I like to dream big ;)
I know this isn’t the point of your post, but is anyone else surprised that 2020 numbers only decreased by 50%? (From 2.8 mill to 1.4 mill approximately)
I would have guessed that the pandemic decreased tourism way more than half.
Maybe people were still working? Domestic went down a lot less than International.
The trends are NOT good - https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?cat=67&date=all&q=%2Fm%2F07623n&hl=en-US Not even back to pre-COVID
Very interesting especially when you compare it to bewelcome and Trustroots.
any stats on bewelcome?
Lol
My city used to have 100-120 active surfers looking for a host. Nowadays it’s between 40-50.
wow. a european city? did you check this yourself?
Would you kill the chicken that lays the golden egg?
The current owners dream of a monthly subscription services all their life, covid 19 has given them that trojan horse to do so!
The current onwner is a venture capitalist that made money off Palantir and other investments (and supposedly has wealth parents). Many former employees and volunteers say he ran CS to the ground.
Everyone has their opinions about cs, from monetary point of view, its generating money off the good will of others.
Yes, that's true. But so is Facebook and other sites and they haven't tried to screw me over by shutting me out of my account and demanding money just to get back in and see/download my account details.
This is a good point.
The chart is showing that the numbers of tourists staying somewhere overnight is still increasing. Now Let's say more and more people will start using Couchsurfing, what do you think what will happen to the costs that Couchsurfing has to make?
For example: - The servers have to be able to handle all the extra requests, so they'll have to upgrade. - Larger amounts of data storage and traffic. - The rent of their office also increases
Now please tell me, do you think it's realistic that they offer you something for free while they make all kinds of costs?
If you really want it to be free stop dreaming and switch to one of the alternatives such as Bewelcome.
You shared a graph that doesn't have Couchsurfing specific numbers so we can't extrapolate much from that. My guess is CS stays are very well down from pre-COVID-19 days. You can see it in the number of open (public) couch requests, the number of friends/former couchsurfers I met who no longer are on CS, the number of events in big cities all over the world (pitiful numbers).
As for your "offer you something for free" question....most people I've seen who are not paying say that they can afford it but don't see value or see other issues (trust and safety, lack of quality guests, etc.). Obviously CS is not doing as well as it was in the past and any company doing amazing business would get funding from investors to handle the costs to scale up. Look at highly valued companies that don't make a profit for a decade or more....its cause the numbers and future growth is exceptional.
The current VC owner is running CS to the ground in terms of not investing more of his money or hiring quality employees and volunteers and there's no perceived value for investors to give money, so he had to resort to making people pay. Think of all the negative profit making companies out there that have hundreds of millions of dollars of severs/rent/employee costs.....they are still being funded.
why did the fees go up initially?
If you mean the one time fee to become a member and verify your profile initially it was sold as a help give back to the community and allowed you to send more messages out to request to stay with more people. If you mean the paywall to access your data, they claimed they were struggling financially because of COVID then never backed up that claim with any evidence. 🤷
Yes that's the information without evidence. Where's their accounts to show they're/were struggling. It would've been easy to implement the paywall after giving people notice to download their photos and friends information. So they did precisely take people's data hostage.
It is what it is man, you can complain about what CS is not, or you just enjoy the beauty of meeting wonderful people from all around the world.
I just set myself up on two other sites out of principle.
So did I, I hosted over 75 people on Couchsurfing, via the other platforms just 2. Seems the Couchsurfing alternatives are pretty much dead.
Hahahaha you’re funny