Couchsurfing: Ride the Wave

I can’t wait to get started on this adventure! All the different places to go, people to meet. Will we be staying in hotels? AirBnB? Hostels? All different, all with their benefits and downfalls. Are these our only options? Nope! Charo’s been doing some research, and she’s signed us up for some surfing – Couchsurfing.

What is Couchsurfing?

Well, it is just as it sounds? Someone around the world offers up a couch, bed, or private room and hosts a traveller or group of travellers in their home. It’s a pretty creative way to save some money and make some new friends.

Why would you want to host?

Why would you do this as a host? The idea behind it is to exchange thoughts and ideas, learn new things, and create friendships with the hopes that one day you can visit the same guest(s) in their country, and possibly in their home. What you don’t want it to be is a hostel or hotel environment where they are just wandering in as they please and just using you for a place to sleep. The exchange of friendship is valuable and cannot be monetized.

Without knowing it, we have already done this. When Charo was pregnant with Marco, we went on a backpacking adventure that found us travelling to little Corn Island in Nicaragua. To get to Little Corn Island, you have to fly into Big Corn Island and take a boat across. The boat is no way tiny; I guessed it could seat about 50 people. We were one of the last on the boat, and Charo sat next to an American named Sara, I had to sit somewhere else. Charo sitting next to Sara didn’t get us to be friends, but almost dying on the same adventure pretty much creates a bond, I promise to tell you that story sometime in the future. Fast forward approximately five years later. Sara is a friend on Facebook, and she is living in Washington State. Charo and I agree that we miss her dearly and invite her to come and stay at our place. She did! Sara met the kids, experienced Toronto, and we got to rekindle our friendship. Even though we don’t talk much, Sara has an open invitation to visit us any time she’d like.

Why are we Couchsurfing?

We are hoping to be able to build more relationships like this over the next year by opening up our house to strangers and them leaving us as friends. We also apply the same philosophy when we travel. We would love to be welcomed into someone else’s home and learn about them as well. I’ll be honest, saving a few bucks along the way will not hurt as well. This will be a year-long trip and expenses add up quickly!

Couchsurfing.com

The site itself is pretty easy to navigate, and you’ll want to create a profile. Before you create your profile, you’ll want to research other profiles to see what they have to write. People are sincere with their expectations as hosts, and most negative experiences had happened when the guests did not give time to their host. They ask for a description of yourself, your interests, if you have or are willing to host pets, or host kids and why you are Couchsurfing in the first place.

Finding a Couch for a family

In Charo’s brief research, she decided to see how this Couchsurfing site worked, so she went searching for hosts in New Zealand. At first glance, it’s great. Fifty plus thousand hosts. That’s amazing! Then we start applying filters. How many people travelling? Five, down to twenty-four thousand hosts. This is looking promising. Then click on the kid-friendly filter. One hundred thirty-eight. Not as good as 50 000, but I’ll take it for initial research, and I’m happy with the result. After all, I don’t want to enter someone’s home if having my kids there will be a problem. As a traveller, you should apply all the filters you can, so you are not disappointed with your experience as well.

The other intriguing part is the verification process. To verify yourself, all you have to do is purchase a membership. At first glance, it appears to be an $84 for a lifetime membership, and you can pay by Paypal or by credit card. It’s just a safeguard to make sure you are who you say you are, and you live in the place you say you live. However, you don’t have to purchase this verification. Like most websites, other users rate you. This rating helps to not only give you a sense of what is out there but also acts to verify that these people are real and what they have to offer is accurate.

Now for Charo and I, she’s created and wrote up our profile. After reading other’s profiles, we have to put a little more work on ours. Hopefully, this will work out for us — just another learning experience.

If you’re interested, you can see our profile and please feel free to write a reference in the friend’s portion.

Thanks for reading and happy adventuring!

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