Couchsurfing: a viable form of sustainable tourism?

The author (right) with a surfer he hosted in Atlanta, GA

Can 4million worldwide members may be on to a good thing writes Uday Balaji

In 1999, a young man by the name of Casey Fenton found a cheap flight from Boston to Iceland. Being on a tight budget, he decided to mail about 1,500 students at the University of Iceland requesting a place to stay. To his pleasant surprise he received more than 50 positive responses. This experience lit the spark for CouchSurfing – the worlds largest travel network with over 4 million members worldwide.
In a nutshell, CouchSurfing is a network where a traveler can request to stay in another members home when traveling in the hosts city. It is a completely free service.

I joined CS in 2008 when a friend of mine recommended it, but didn’t actually start using it until almost a year later. This was partly since it just seemed like a strange concept at the time. Why on earth would I open the doors of my home to a complete stranger or for that matter, stay at a complete strangers home?!

Here’s why…. CS in principle is truly a travelers community. It gives one a genuinely local perspective through staying with a local and seeing the city through those persons eyes. This way one gets to meet other locals, understand local life, explore sights off the beaten path and of course, discover the best local bars and restaurants! Additionally, not staying in hotels and other organized accommodation reduces the travelers carbon footprint.

The aspect I enjoy the most about CS are the local communities and activities. Every major city has groups of local couchsurfers who meet periodically for various activities, be it the weekly bar meet-up or day trips. This is a great way to participate, especially if one is not comfortable with the concept of hosting or surfing. When I moved to Atlanta in 2007, I didn’t have a whole lot of local friends. CS fixed that pretty quickly. Some of the surfers I met in Atlanta remain to this day, good friends of mine. This highlights another huge advantage of CS, building a network of international friends without actually traveling, which let’s face it is not something we can afford to do as much as we would want. For instance I’ve hosted peoplefrom across the world including a gentleman who had worked on all 7 continents including Antarctica and done things like drive from Italy to India. The stories and learning from these interactions have been truly amazing.

The standard question that crops up when speaking about CS, and one that I had as well is "How safe is it?" In my opinion, CS is extremely safe when used right. There are references left from fellow members, vouches from those who highly trust the surfer as well as location verification via a small donation. However, there have been a handful of bad experiences that I’ve heard or read about. In my opinion though, of the stories I’ve heard, the surfer has ignored the checks and measures available in favor of finding a free place to stay. In a community of over 4 million members, there are bound to be some bad apples. I’ve been a member for nearly 5 years and haven’t had a single bad experience.

CS has evolved a fair bit over the years. I’d like to touch on changing member motivations, some of which bother me considerably. To begin with, many travel sites recommending CS as a medium of free accommodation has led to several people joining the network, with a primary motivation of find a free place to stay, rather than for the traveling experience.

The other trend I’ve seen growing is members, men especially treating CS as a dating site. Don’t get me wrong, if travelers meet and a mutual relationship develops, it’s great for the world in general and I’m all for it. I have friends who met on CS and have gone on to have great relationships and even get married in some cases. But, that should not be the main motivation. Again, references help in this case. Finally, although the guidelines explicitly forbid commercial use of the site there are a fair number of groups and posts with holiday rentals and people advertising travel agencies!

I interviewed Annie Fishman, Director of Marketing and posed the question of preservation of CS as a site for true travelers. She did acknowledge that it is an issue and needs to be addressed as the network grows. One does wonder however, in this new world where size of social networks is worth its weight in gold, how far will the management go to adhere to their stated mission?

I’d like to now speak about CS as an organization. It started off as a Non-for profit entity, running on the $25 location verification donations and built by time volunteered by hardcore surfers. In 2011, CS’s application for federal 501(c)(3) charity status was rejected by the IRS. This led to a new avatar, CS as a for-profit entity (B-Corporation) with $7.6M raised by Benchmark Capital. A B-Corporation is a class of corporation that is required to create general benefit for society as well as their shareholders.

This move came as a shock to many, especially since the site and community had been built by a group of people with the whole non-profit, "we love the world" line of thought. There were several protests from members including formation of groups on the site against the move. In an attempt to quantify the volunteer contributions, CS set up the CouchSurfing Cultural Exchange fund with funds from the Non- Profit entity which will award monetary grants to non-profits and schools with compatible missions. Several accusations over the years of mismanagement of funds and lack of transparency did not help the image either. The hope though is that with the transparency requirements of a B-Corp, such accusations will be a thing of the past.

In August 2012 CS raised a new round of funding of $15M led by General Catalyst Partners. This set off further alarms given that the investors portfolio includes companies like Kayak, AirBnB and Sabre – entirely profit oriented ventures. What this boils down to is, with $22.6M invested, who is going to pay?

Over a year after the first round of funding, nothing has changed other than a vastly improved user experience, but there has been no move so far to monetize the 4M strong CS network. When posed with the question of monetization, Ms. Fishman answered that they have been exploring revenue models which do not impact the user experience.

The one thing that struck me through the interview, which was via mail, was I would go so far as to say, very corporate answers. I’m a strong believer in entities going the For-profit route in order to make bigger change, but there is this troubling feeling that the investors are out to exploit the power of that 4M strong and growing network. Unfortunately, at this time we will just have to wait and watch. In the meantime, however, Happy Surfing!

Uday Balaji
http://www.couchsurfing.org/people/udaybalaji/
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