I see on Instagram he's off travelling constantly seemingly having a great time, makes me so sick

Meanwhile the community he is supposed to be helping is being destroyed

Did CS give him 30 pieces of silver or do they have his family hostage?

I just don't understand...

How can he sleep at night turning his back on this wonderful community , while it is being tore apart

It's sad because almost everyone I've met on CS have been amazing people and restore my faith in humanity time and time again, but my faith in humanity is lost again any time I think about Mr Joy

Hi everyone. I’m a 26M and I’m going to London in a few months and thought I’d try couchsurfing for the first time. If anyone has any advice, tips, or anything I should be looking out for please feel free to tell me. Also, if you have tried couchsurfing in London what was your experience like and would you recommend me any hosts? Thanks in advance 🫶

Hello everyone ! I’m using Couchsurfing the last years in Greece and to be honest I’m really active on that ( I ve hosted around 15 people the last year ! )

I’m a naturist and an all year nudist ( beaches during summer and in the house I’m always naked the whole year )

What do you think about communicating that with my guests ? Cause when I host more than 2 days , I feel that is a bit pressure for me cause of course I don t feel like home in my own home cause I need to wear clothes all the time !

Is it ok to communicate that on the messages send after the request or to write it directly on my profile ?

So it's been a minute since I've been on the app. I'm trying and failing to find Hangouts, and I stumble onto Events (think I'm close...?) and there's a local Event organized by "Couchsurfing" who lives in a different state...I am genuinely confused XD Is there a human going to this event, or is CS just trolling the web for local events and posting them? And where the hell is Hangouts?!!? XD

Why the f*ck add something like this if it is yet just ANOTHER LIE?!

I can totally understand some noise to be added to the hosts locations for privacy, but appearing in nearby cities??? What the actual f*ck

Too many lies on this app

Bad for both guests and hosts.

Guests want a host in a very specific area/city and will have to shift through all the hosts in the search results to see who actually lives there

And some guests might not read the host's location. I mean why should they? They clearly chose the very specific area they want with circle. And then guests will come and be annoyed at hosts for living elsewhere

Why CS just f*cks the app up so much for the current users. Just let us use the app! No lies! We all know there are very few users. Maybe hundreds or a few thousands. Who cares?! Just make the app useable for the few of us that haven't left yet

Here are my ideas for people to ponder:

Whenever I mention couchsurfing women think it’s weird and dangerous and don’t get why you’d give away free rent to a stranger.

I think it’s weird that I can host people but they’re not my friends afterward and won’t host me back even if I asked - it would be weird because they’re obviously not interested.

The concept seems to revolve around generous people getting high off the idea of serving someone’s else’s needs and buying friend with free rent.

My cousin who is a clever successful happy businessman said “People are supposed to pay you rent, why host anyone for free.”

You’re essentially giving away your resources to strangers without reciprocity just to feel good about yourself and to get some companionship. Maybe to get hosted in the future but I bet most hosts don’t use couch surfing if they travel.

It’s essentially a social engineering app coupling predatory people who are stingy or low income seeking free housing and people who have generous traits and are good targets for such pseudo-predatory behavior.

The idea of a friend app where people also get hosted is a good one however like in any social group social predators always dominate.

Personally when I hosted I found that I stopped cooking for myself and organized my life around the guests which is not an improvement to my life. It definitely added stress to my life and took up time.

It is as if this forum is populated with conscientious pro social generous do gooders who have rose colored glasses and are idealistic and bitter people who realized it’s not the friend app that it could be.

I wonder if the hosts realise that they have these pro social conscientious traits and that people without these but with social predator traits exist also. Thinking you will dodge such people is naive since they mask quite well often.

Just my thoughts! They don’t have to be true at all.

Hi yalls i found this page from googling alternatives for cs. Just like we all, i am also griefing for this change in the app and find it impossible to use it anymore. I have both hosted and surfed, but most importantly the hangouts really have been important to me as a traveller who at older age prefers a hotel over a hostel.

What alternative would be the best for hangouts when travelling? Thank you and this might be the most asked question but I only found this page today.

Hey everyone, just wanted to share a quick local insight for anyone visiting Tokyo soon.

If you're looking for a convenient base that’s quieter than Shinjuku but super well-connected, the Shin-Otsuka / Otsuka area is great. It’s right next to Ikebukuro, 1 minute from the Marunouchi Line, and 7 minutes from the Yamanote Line. There are 24-hour convenience stores everywhere and it's super safe at night.

I live in this neighborhood and love how easy it is to get around. Happy to answer any neighborhood questions in the comments or DMs!

I appreciate the effort, but why focus on remote islands with tiny populations and limited tourism?

