Hi guys, I'm just curious to know how many actual monthly active users of CS, not what CS claims?
Edit: It was my first question on Reddit and I never expected to get so many replies. Thankyou all.
I saw it in Texas! 100% - was amazing!
Certain aspects of CS are dead. Also it depends on the city. For instance people in the US cities such as NYC, LA etc are super active with events and with people requesting couches. However I posted a meet up in Detroit and have very few people join or even participate in dialogue. I will say that the "Group" message boards are generally dead. Most haven't had a post or any back and forth dialogue in years.
How do you find NYC events "super active"? I find 34 events there and most of it is the same CS weekly meetup post (weekly until November; and the most RSVP's I see is 9 and you know many won't show up, compared to maybe 100 in the mid-2010s).
So recurring CS happy hour events are about 29 of those events. And people hawking their own events based on commercial interests (e.g. grant writing workshop). And people hawking their own events based on commercial interests (e.g. grant writing workshop)? Not like before, where people would post events to go to a rock concert, have a picnic, see a show, etc. together.
Perhaps a better term is more active than average . You are correct some of those cities that seem active are just the same group meaning over and over again and without much variety of events. Also in my those groups haven't been very welcoming like CS used to be. Some years ago Berlin and Amsterdam were closer to "super active" when I traveled there. Perhaps things have changed in those places as well.
Thanks! I just checked Berlin (34 events) and Paris (39) events for the entire year. And maybe 90% percent of it was recurring happy happy our or weekly running event.
It really has been bare when it comes to active members posting events for the group (and not for their pockets) even since Pre-COVID. I mean things like "I'm hosting a get-together at this bar/restaurant and then going to this concert/event/venue...let's all go together" or "let's picnic in the park on Saturday").
And yes, there is a whole new generation of CS users that are not as, you put it, welcoming. A lot more anxiety, non-sociable people or people who show up in your city and are glued to their Instagram or other social media.
Gosh do I miss the former times you speak of. We had an amazing loony bunch in my city around 2010-2013. Always welcoming new people, open minded, and always throwing random meetups and parties in each other's house. One memorable party one a girl in our town had was called "Fried Chicken and Porn". We'd be like 40- 50 people deep. She would literally fry chicken and we'd watch a campy porn movie with a title like "Space Nuts"🤣 No one was offended and all our CS guests visiting would have a blast if they came during that time.
Last time I was in Berlin at CS meetups no local was friendly unless they were excited to meet a girl visiting from another country. Everyone else was in clicks and not speaking with anyone else.
I think now people would find such an even offensive: if not for the porn, at least for the fried chicken.
This right here..💯
Ha! I bet it was fun. Yes, it really was a different era and most everybody I met on CS was pretty fun and laid back and up to for adventures and good times. And we also had nicknames for the wild and crazy fun people we met.
And yes, these days are just weird on Couchsurfing. There are studies that say the cellphone and social media changed everything. All I know is that its exactly like you mentioned it now and then.
Im just south of you in monroe. But I'm in Europe and Ukraine most of the year
Well going off my own experience I get several requests a day And See hundreds of people wanting to ‘hang out’ in my area.
Over all across the globe no idea.
Where do you live?
Post history says London pretty clearly.
Good on running background checks on reddit, probably experienced from CS?
Yep, central London
User deleted comment
1mo
Why?
It's in a weird "staying afloat" state overall, I'd say, but as others have said it also depends on the region.
I've been extremely active on CS since joining in 2020 (ironically during the pandemic), and my observations are the following:
-Current State: It seems like the platform had its heyday in the past. I feel like I joined a partial graveyard site initially with some limited lingering users, but over time realized there's at least a small community in the US, but much larger presence in other parts of the world (will get to that below). I also feel like it's been gradually growing back up in the post-pandemic years overall, and have been noticing new users join.
