Posts Tagged ‘couchsurfing’

Posted on April 28, 2010 - by Denis

How To Become A CouchSurfer

You may have heard about the term “couch surfing” which simply means crashing on someone else’s couch, especially in the context of travelling.
There’s a great community of couchsurfers and the online hub I love and use to connect with them is the site CouchSurfing.org (CS). You may already be a member there or not, but if you need a few ideas on how you can get started there, i.e. build up your profile and reputation within the community and get in contact with some of the really awesome people there, here’s a starter guide that I’ve originally written via Facebook comments for a friend of mine, and I thought it may be beneficial if I shared it with all of you.

How To Get Started With CouchSurfing

You don’t really need to have reputation to get started. Fill out your profile there, make sure you enter “couch available” or “couch definitely available” if you’d like to host someone or set it to something else if you don’t feel comfortable hosting people yet, but still want to meet up for a coffee or something. Then go look for a few groups, for example: the city and area you live in and / or travel to frequently or similar, some areas of interest like yoga (that group did the trick for me, I even found my current girlfriend through that group, and this story may be worth its own blog post ) – and the “stronger” the interest, the more likely you are to find like-minded people there. Then if you feel like it join some discussions, but if not the Universe will bring you people who want to surf your couch or meet up with you anyway.
Also, make sure you join “emergency hosting” groups if you can host people spontaneously, like on the day they ask or one day or so ahead of time. Those groups are usually well visited by people really wanting to find a host, so that can improve your odds a lot for having your first CS experience soon.
And if you travel somewhere for at least one night and have a little time available make sure you find a host through the site and stay there instead of using a hotel. That also will save you money, which shouldn’t be your primary reason for doing it, but it’s definitely a nice side effect.

I would also advise you to join a regular local meeting of couchsurfers in your city, at least a few times, so you make “first contact” with some people from the CS community, that can also be a good starting point!
And then, but this is less important, add me and other people you know on CouchSurfing.org, write them a positive reference there and they’ll respond with a reference for you, too – it’s always good practice to have references both ways there. This is going to establish a base amount of credibility for your profile.

And also, there’s always many invitations to various events posted on especially the local and interest-based CS groups that you can just join. For example we have a yoga group here in Dresden that meets once a week for a free class of Hatha yoga. Then there’s a meditation evening every week. Then I know of quite a few people who’ve found buddies for climbing, salsa, … through CS.
I’m pretty sure that you’ll find quite a few people to get the ball rolling on CS in this way! Enjoy!

Be sure to let me know how your first CS experience went after you’ve gotten started with couchsurfing! More tips on getting started and all things couchsurfing are welcome in the comments as well!