For some perspective:

- Niue: 1,681 residents

- Tokelau: 1,485 residents

- Tristan da Cunha: 222 residents

- Montserrat: ~5,500 residents

- Saint Helena: ~4,000 residents

- Tuvalu: ~9,500 residents

- Nauru: ~9,900 residents

- Christmas Island: 1,692 residents

- Cocos Islands: 593 residents

It's like judging Airbnb's popularity by looking at remote islands.

Why not compare major tourist destinations like London, Paris, Barcelona, Sydney or New York? Surely that would give us a more meaningful picture of Couchsurfing's activity.

I submitted a support ticket to CS using the "Contact Support" link in the app; it goes to a Zendesk support system on support.couchsurfing.com. (Zendesk is a very common ticketing system that allows support agents to assign issues, rank them by severity, mark them as "closed," etc.)

But they didn't respond in Zendesk; they sent the following automated form letter through the ticket system:

Hi [yournamehere],

Thanks for checking out the platform and sharing your thoughts.
Feedback like yours helps us figure out what to fix and how to improve.

We'd love to hear more. This quick form goes straight to our
product team and shapes what comes next.

This is the start. There's a lot more coming, and we're excited about
where it's headed. Any other questions? Don't hesitate to reach out!

Best,

--
Blue

The "quick form" link goes to a generic feedback form on research.net. God only knows if anyone is monitoring that inbox.

Given how little this company cares about anything why not sell couchsurfing?

How little they care:

- The controversial huge update made which looks like it was made by people who never used the app before and never talked to anyone that used the app before. Everyone hated the update, it made many things worse, especially searching which is still worse, even after so many months and 'updates'

- Continual refusal to listen to user feedback, feels like talking to a brick wall. We all want Last login back, instead they treat us like sh!t, give us "Recently Active", refuse until maybe their dying breath to tell us what it means. And apparently doesnt do anything, most people in top search results have it, even those with last references over 6 months ago, in some cases years ago. Feels like a middle finger to the community for asking for something

- No good communication, why are they not active here, communicating with us?

- They just make up fake events in cities to boost event numbers - probably have a bot or something to automatically create events when there is a concert. CLogs up events and makes it harder to find real user generated events

- App still very buggy after so long e.g. reference numbers in search results completely different than reference numbers in profiles

- Make a bunch of unnecessary fake AI sh!t on the website, see images

- Charge everyone for this sh!t

please , for the love of God, if you work for CS and are reading this, just sell it to someone that cares, dont slowly kill it

I love this app , and I hate what it has become, and from talking to many other CSers this is a sentiment felt by most people

Sell it, or please please please please start listening to your users! start communicating with us. Treat us like f*ckin adults and stop this AI sh!t, this fake event nonsense, this creating useless search filters and not giving use the filters we actually need

​

I recently joined Couchsurfing, and honestly, the timing couldn't have been worse.

Why on earth would they remove the ability to sort hosts by their last login? That's arguably one of the most important features of the entire platform.

Now I'm stuck opening profiles individually, checking the dates of their references, and basically playing detective trying to figure out whether someone is actually active and still hosting.

The algorithm supposedly prioritizes active hosts, but there's no way to know how recently someone logged in. It's incredibly frustrating, especially when you're paying for the service.

I genuinely don't understand the reasoning behind this decision. Why not just keep the old sorting options alongside the new algorithm?

Has anyone found a decent workaround? Any browser extensions, tricks, filters, or alternative ways to identify genuinely active hosts?

Also, has Couchsurfing said anything about bringing back last-login sorting, or are we stuck with this?

I looked at couchers, but their base is so small i can barely find people

Just had a friend contacting me asking about the trip that I selected on CS. I asked them like how tha hell did he knew about, told me he received a damn email this morning from the platform telling that LOL

Like WHAT THE ACTUAL F....????? This app is now zero privacy .

Planning a trip and will use BeWelcome/Couchers, but still get 2 free message views on CS so was curious about what it looks like nowadays (5-6 months after the rebuild), whether it would be worth messaging someone or whatever. Here are some random little things I noticed (i.e., BESIDES all the major things they screwed up that get talked about a ton already here...)

- When I open the app, I see "Your Stays: Find locals to stay with", and the 3rd profile in the carousel there is... my own profile. Yep, great idea – I'll go ahead and request to stay on my own couch when I visit the city that I currently live in... thanks for the suggestion, CS!

- In that same place, it says I have X references – a number more than 100 higher than the number of references I actually have. The real number is already in the triple digits, why inflate it even more? (Not sure if this is a bug or intentional, but it's the same for the other profiles in that carousel as well – for example it says that the guy listed next to me has 84 references, but when I click on his profile it's actually under 50. Are they counting some references twice due to shitty vibe coding? Counting references received and references written?)