-Real Count of Actual Active Users: If you do a search on any given city (especially in the US), you might get dozens or even hundreds of pages of users seemingly on the platform. But then when you use the filtering options to filter based on recent logins (or even manually look through profiles haphazardly, since CS' default filtering options are limited), you will notice that only a tiny fraction of users you're seeing are actually still even active (I'm talking like a 110 page result could really be a 1 or 2 page result if you remove all non-active users - that drastic of a difference).
-Paywall: this must be stated, and I surmise this was associated with CS' previous "downfall". Couchsurfing historically, and undeniably, had an ethos around the platform being free and everyone inherently offering a couch (or bed) to others for free, with no expectation for monetary exchange. When the site started charging people to continue using it (which was admittedly barely anything, and the rationale was the downturn of businesses during the pandemic), this sealed a nail in certain peoples' coffins and they refused to pay, and thus their accounts were either deactivated or unable to login.
I learned the hard way over time that I used to send so many messages to accounts that had no ability to even see or respond to my messages, even if they wanted to. Even if they got an automated notification to their email inbox with a preview of my message, they wouldn't be able to respond when clicking on the link in the email, because they'd be immediately presented with CS' paywall (and actually, for this reason, I started including my email in my messages and have found a surprising amount of users manually respond to me that way, and have even secured couches that way, and this is how I also realized the extent of the problem that CS presents users with). Some users have a hard stance on not paying, even if it's a $1, whereas others don't mind paying.
ALSO, CS price gauges. Some regions (of course, the first-world ones - i.e. US, Canada, Western EU countries) are required to pay for CS service. Other countries (particularly those in Latin America, and possibly Asia) do NOT have to pay. It is for this reason that those areas not required to pay still have a VERY active user base (see note below)
-Region: Converse to the analogy I gave above for certain regions like the US, if you do a search for a city in a country like Mexico, for example, and you see hundreds of pages of results, there actually IS hundreds of active users in those places. They all are able to see your messages, and my rate of responses in other countries (particularly in Latin America) is astronomically higher than in other areas. It's no wonder there is a more active community in those types of places.
To be honest, I actually think the hardest places to find hosts are in the US and Canada. Part of that is also because I think there's more of an untrusting culture in these places on average, whereas other parts of the world are more accepting of strangers and willing to open up their arms.
-Persistence: With the above said, at time I can be VERY persistent to find hosts in certain areas, but I'll admit it can be like finding a needle in a haystack. While other users may naysay me (and I don't really care), sometimes I don't think there's anything wrong with sending "spam" messages if you're dealing with the above issue of sending an unknown amount of messages to potentially dead accounts. My thought process is to hopefully see if at least someone is "alive" and responds, and it's at that point you can then have a proper interaction with them and determine if it's a workable match for hosting/surfing. So I will say, even if chances are low, I've found hosts in the most random of places where there didn't seem to be any hope, and all it took was a single person to bother responding. And some of these have led to awesome travel experiences.
Competition: Other competitor sites have popped up in recent years to take advantage of the paywall situation at CS, and there seems to be a migration of users to other platforms. However, I have no experience with those and can't comment on them. I'd personally find it hard to believe that those other platforms rival the community CS still has at large, though.
Policies: The shitty risky thing with CS now seemingly is that I've read horror stories of accounts being banned/deactivated over the most ridiculous things. After using it for so long and building up my profile, this does make me a bit uneasy for the longer term, but if anything theoretically ever happened to my account, I guess that's when I'd consider a migration to one of the above platforms lol. But CS is not well funded or organized anymore, which must also be stated, and thus customer support is awful, the interface is completely outdated (my app didn't work for over a year until customer support finally helped), and honestly I think the app should clean up inactive accounts and offer better filtering tools. There's no reason that on the first page of results that pop up, you see a user advertising their myspace page -_-
So overall, is it dead? No - but it's a shadow of what it formally once was (on average), and has many outdated and inconvenient aspects. BUT, if you use it in certain active regions, it's very much alive.
