See the World, One Couch at a Time

ABC News On Campus reporter Andrea Alarcon blogs:

Twenty-four-year-old Aaron Brockman spends less money traveling than staying put and paying rent. 

Thanks to couchsurfing.com, Brockman has kept up his nomadic lifestyle for the past four years, traveling cross-country on his motorcycle and then through South America.  During breaks, he returns to Portland, Ore., where his parents live.

“I think there are some people who enjoy living vicariously through the travelers in Couch Surfing,” and I help them with that for sure,” he said.

Couch Surfing is a non-profit organization that helps connect travelers with hosts around the world who offer their couches for free. According to the site, the idea came about when one of the co-founders, Casey Fenton, bought a cheap ticket to Iceland and e-mailed over 1500 Icelandic students in Reykjavik, asking them if he could crash on one of their couches. Fenton then decided he would never again get trapped in a hotel and tourist marathon while traveling.

According to statistics on the site, it has more than 1.1 million members from 59,862 cities and towns around the world. Every user is linked to the other users in the system through a network of references, vouching and verification systems.

Members can only be vouched for by a CouchSurfing.com member. Essentially, it's a trust circle that has trickled down from member to member to help ensure safety.

“People generally love the experience,” said co-founder Daniel Hoffer, who manages the Web site. The main complaints the founders receive are mainly about the site itself and not the actual experience, he said.

Yet problems that have been encountered with the system rarely have to do with security, but rather simple disagreements or misunderstandings between hosts and surfers.

Craig Heimburger, 29, has been couch surfing with more than 40 hosts for nine continuous months, in a trip from Hungary to Egypt. Some of this time, he traveled with his fiancée and their infant son.

In Romania, they had their first unpleasant experience. While the husband seemed incredibly nice and pleased to have them in his home, the wife acted with “passive-aggressive” behavior, hiding things from them and just acting rudely, Heimburger wrote in his travel blog.

To him, the couch surfing reference system is faulty because once someone gives you a reference, you can’t erase it, so users don’t really find a benefit for going back and commenting negatively on their hosts or guests.

“I'd love to leave a negative feedback for several of the people I've stayed with,” he said. “But where's my motivation to leave such feedback for others to read? The risk to reward ratio is way off, in favor of keeping my mouth shut.”

Yet Heimburger’s situation is rare. Most couch surfers have nothing but good things to say about the site. The precautions hosts take before letting someone into their home vary.

Georgia State student Matthew Chapman, 22, has hosted surfers from four different countries in his hometown of Atlanta. He always meets up with surfers at a public place. If it doesn't feel right at that point, he said, he has the phone numbers and information on the hostels in the city.

“I am always a little scared about it, but that fear has been washed away within minutes of meeting every person I have hosted or surfed with,” Chapman said. When he met a Canadian host at the Waffle House near his home, “he was holding a birthday cake and a bottle of wine for me. I hadn't even told him it was my birthday; he had seen it listed on my Couch Surfing profile.”