- One thing I haven't seen talked about much here is the fact that they don't show people's age anymore, just these huge ranges. Does anyone see the logic behind this? It's consistent with the fact that they've generally removed lots of useful/relevant information, like not showing last login info, response rate, etc... but they clearly removed those things to hide the fact that the vast majority of profiles are actually inactive. I can't see what not showing a person's age would accomplish though. Would they say it's for "safety" or something? Why these huge 10-year ranges, instead of maybe 5-year ranges? Why 25-35, 35-45, 45-55? This is really weird, I don't know of any other sites/apps that do this.

- I'll be traveling to a huge city that's a major tourist destination as well. There's around 100 shitty imported events... but no actual events where CSers will be meeting up, not even the old "weekly meetings" that most big cities used to have. With all the other core functionality that was taken away, I hadn't even really thought about this aspect of the community disappearing – I always preferred meeting up 1-on-1 (or in small groups) anyway, but I know that many people were regulars at CS events in their communities. I checked a couple of other cities where I had attended weekly events in the past few years – nope, gone too. I presume there must be at least a few weekly meet-ups surviving? At least in the major European/American capitals that used to get dozens and dozens of people every week?

- The new "feed" they added: It's mostly just things posted by CS themselves, plus a few random other group postings just because some random CS friend is in that group (I guess the "Queer Couchsurfers" group is one of the few groups that's still getting a few posts?) If groups were still active like way back in the heyday of CS, maybe this could be an interesting way to bring the posts from MY old groups together in one place? But in the current state of CS, meh.

- Also in my feed: A "public trip" where it doesn't seem like the friend writing it actually knew that a public trip was being created and that it would be showing up in all of his friends' feeds. It's addressed to someone by name and talks about how a mutual friend has been in contact with her, etc. I remember there was a ton of confusion around this in May when the rebuild rolled out, and I thought I had read here that this aspect was improved in the weeks that followed, but I guess it's still not really clear to everyone.

- On the topic of public trips, I was struck by a certain irony. There's been some discussion here of how they're a complete mess now – no specific dates, random order, etc. Definitely is that way for the city I checked. So it's yet another area where the focus on quantity has absolutely destroyed the quality: By forcing a public trip to be created before anyone sends a request, the company can now brag "we have X public trips in city Y" – even if that very thing itself helps create a mess that most hosts aren't actually going to look through anymore to offer people a couch or to show them around.

- Most common first line in CS profiles in the city I searched is the (often all-caps) declaration that the person isn't hosting. (Great look! /s) Interesting contrast to how the most common first line in Couchers profiles is about how they used to be on Couchsurfing but don't like the direction it took and believe hospitality exchange should be free and mention how many CS references they have and maybe share a link, hehe. (BeWelcome less so, that seems to be more of a Couchers thing I guess because most profiles are newer.)

- There were several things in my CS account that I had deleted many months ago. I had even confirmed on the pop-ups that I understood that I would not be able to recover those things and that the data would be deleted. Well, they were back now. Just another reminder that I can't trust anything they do with regard to my data.

Long post I guess, just kept noticing things...

Call it Macedonia, F.Y.R.O.M. or Republic of North Macedonia, does anyone here have an experience of surfing there? Mainly looking for the capital Skopje but experiences in other cities are also appreciated. Which platform did you use, was the stay pleasant, anything to be mindful of?

Is anyone facing the same problems when trying to load your feed, messages or just setup? Since a couple of days it just says "wasn't able to load this site. Please come back later". I'm able to login and see my profile but that's basically it.

I tried with different devices, different browsers and even wrote an email to the support which wasn't any helpful.

Yes I do know couchers, trustroots etc. thanks for the advice ;-)

I was a very active member of the community until before the latest updates, having hosted and being hosted by hundreds of members.

With the new scale-like reference system, I don't feel as much like hosting. It makes no sense to me to provide free accommodation and having someone rating their stay like it's a hotel.

Out of hundreds of my references, all of them are positive, and I wonder if I start hosting again, people are now going to rate me under 5 just because they don't like the mattress I provide or they think that I am too quiet or whatever other reason.

For those of you who are still using the app, what's your experience been? Are people likely to not give a top rating and be complaining about minor things?

I remember Couchsurfing before there was an application that actually had some functionality. It was just some random site where people can message each other and hope to find someone willing to show you around and get you a couch where you can spent a couple of nights in exchange for some interaction. After the recent update I first of all lost complete oversight, was super surprised about what was happening, felt disoriented, kind of overwhelmed and absolutely disappointed!

