CouchSurfing

CouchSurfing is an international Internet-based, nonprofit networking community centering on the exchange of hospitality between travelers. The tagline of its Website, http://couchsurfing.org, is “Participate in Creating a Better World, One Couch at a Time.” This reflects that the community aims not only to supply travelers with free accommodation but that it also has a cultural and social objective. As members make their couches available to each other as places to sleep, a certain form of cultural interaction and exchange is enabled. Hosts meet people from all over the world in their own homes, and travelers can easily take part in the local cultural life of the places they visit.

The CouchSurfing mission statement claims that the service wants to bring together people from all cultures and all walks of life in order for them to connect and learn about each other by sharing experiences. It also claims to be about personal development, as it builds on the idea that the best way of learning about the world is to experience it firsthand. The CouchSurfing ideology, which revolves around the creation of a better world by the surfing of couches, is promoted by a number of CouchSurfing “ambassadors” around the world. It is believed within the community that this way of meeting and traveling can be educational and raise collective consciousness, as well as spread tolerance and cross-cultural understanding.

The site was founded in 2004 by American Casey Fenton. According to his own account on the site, he conceived the idea in 2000 when he found an inexpensive flight from Boston to Iceland and decided to randomly e-mail 1,500 students at the University of Iceland to ask if he could stay with them. He received more than 50 offers and started to develop his ideas for the site after returning from the trip. The network of members grew slowly in the beginning, and serious problems arose when the user database was irrevocably lost in 2006. Many users demanded that the site be started anew, and since this relaunch, membership has exploded and the site has received substantial media coverage.