Hospitality

i’m moving closer and closer to a normalized database, and with it, many new stats. one of the ones i wanted to see was the distribution of guests by country. i noticed early on that i seemed to get guests mostly from rich countries and no guests from africa for example. so i also cross referenced it with the GDP of each country. there is a relation, no doubt.

these are the results for the total amount of guests. i didn’t do stats on uncertain origins.

zoomed in:

these are a bit more interesting, how they relate to GDP (sorry, had to put the legend in the middle so it wouldn’t cover points, and it’s so big it didn’t fit).

in both cases we can see that there is a great “divide” between the high GDP – high traveling countries and a lot of poor visitors on the bottom.

you can get the R source code and the source data and replicate my results. remember the data is licensed (see license on the bottom of the page). i will progressively provide more stats while i normalize the database.

what i see here is just another obvious fact. rich people travel more, poor people just can’t do it. couchsurfing might enable people to travel using less money, but it’s failing at getting poor people to join it. think about it, who has access to the internet and enough money to travel? i don’t want to be simplistic, but i do think this is food for thought. in a way, it is a hospitality network not for those that need it, but for those that don’t. just think about that taboo on couchsurfing: never say you’re short on cash! i guess you can’t be poor and acknowledge it.

this is apropos, we had our first money theft in a house (at _42). i guess it was only a matter of time until it would happen.