Hangouts was the BEST functionality for me to meet and hang out with new people while traveling. No matter what someone planned or wanted to do, in good locations there was always smoeone to meet up with or even group of people which then led to some awesome experiences. Now it is tied to events and that makes it soooooo useless! It looses all the spontaneous meetings and happenings that can happen and instead it appears like a weird way to try to organise some event or something... This really disappointed me about the new app.

Just sayin...

After a little less than a decade on Couchsurfing, I’m genuinely astonished by some of the requests I receive. What surprises me even more is that these people somehow keep finding hosts.

At what point did basic etiquette, social awareness, reciprocity become optional?

Maybe a community built on generosity actually needs a little exclusivity, to preserve what makes it special.

“I’m excited to explore your city!” So is everyone at the airport.

“I love meeting new people!” Congratulations on possessing a trait shared by half the population.

“Would love to share stories from my travels!” Is that a threat? I’m busy that day.

“I hope you can host me!” And I hope you can develop a personality before your next request.

At what point did we collectively decide that expressing an interest in travel qualifies someone to be welcomed into a stranger’s home?

The bar is in hell, I fear.

I tried to sign up for the first time and this came up

What does it mean.?

And what should I do do ?

CouchSurfing would do anything but implementing actually useful updates.
Today I found this

Who the hell asked for it, when we lack actually useful filters like for dates/number of travellers.

I hosted my first Couchsurfer in 2003 (via CS's predecessor The Hospitality Club), and was a part of building the CS community -- we had radical goals: completely free travel, cultural exchange, friendship, and building world peace!  (A relic of the old listserv still exists at hospitalityclub.org.)

Since those first days, I've always insisted having a brief video meeting (then, via Skype; now, WhatsApp) with potential surfers so that we could get to know one another a bit better and I could give them a video tour of my home.  I also send a short pdf guide to staying at my apartment along with a few useful tips about visiting NYC.  It's something my surfers have always thanked me for!  

Today, I received an email from Couchsurfing announcing that any contact outside of the app is now forbidden, and that my account could be suspended!  I'm convinced that greater communication, including video chat, actually increases the safety and comfort of surfers and hosts.  

I helped to create the original guidelines, in which we actually encouraged outside communication for these exact purposes!  Couchsurfing wouldn't exist at all if it weren't for old-timers like me, and our rules were simple: NO MONEY, no spam, no exchange of services (i.e. sex), and please write a reference.  These simple rules kept the community extraordinarily safe for 25+ years

I plan to disobey and continue asking potential surfers to contact me for a video chat and greater information exchange, as I always have.  I strongly object to this rule.

-Shawn from NYC

Hi everyone! I’m a college student currently doing a small research project on Couchsurfing and digital platforms.

I’ve been reading through this subreddit and noticed quite a few discussions about the recent Couchsurfing redesign/update, especially from long-term users. I’d really love to hear more about how people here actually experienced these changes.

If you used Couchsurfing both before and after the update:

What changed for you? What specifically do you dislike about the new version, and why?

I’m also interested in the opposite question: are there any features, old or new, that you think work particularly well? What features actually make Couchsurfing useful, enjoyable, or different from other travel/social platforms for you?

I’m especially curious about small things that might not seem important at first: profiles, references, search, messaging, the way you find hosts/guests, how people present themselves, or how you decide whether someone seems trustworthy.

I’m not affiliated with Couchsurfing and I’m not trying to evaluate whether the redesign is objectively “good” or “bad”. I’m interested in how the platform’s design affects the way people actually use it and interact with each other.

Would love to hear your experiences, especially if you’ve been using Couchsurfing for a long time!

Thank you so so much

Hey everyone!

I’m planning my first trip to Europe and will be backpacking across the continent for a few months. I’ve travelled to around 50 countries so far, but most of my accommodation experience has been with hostels, hotels and Airbnbs.

I’ve used Couchsurfing occasionally in different countries, but I’ve never used it extensively as most backpackers do.

I’m wondering how safe and reliable Couchsurfing is in Europe, especially when travelling solo for an extended period. I’d love to experience local culture, meet interesting people and hear perspectives from locals rather than just sticking to the usual tourist experience.

A few questions for experienced Couchsurfers:

How safe has Couchsurfing been for you in Europe?

Are there any particular countries or cities where it works especially well, or where you’d be more cautious?

What red flags should I look for when choosing a host?

Is it generally easy to find hosts, or has the platform become less active in recent years?

Are there any alternative platforms or tips you’d recommend for a long backpacking trip?

I’m not looking to use it just to save money. I’m more interested in the cultural exchange and meet local people I might meet along the way.

Would really appreciate advice from people who have actually used Couchsurfing across Europe, especially those who have travelled for several months.

Thanks in advance! 😊