I recommend it overall. And I hope it does make a more major comeback, honestly. It has been a complete game changer in my travels since I started using it.
Thank you for this detailed review as a former surfer from the pre pandemic/paywall days it's really helpful to see and refreshing to know there's some hope for those beyond the US/CAN.
Such a long answer but I read it all. I think the US & Canada anyway not an ideal countries to travel. They are an extremely capitalist country with people living from all the cultures, so they're naturally not interested in things they encounter on a daily basis. Meanwhile in other not so capitalist counties you'll always find people who want to know about you and vice-versa.
Thanks for this review, I used to surf and host between 2008-2013 in Europe and I thought of a quick trip to France like old times and hit the paywall.
I thought I was going crazy but it's just a hard paywall, and can't even see my old info. I can easily pay but my gut reaction is fuck that, the ethos of CS was free, mature and anti capitalist, I understand hosting costs money but how the paywall is set up it's pretty aggressive.
I'm going to try couchers.org but I'm not convinced. Let's see.
Such a shame how things went.
I can understand the sentiment about not wanting to even pay a penny because of the ethos, but at $14.99 a year I really don't think it's as big of a deal as some people make it out to be. Considering it's a partial hosting platform where people put you up for free instead of having to pay for lodging at a hotel, Airbnb, etc, $15 is the cost of like a single night in a crappy hostel bed in a dirt cheap country, and then everything else is "free" the rest of the year. Or, alternatively, it's $1.25 a month.
Considering it still has the biggest user base and namesake, I just think going out of the way to find alternatives ultimately won't serve you the user with the best chances of "surfing" if other sites just don't have a similar user base. Maybe one day, but even with its flaws and downturn since its peak, I'd still say CS is "king".
I thought something kind of similar as a pragmatist, and yes it is cheap, I think they'd genuinely make more money if they, especially to people like me used it before there was a paywall, if the paywall wasn't so aggressive and if they explained what it was for honestly.
The landing page is written and formatted so badly if I didn't know the possibilities within it'd be pretty even more annoying.
Thanks for your original comment though, I might try it.
For me (small town U.S.A) it's just slightly less active than it was before Covid. Still works for me to host and surf. Not dead.
It's very active in Europe and even Ukraine
Agreed. CS is active and the concept of couch surfing will never die.
Same for me, though 73rs old now in Mexico!
I used it for the first time last week., and I’m heading to a new Couchsurfing home right now. It’s been great for me so far
Great to read, thanks! OP and many posters are frustrated old timers who left or no longer surf.
Its alive. We host roughly 2 people in a month. Sometimes more. Getting at least one request a day.
Me too in Mexico, having more guests than ever. Obviously things with time, especially cellphone made it more democratic and the quality, so to speak, went down somehow.
I get tons of requests where i live in Innsbruck... To be fair im the first profile that pops up and 50% of requests are teenager interrailers. Ive hosted plenty of nice people this year though and kept in touch or visited about half the people I hosted...
They don't ever reveal actual monthly active users, so you have to do your own research for every city/town by sorting the hosts by last login. Even then it doesn't give an accurate sense of how many active users there are because many users only surf and never host —especially the students who are young and can't offer accommodation.
I miss the forum and being able to login without being told I need to pay. It was great 12 years ago when I went traveling around the world at least. I hope the community continues and eventually finds a new website.
Why don't you guys like to pay just $15 a year? I mean how would they operate if you won't pay?
I have no interest in paying for what you get, or monthly. Maybe I'd pay for like 50 credits to send messages or something. There are ways to operate much leaner than they do. I also paid to get verified ages ago. Lots of other things they could have done besides trying to lock me out of my account.
Seems like an ego issue.
Na
People have moved to posting their requests on this sub instead…. 🙄 /s
OP is asking if it's worth it to pay for CS in a roundabout way 🤣
Who can afford a couch these days? Or a home to put it in!
