61–70 of 168 posts
The first app I'd fire up when arriving in a new city was the CS app. I'd announce myself in the activities section - ie. I want walk around the city. A few mins later I'd have a group of people wanting to meet up and explore. Instant friends. It was wonderful!
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If I'm trying this idea for the first time. I'd like to know if my planned routes have potential places on WS or am I just paying for a "your search has 0 results" page.
I just checked with the guy who recommended it to me and he said when he used it, it was free. Website also seems to confirm that. Not sure what changed when?
A friend of mine, she used to travel a lot, used it as a dating app. She said better as Tinder, more transparency and in the worst case still a comfy couch. She met her husband via it.
I'm on the younger end, and around 2014 is when I was in my early 20's and rather much do airbnb vs couchsurfing because the reviews and the paywall was a compliment to allowing strangers stay in my place (alongside a fake/marketing fluff guarantee piece.) So I joined airbnb and used that, because couchsurfing was on the way out.
Early 00's Couchsurfing was a bit unregulated, and many people here forgot to mention the downsides - sexual assaults, thefts and such, which is not to say they didn't happen on airbnb or hotels, but the optics were never handled properly because "stranger, staying on couch, assaulted host" always catches headlines.
Plus comparing an airbnb to an couch vs a hotel, airbnbs won , you had a room for $20-40 a night, no fees - sometimes even less.
Now, there's room for another disruption, airbnb is highly not as efficient anymore for customer experience on the low end as they're moving to high end experiences, vrbo is kinda doing it's own thing and hotels are hotels.
Or maybe the high price of airbnbs are a reflection of how in demand and efficient all this actually is.
Airbnb ruined Couchsurfing because it changed social expectations around hosting strangers at your house. Before Airbnb, no one really even thought people would pay for the privilege to sleep on your couch or your spare bedroom. But once Airbnb started getting popular, I think a lot of hosts on CS were thinking well, this is neat, but I could get paid doing this. And a lot of CS guests became refugees from Airbnb thi…
I was an avid Couchsurfer and early AirBnB host. Initially AirBnB had a vibe very similar to Couchsurfing. Both seemed to lose the personal touch as they became larger networks. Money exchange is highly influential as well, but I don't think we can cross off network scale from the causes.
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Pareto principle. 80% of people are decent human beings, but the 20% that aren’t cause 80% of the problems.
Price's law: the square root of the population produces 50% of the trouble. Apply that to the US (328.2 million people) and we have that 18,116 individuals are responsible for 50% of problems. Mic drop
Nothing about trouble.
Couchsurfing was too intrusive for me when i tried. It required somewhat nice and approchable picture of myself, with some interesting story to put on my profile This was just too much asked. Compare that to "pay N€, you can stay M nights" I picked second every time.
https://blog.rplasil.name/2016/02/the-fall-of-couchsurfing-a...