Flatmate fun for football fans

While the hotels in Germany's major cities may be booked up over the World Cup, all is not lost for football fans still in need of accommodation.

Thousands of Germans are making their own homes available for visiting supporters, with fans able to rent anything from a simple sofa to an entire house.

The Staying With Friends service is a joint venture between the website rooms-worldcup2006.com and ImmobilienScout24.

Around 7,000 rooms are currently listed on the site and users can browse for accommodation in a 200-mile radius around the main stadiums, which are located in Berlin, Hamburg, Dortmund, Frankfurt, Gelsenkirchen, Hanover, Kaiserslautern, Cologne, Leipzig, Munich, Nuremberg and Stuttgart.

Arndt Kwiatkowski, CEO of ImmobilienScout24, explained that it wasn't the money that had motivated many Germans to list their spare rooms on the site.

"Many of the people that list with us are interested not so much in the money, but rather in the opportunity for an intercultural experience," he said.

And true to the feel-good ethic of the service, a proportion of all profits will go to charity.

Posted by Just the Flight, 08 March 2006 17:45

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• Frankfurt