I don't think so. My gf has coachsurfed in Europe twice this year. I'm going to host someone next week And also I've been using the hangouts both in Europe and Latin America. Ps: I've been a member since last year. I don't know if it was better before, but so far it's been going well for me
In Europe it's quite active. Lots of fake accusations of course, but nevertheless it works. The concept itself is great and won't let it die! There are other alternative platforms as well, which are more reliable than CS. I'm using 3 in total, but sure CS is the biggest one.
What are the alternatives?
I'm using mainly Trustroots and Couchers. You can try BeWelcome too, it's quite popular as well, but I don't like the functionality of the site/app.
Alive, im traveling through perú and ive met some very nice friends
From what I've seen and heard from many couchsurfers, there will always be major cities with an active user base....simply because they are looking for a cheap place to stay while doing something else in town (e.g. interviewing, working, seeing family, etc.....for example, hotels in London are hella expensive and hostels are high as well).
For the non-tourist cities or cities that are not hubs for the moving types, its pretty dead.
NYC was super active with events in mid-2010s. Now I find 34 events there and most of it is the same CS weekly meetup post (weekly until November; and the most RSVP's I see is 9 and you know many won't show up, compared to maybe 100 in the mid-2010s).
So recurring CS happy hour events are about 29 of those events. And people hawking their own events based on commercial interests (e.g. grant writing workshop). Not like before, where people would post events to go to a rock concert, have a picnic, see a show, etc. together.
How am I wrong? 26 out of 35 NYC events (75%) are repeat events for meetups (and the average meetups is 5/month until November, almost all the below meetups):
Bi-Weekly CS Astoria Meet Up @ Mad Donkey
14
NYC CS Tuesday Weekly Meetup
10
FREE - MoMA First Fridays [NYC Resident]
2
The other ones are small one-off event like this with mostly just the poster joining the event:
TCC Grant Writing Workshop
Brooklyn Myseum Saturday - Looking For Tickets 😅
Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix Watch Party.
I'll say it certainly declined after the 2010's.
Before I used it as a host mostly and that was interesting experiences, but they changed their politics and even if you was hosting, you have to pay now. I can understand. But I lost all access to my reviews and contacts I made during several years. I don't understand that such a platform can do that, so if they die, I will not mourn about it.
I get requests all the time.
For me it is, used it to travel the world in 2017, and never used it since. A mixture of bad practices by the owners and being replaced with Trust house sitters (different I know but better suits my needs), I don't think I would go back
From my recent experiences I can tell that CS still is very active in Europe and North-Amrica. Last week I hosted 3 guests, so it's far from dead!
What are your goals? Impossible to answer. Your access will depend on who you are and where you plan to go and how much you put into CS outside of taking
CS is very active in Mexico, where I live, and Latin America. We are still missing 10% of the pre-Covid requests, but that's about it.
So maybe less event in NYC but better in Mexico City and Buenos Aires as well: NINETY SEVEN EVENTS:
No it's not. In India it is still free and I recently used it for my USA visit.
Normal usage i would say. Switzerland, Touristarea, requests are raising around April/May/June to around 4-7 per week
I'm hosting 3 people in the next 6 weeks, so it's not dead.
But I'm pretty picky about who I host now (I have AirBnB, so only take free Couchsurfers if they're really interesting!). CS has changed, so I screen out the people who really just want a free place to stay.
I hosted a young couple from France who messed up my kitchen, smoked outside so locked themselves out after I'd gone to sleep, met me at the pub but didn't offer to buy a pint (I would have declined, but they didn't even offer), then when they left NEVER SAID THANK YOU. I'm way more critical of requests, now.... I hate that I am. But I am.
Vagabond_Sue on CS Waterville Ireland
How do you screen out the people who just want a free place to stay? What questions do you like to ask
Well, some requests are "I need a place to stay, can you host me?" Nothing more... THOSE have no success with me.
I have a 2 night minimum. Those rushing through often just with a sleep... nothing more.
