurfing is global in its scope, it is locally practiced in different ways by different cultures. The meaning of CouchSurfing is negotiated by surfers and hosts who both participate in it, and the reciprocal system of CouchSurfing seems to be more complicated when different cultures are involved. Based on Taiwanese experiences of CouchSurfing, this study introduces a non-western perspective on CouchSurfing and has a dialogue with prior research about CouchSurfing that has tended to focus on western experiences. Qualitative methods, including participatory observation and qualitative interviews, are adopted in this study to explore how CouchSurfing is practiced in non-western society.

Online hospitality exchange networks whose members offer and request free overnight stays at other members' homes have been founded in the 'West', but the increasing number of members in non-western societies poses challenging questions about issues of reciprocity and the assumed equality of members worldwide. In addition to limited access to international leisure travel and the role of the 'guest' in hospitality exchange, being a 'host' also faces great odds in various societies. An ethnographic study on the practice of CouchSurfing in Marrakech (February–July 2010) shows that several Moroccan members, who live with their parents, express the wish to host but their participation is actually limited to showing people around. Departing from the observation that hosting, both at the home of members' parents or in single households, causes considerable gossip and speculative contemplation among neighbours, this article explores CouchSurfing's entanglement with (other) local forms of hospitality and discrepancies with cultural conventions regarding what people view as appropriate reception of guests. The conflict and gossip crystallize around moral concerns about sexual relations between Moroccan men and 'western' women on the one hand, and expected reciprocity and assumed financial remuneration on the other.

HOSTING THE STRANGER: BETWEEN RELIGIONS, RICHARD KEARNEY AND JAMES TAYLOR(EDS) (2011) London and New York: Continuum Press, 196 pp., ISBN: 9781441158086 (pbk), £16.99

POLITICS OF THE GIFT: EXCHANGES IN POSTSRUCTURALISM, GERALD MOORE (2011) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 224 pp., ISBN: 978-0-7486-4202 (hbk), £65.00

COFFEE CULTURE, DESTINATIONS AND TOURISM, LEE JOLIFFE (2010) Bristol: Channel View Publications, x+235 pp., ISBN 978 1 845411428, p/bk, £24.95