BeWelcome News

This month BeWelcome is conducting another survey among a randomly selected sample of members. 20.000 of you will receive an email invitation from our survey provider Lamapoll.de to participate in the survey and provide anonymous feedback about your experience with BeWelcome, your satisfaction and what you would like us to add, improve or do differently.

Based on the feedback, like last time, BeWelcome will guide development within the possibilities of our resources.

For various reasons…

Hi everybody,

In an effort to keep the code driving BeWelcome maintainable and future proof the first release of the year 2023 focuses on rewrites of existing functionality.

• Rewritten most of the profile sub pages. This includes: Comments, Family & Friends, Forum Posts, Notes, Visitors, Preferences.
• Reset password moved into the members menu.
• Thanks to the remember me functionality a lot of people never needed to login. There the statistics gave the impression people do not use the site. This…

We love what we do and would not accept any payment for it. Nor do we ask members for fees,. We are a registered non-profit since 2007, and have no staff, offices or large costs.

We do need your help every year to help pay for things like insurance, server costs and domain registrars. Our donation campaign for the forthcoming year is just €4912.   That allows us to serve our growing membership, which is likely to exceed 250,000 in 2023. If you have a few $£ to donate by card/bank transfer, or…

BeVolunteer – the association behind BeWelcome – has a new Board of Directors as of today.

The annual General Assembly of BeVolunteer took place at the beginning of November 2022 in Wieliczka / Poland.

8 BeVolunteer members participated live, 7 more online.

The elections of the new Board of Directors for the year 2022/2023 took place online after the GA meeting. The result:

Gbenouville stays President
 

Corazondeviaje is the new secretary (she has experience in this job as she has been on the Board…

Hi everybody,

The dev team has been busy the last 4 months to fix bugs and add small feature improvements. Notably these are:

• The profile page now shows more comments and additionally shows comments written as well (there's a read more/show less button now as well to keep the page short).
• Comments are now sorted by creation date (not last update as before).
• Community news got a small design update and it is now possible to directly add a comment.
• The display of forum post on mobile was improved to…

8 BeWelcome travelers found their ways to Sète, a town at the Mediterranean Sea in the South of France: 7 French and Neta98 from Israel.

Sète is located between land and sea, so water was the main topic of this BeWelcome weekend - and it was surprisingly wetter than expected: A strong storm with heavy rains flooded the campside the night before the gathering began. Swimming tents convinced all participants to spontanously rent a luxury mobile home - the last one available on the campside.  This…

The Ducks are celebrating again!

"Seek the Duck" is a legend! It is the oldest BeWelcome  event. The BeWelcomers from Toulouse in the south of France organized several of these weekends in their beautiful city. And they inspired other French communities. "Seek the Pig" took place in Lyon "Seek the Cod or In Cod we Trust" in Marseille and "Seek the Mussel" in Montpellier.

And again the French BeWelcomers prove that they are a great community and wonderful hosts. Their current idea is called…

Hi everybody,

Nearly a year has passed since the last bigger update to the site. So this time something big is changing:

Introducing the trips feature

• If you haven't noticed yet, there is a new section on the landing page called 'Be visited' where you might find people coming to your vicinity. 
• You may even invite them to your home or just meet them for a coffee. 
• Creating a trip is easy and straight forward.

Introducing conversations

• As we now have three different types of communications between…

Due to the recent escalation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, over 10 million people are believed to have been displaced from their homes. About 4.3 million people, mostly women, children, and the elderly, have left Ukraine, while about 6.5 million are internally displaced. As of April 17, according to the United Nations, 2,780,913 people have fled to Poland, 743,880 to Romania, 461,539 to Hungary, 423,852 to Moldova, and 337,311 to Slovakia. Smaller but still significant numbers of refugees…

An interview with a new BeWelcome member. 

1) What does hospitality exchange mean to you? 

Overall, I favour barter/exchange instead of using money. It is in this spirit, I find hospitality exchange really  interesting.  While hospitality has different forms and meaning for everyone, I am always very happy to discover what my education "made in Switzerland" has instilled in me, and motivates me to discover other forms of hospitality.

2) When did you start hosting people, and how has if affected…