Houses of Benefit • K.Rich \

by Kate Rich

Kate Rich and Sneha Solanki (hostexe.org) are developing a protocol for a distributed hotel – Houses of Benefit – in London. While guest services (concierge, breakfast, lobby) are centralised, we will be outsourcing bedroom locations around the central London area. The system is designed as a coordinated lodgings service, with local hosts sourced via social networks, providing comfortable, glamorous &/or interesting sleeping accommodation to culturally-funded visitors, in exchange for cash.

The distributed hotel idea is based on mutual benefit economics, with the intention to a) undercut standard London hotel prices; b) provide cultural visitors with a more located experience than an Ibis; and c) reroute cultural funding away from tourist/service sector by paying peer hosts direct. The idea is to put a direct value on the normally altruistic work of accommodating visitors, by supplying the private host with the kind of economic credit that hotel systems reliably receive.^[1]

The service / Who it is for
The system is not designed for individual travellers, but directed specifically towards event-organisers and host institutions with hotel accommodation budgets to divert. Scale: in its current layout, Houses of Benefit could house from one to ten guests for periods of up to ten days. Visitors are ideally processed by batch ie. event delegates, grouped artists visiting simultaneously,  for best conviviality and economy.^[2]

The Limits of Hospitality
We do not attempt to replicate the hotel experience – homestays clearly lack the anonymity and standardisation of the hotel. Conversely, while hotels are largely set up to emulate the natural behaviour of hosting, the limits of hospitality are generally fully articulated, priced up and enforced – minibars being a classic example.

There are obvious risks in substituting the real thing.

Conscious of the vagaries and awkwardness embedded in normal home encounters, we are designing a set of protocols which will form the core of the Houses of Benefit project: to provide a minimum set of conditions for amenable homestay under HofB guarantee. These protocols are open source and transferable to other settlements outside London. They aim for a social contract somewhere between the unmediated encounter of friendship, and the super legislated service relations on offer in the hotel sector. The advantage of Houses of Benefit is that non-professional hospitality can be open-ended, ie. any contractual limits are designed to be exceeded.

Amenities
A key role is that of the Concierge, engaged and paid by Hostexe for the duration of the home stay.

Concierge is selected for his/her local knowledge, peer-proximity to the guests, and interest in earning cash for hospitality. The Concierge occupies a roving front desk and will track incoming flight schedules, meet and greet guests on arrival, pass over keys, maps, hospitality packs etc. Over the hosting period Concierge manages front desk communications via email, mobile and skype phone, answers questions and mediates in any difficulties either host or guest experiences. Host, guest/s and Concierge are sent each other’s bios in advance as conversation starters. (Any personal relationships struck up/out within a hosting period are naturally beyond the management remit of HofB).

Insurance Policy: the network of dependencies between guest, host and Hostexe is largely mediated by social visibility, underwritten by mutual accountability to the Funder. Money and reputation are pitted as a stake against any misbehaviour.

Enhanced services
In the long run we are interested in more than the rehabilitation of accommodation budgets. Houses of Benefit is conceived as a platform to support other research, with commissioned and collected bedside reading for guests to include information on aspects of the London housing market, contemporary and historical. A literal investigation of the premise ‘Social Housing’ is also of interest to us; and we are further researching zoological models such as symbiosis, where certain creatures form partnerships with other kinds of animals or plants for mutual benefit, for example the cohabitation of unicellular green alga and the clam.

Further/derivative uses imagined for the HofB system are product placement (the critical procurement of vital guest room items such as soap, coffee, towels), and using the known movements of guests as a rudimentary freight system.^[3]

A trial run of the system took place in October 2005. Houses of Benefit beta accommodated delegates to the World Summit for Free Information Structures (WSFII)^[4] at Limehouse Town Hall, drawing on a network of friends for hosts. Five international visitors were placed in premises which ran a fair range from illegal Housing Association sublets to owned homes and artist studio accommodation.

Host, guest and Concierge were supplied with contracts, the hosting contract reads as follows:

Dear Host

thankyou
hostexe.org 

Assessment - Collected reflections from hosts, guests, WSFII and Hostexe after the trial HofB run
In general, guests reported their pleasure with the unfettered incidentals found in homestay (cricket, markets, book loans) and did not miss the absent abstract comforts of a hotel. Social warmth generated rated high, both within guest-host pairs and also in broader transmission of the HofB idea around the WSFII event. Concierge was surprised and pleased to notice that guests automatically treated her as peer/professional and not a simple support service. Several hosts and guests planned to stay in touch after the hosting period was over. The £40^[5] per guest per night charge substantially undercut close competitiors, for example Ibis Hotel Shoreditch £59.95.

Contingency: illness &other unpredictabilities of real life are critical factors to be planned and budgeted in, as sick hosts/guests or unannounced arrival of illegal sublet landlords will reduce the comfort of the homeshare situation. As one host described it, a system built on insecure housing needs its own security plan. The £25 management fee per guest per night has been factored with this in mind, and Hostexe plans a standard hotel room evacuation policy for the next implementation, so that unwell guests will have a simple getaway where necessary.

Commonality: one guest regretted the lack of shared evening lounge space, a facility we plan to implement in future Houses of Benefit using local event-space, public bar or convenient hotel lobby.

Concierge: As this was the first run of the system, Hostexe opted to self-concierge the experiment. This was useful on a management level, but patchy when it came to ground work and local knowledge (neither Ms Rich nor Ms Solanki actually resides in London, in part due to unobtainable rent).

Further test implementations of the system are due to take place in 2006, please contact hostexe for more information, hosting or guesting enquiries: flat AT hostexe.org

•FOOTNOTES 

^[1]    Houses of Benefit is a move towards enumerating some of the diverse, non-monetary, rarely counted methods of social solidarity that underwrite the culture scene in London, relationships that contribute directly to what is otherwise a highly valuated Creative Industry.  A Creative Industry is defined by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport as one of “those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property”. http://www.culture.gov.uk/creative_industries.

^[2]    Base price to clients is £50 per guest per night, £25 of which is paid to the host, the remaining £25 goes to the concierge, management and service extras of HofB. Reduced management rates on simultaneous artists are possible as Concierge work compacts accordingly.

^[3]    See Feral Trade Courier at http://feraltrade.org/courier for the traffic of goods over social networks.

^[4]    See WSFII programme at http://www.okfn.org/wsfii/programme.html

^[5]    Both hosts and Hostexe received a reduced rate for trial run, due to the experimental nature of the service