CouchsurfingReviews of couchsurfing.com

Niet meer wat het eerst was helaas. Na de update werkt het nog maar slecht en de site is moeilijk te bereiken. Profiel blokeren en om betaling vragen.

I've been a member of Couchsurfing since 2007. It's undergone a number of changes over the years and each one has made it steadily worse. The latest set of changes have made me seriously consider ending my membership. At a basic level, the new site is cluttered, hard to navigate and has made it more difficult to find out about potential guests or hosts. There was a time when frequent hosts like myself could get membership for free, a small reward for providing a service to the community. Now, I feel like I'm being milked for cash. The only small concession to user requests has been a slightly improved post-surf/host process, where users are asked confidentially if they felt safe. A tiny step in the right direction. Everything else is horrible. Terrible design, harder to read, harder to search, unintuitive UX. It's as if they're actively trying to put people off. When this was a community-led charity, I was all for it. As a business model, this deeserves to go bust.

Since they changed everything the site has become difficult to use. I have a beautiful cottage and garden that I love to share with travellers who come through Bulawayo, and now @Couchsurfing want to charge me for it? No thanks 🙏

Coucher.org and BeWelcome.org. That's where most of my friends and I went to. CS was a brilliant idea. But a corporatio bought it and turned it into a money-making machine. But at least it worked for a few years. The most active people were slowly migrating to the alternatives, though. Recently less that 5% of accounts in CS were logged in within the last year. And maybe 1% actually active. But after the rebuild (May 26) it's totally useless. It impossible to navigate. I paid for a year but they cancelled my payment when the rebuild happened. I lost a few months and money I paid. They are not answering my mails about that problem. So, after years of being a member this wonderful community, and sadly watching it being butchered by the corpo I'm finaly leaving. I messaged all my friends I met trough CS that if they join Couchers.org and BeWelcome.org we can exchange our references from CS again. This time in new platforms. Now I'm watching the same community growing and thriving elsewhere. Why pay a corpo to be a community, when you can join a real community for free?

Depuis la dernière mise à jour, c'est juste affreux : plus moyen de me connecter sur l'app', mais impossible de répondre aux demandes sur l'ordi... Ca fonctionnait mieux quand c'était gratuit !!! Un comble. Je pense sérieusement à arrêter. J'aimais beaucoup mais franchement en quelques mois c'est catastrophique

The new website (May 2026 redesign) is a disaster. Basic features that defined the platform like setting your hosting availability to 'Not Accepting Guests' are buried. The UI is like a dating app. Filters are gone. It's harder to find real hosts and easier to get spammed. But this redesign is just the latest symptom of a longer rot. Couchsurfing was founded on genuine cultural exchange, opening your home to a stranger because you believed in human connection and paying it forward. That spirit has been dying for years, replaced by people using it as a free hotel or a hookup app. The platform let that happen. Now they've built a UI that makes it worse. People should look up Couchers.org or BeWelcome. They seem to be trying to preserve what Couchsurfing abandoned.

I used to love couchsurfing. I used to talk about it all around the world and recommend it to everyone. Thanks to me a lot of newcomers joined. That's over right now... Greed took over, the app and website is not usable, it's a sad end of CS. I'm moving to its competitors after 10 year of being a proud member of the community...

The new app and new website since May 2026 are completely useless for finding hosts or guests. They have not improved ANYTHING in the 30 days since the update came out. I advise anybody against using Couchsurfing and paying them money.