CouchsurfingReviews of couchsurfing.com

I used to be a very active member of couchsurfing, hosting many travellers for free and enjoying the great communities which were popping all around the globe. It used to be excellent, now everything is driven by MONEY and greed, asking people to pay to be host (for free) by stranger. The main point, however, is another. Unfortunately, due to covid they locked without announcing to the people all the accounts, so now IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO ENTER OR EVEN DELETE A PROFILE WITHOUT PAYING. That's illegal, greedy and overall disgusting. Keeping all the data from people and ask for a year subscription just to access and delete the data/profile. I hope that you will find happiness knowing that you are stealing money out of people data.

I used couchsurfing a couple of times. I had mixed experiences with it. I am mainly rating them with the least amount of stars because Couchsurfing has been greedy enough to ask for membership money. The entire idea of it simply goes out the window when you try to do that. I would have been more than okay with the advertisement and to use the pandemic as an excuse is a joke. And do not use "third world countries" as an excuse either. It is 2020 and there is no such thing. At least not in terms of the countries which they would be willing to help. One country has more gem stones the other has more engineers and the third has more money. The idea by itself is racist and is based on the 80s. It wasn't a smart move. I am not okay with it when a company becomes greedy and tries to mask it as helping others. I am also not okay with it when a company is being non-factual about it. Apart from that I had several problems with male hosts who tried to sexually harass me and there are many guys who use it for hooking up too instead of behaving responsibly. I had to open up a second account after some years because couchsurfing didn't let me login to the first one. I couldn't find the contacts again of many dear people after that. So even if I thought that it WOULD be okay to ask for money when they could have made the money with advertisement I still wouldn't do it because they lack in customer support and generally I didn't find the website that reliable. There are a lot of alternatives by now and I won't be using the site any longer. PS: If couchsurfing really did aim at keeping it cheap for users then they would have done the only logical thing by keeping the advertisement.

Couch c'est 10 ans de ma vie, des rassemblements à gogo, des fous rires et des rencontres inoubliable.. et pourtant couch aujourd'hui c'est fini.. avec la crise du COVID le site semble surfer sur la vague du tout payant, ne laissant aucun choix d'abonnement ou non. En tant que CS je suis d'accord pour donner un coup de pouce, mais pour payer un abonnement annuel/ mensuel ? Où va t'on ? Le site bloque par défaut tous les profils et j'espère quand même pouvoir supprimer mes données ! Je suis triste que cette si belle initiative de partage de culture se soit transformée en business et en site de rencontres amoureuses ( car il y a beaucoup d'autres site pour ça ! ). CS vient de signer la mort de cette si belle communauté basée sur le partage et l'entraide... j'espère qu'il y aura rapidement un plan B ( un autre site ? ) où l'on pourra retrouver cet esprit.

Soy miembro de la comunidad couchsurfing desde el 2012, he viajado, alojado y conocidos buenos amigos. Ayer, 14 de Mayo 2020, couchsurfing bloquea mi account pidiendo una donación obligatoria. De hecho no se trata de una donación, sino de un cambio de las condiciones del servicio ocurrido sin preaviso. No quiero entrar en el merito de esta decisión, pero si en la manera. Ha sido una falta de ética y una violación de la ley sobre la privacidad, a lo mejor hubiera hecho una donación si hubiera sido voluntaria. Decepción total, nunca volveré a usar esa plataforma pero antes que me dejen recuperar mis contactos y mis fotos. Dan verguenza

I want to share my experience and open eyes to what is couchsurfing: started as member in 2010, hosted around 25 people in 9 years and used as point of concact while traveling. Never been hosted because I have a fix holiday schedule and it's not easy to find accomodation in this way. At beginning I had very nice experiences with people from all over the world ( Australia, Canada, USA, Poland, Argentina, France, China, Taiwan, Czech Republic, Mexico ) and with some of them we are still friends. I had a couple of so and so experiences with people who were not ready for such cultural exchange and on some topics were a bit controntational, but nothing was really bad and it's part of the game and the risk of meeting people of different background. In 2019 I hosted a woman, 36 years old, a russian but living in USA, a PhD student at UCLA, with several positive references. I always ask a working phone with whatsup to arrange and keep contacts. The nightmare began: after very nice messages ( including whatsup ) she said she arrived around 10,30 PM from airport. I've waited for 3 hours, calling her without reply. I made the huge mistake of not forgetting her and go to sleep. She arrived at 1,30 AM in the night saying she gave me the wrong flight number, and she had a fight with cab driver from airport to my house for price ( she wanted to pay 10 USD maximum ). First surprise, 6 months pregnant, a condition I would not have accepted. But, I had a low defensive mechanism in my mind, because our previous chats and good past experiences with CS. I gave her food and a private room with a double bed. The next morning she went for a full day tour, I gave some tips and asked at what time she would come back, because I like to organize my life. She said arond 10 Pm. During the day I sent a couple of whatsup messages, without replies and on one phone answer she said she did not know the arrival time. She arrived, without any communication, at 12,30 AM, without apologizing. She went again to sleep and she left my house, with lots of smiles and thanks the next morning, and having a free breakfast at my house. It was a bad experience but I tried to forgive. After 2 days I received a notification of reviews. Now recently CS changed the system, so you can not read the review of the other one. I gave a dry but positive review and surprise, for the first time in 10 years, I receive a horrible negative review, full of lies, violating at least 3 of the couchsurfing rules: describing a medical condition, false statement and defamation. I immediately wrote to CS, describing the whole facts and give them proofs ( with whatsup messages ). They repeately refuse to delete this review, even if it violates clearly 3 rules. They want to decide if the rules are violated. After I wrote to the hosting site ( amazon ) and to the venture capitals who are financing them, nothing changed. I read on glassdoor website, many horror stories of people employed there, greed and so on. CS is now a for profit company, who only has a database of community of peole who are willing to put their private property at risk for FREE, only to let them profit with advertisement, data profiling and some fees paid by verified members. CS does not care at all to the safety of all this ( like AirBnB is doing actively and it's a business ). They exhibit a terrible arrogance and ingratitude, like the worst for profit company you can imagine. This is sadly the real face of CS. In my case they do not accept the fact that a long time member is getting defamated and is warning them about a dangerous experience with a person with potential psychosis. CS must disappear.

You shouldn't have to pay $60 just to verify who you are,if its free it should be free.

I signed up to this site many years ago. Never actually used it but also never deleted my account because I thought that maybe I'd use it at some point. However, today I got an email from "LexToIndia" (CS Ambassador in Bremen, Germany) whose message included this nice little bit: "First, I recommend you fill out your profile. Really. This isn't Tinder." I would've deleted my account but since they make this intentionally difficult (one can't just do it through the site but has to contact support), I only deactivated it. Hopefully that means that I will no longer get emails from such primitive people.

The main fault is personal certification, from the beginning. The couchsurfing verification is only for the payment of the money. A true verification must be scanned documentation, and verification by video camera with AI. I want to make a website that has the idea of ​​couchsurfing but with the security that hosts and travelers of the world merce. and also to clean profiles every so often to inactivate them in the search, until they re-login, in this way no time is wasted looking for inactive people. If you want to be part and invest in this concern my email is: alnope6891gmail.com Successes