Susan
Some people are a little more sneaky and know how to say the right things. One way I suss them out is by reading how they review their hosts
Good idea!
I started on CS about ? 20 years ago? while I lived in Austin, Texas. Plenty of fantastic guests, I surfed at that time in Colorado, Florida, Mississippi, New Orleans.... then moved to Florida, still used it. Lots for meet ups.
Then 10 years ago moved to Ireland...have been hosting all this time, now have a new house with a better guest room, too. I've surfed in Florence (a week!) and attended 2 meet-ups. I've surfed in Ancona, Italy, Sarajevo, 3 towns in Ireland, and more back in the States when I visit. I hosted a woman 2 nights this week. Just met her in her new location for a walk and a coffee today!
I've always paid (donation, originally) so the pay wall never bothered me. I had 2 surfers a couple years ago that complained for hours about the pay wall - then that night spent €85 at my local pub. I understand a website that contains millions of users is expensive to run. I have no problem with business owners making a profit with their service.
CS is not dead. It had problems when it was free, it has problems now. It's still FABULOUS! I recommend it to most people!
Vagabond_Sue on CS Susan Baughman in real life
🇮🇪 🇺🇸
I recommend Workaway.info (r/workaway) , it's a little different from CS, but a great way to meet new people and stay anywhere for free or very little, often with room and board provided, almost always in exchange for a helping hand (which I think is totally fair)! There are also hosts that compensate you for hours worked/helped
Unlike CS, they allow you to simply browse the site and host offers before asking you to sign up and pay the fee (the fee is reasonble, and for an account).
Hosts/stays range from cultural/language exchanges to au pairing to off grid communities willing to teach you about farming and construction/woodworking, and more. This in many, many countries, all over the world.
It's the best one I've found so far. Not a sales pitch btw, just excited xD I will hopefully be doing my first Workaway this summer in the US :))
edit: Workaway.info, not .org!
Can anyone tell me if it's active in bolivia? I don't wanna pay if there are no hosts. Would be a great help ❤️❤️
Stop the stupid questions. Couchsurfing is very much alive.
Some of us genuinely don't know ever since the paid model and pandemic went into effect. This has been a useful post for me so far as I thought the app had ended hangouts and stuff too.
Nothing ended. Hangouts are active. Lots of trolls on here purposely bashing CS, especially the zealots pushing the flailing Couchers app.
That feels like an overgeneralized bad-faith statement.
Some regions really did experience a significant decline in app and website use.
So it's valid to me for some to say "yeah it's on the way out [of use here]" without knowing about th status of community in bigger cities and the differing policies in Asia, South America and maybe Europe.
Like in my area a lot of people started migrating to Facebook and a more personal network with word of mouth recommendations rather than stay active on the app and this was happening before the pandemic and paywall policies came into effect. Someone else posted that it really died down for them at least among others in the US (not necessarily for international surfers).
Whatever and who cares? When people make arrangements on Facebook etc., they take more chances than on a reference-driven platform. I’m on several of them. None have the traffic CS still has. FWIW, I’m very happy so far with travelers who contact me from Trustroots.
the company is run by scumbags who bait and switch you into paying for verification.
i am going through a chargeback process and will never use cs again
The second that they started requiring money, I stopped using it. I had hosted quite a few people, their reviews should have been enough, but they had to get greedy. I’m not going to pay to host people.
I started using it in 2022 in South America and it was pretty active. Met a lot of people this year in Central America and Europe as well and also was hosted by people in all places so I'd say pretty active.
In NYC not so much, as mentioned before it's really just the same weekly meet up in the events. Wish there were more women on the app as well but its usually men that pop up in hangouts. I don't really use it that often when in NYC.
Are you a woman?
Had the opposite experience as a sociable and straight guy with 80 references from both genders
Are you a single traveling woman with lots of photos?
like hip hop
Just used it in mexico last month! I was the hosts first guest and we went to see the eclipse together ❤️