The idea of hospitality exchange has been around for a long time. After the Second World War, Bob Luitweiler founded Servas as a peace organization. He hoped to foster intercultural understanding and to build peace through a world wide network of open doors. In the following decades, other people fo... read moreunded similar organizations, and a lot of special interest groups developed - hospitality exchange networks for bikers, for women, for hitchhikers , for Esperanto speakers. Veit Kühne founded a network for members of the largest student exchange organization AFS in 1997, based on the model of volunteer country coordinators that had been used by Mensa's hospitality network SIGHT. All those networks had to battle similar problems: printing host lists, collecting member fees, spreading the idea.
