I
have written about tips to travel safely with Airbnb. For Airbnb, we still pay
the hosts, just most of the time it is much cheaper than hotels. Most Airbnb
hosts use their spare rooms to host guests. That means most of the time the
guests will have a separate rooms to stay in and have a lot of privacy.
Today I am going to introduce you an even
cheaper way for lodging: Couchsurfing. It means hosts provide their couches for
travelers to sleep on for free. The concept is very similar to Airbnb. In fact,
there was Couchsurfing first (2003), and then Airbnb (2008). The major difference
between the two is price. Couchsurfing is absolutely free, but Airbnb charges booking
fees plus the amount charged by the hosts.
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| Photo by Ali Inay |
Because
of the concept and the fact that Couchsurfing is absolutely free, you should
not expect to always have your separate bedroom. Most of the time you get the
couches in the hosts’ sitting rooms.
How
does it work? Here are the steps:
(1)
Register
at the website of Couchsurfing
You need to fill
your profile so potential hosts get to know you a little bit. You do not want
to provide every bit of your information here (risking your identity), but you
do want them to know your age, gender, profession, hobby, and etc. Nobody wants
to host a total stranger about whom they know nothing about.
(2)
Search for potential hosts
Once you registered
successfully, you can search potential hosts at your destination. For example,
if we want to visit London, we just search hosts in London. Hosts normally also
have a detailed profile. We get to see roughly what kind of people they are. Here
we need to read their profile carefully and see if they are compatible to our
needs.
Here we need to
pay attention to their gender, their profession, their reviews, their pictures,
and their descriptions. As a single young woman, you may want to avoid staying
with men living alone to minimize complications. If you are allergic to pets,
you may want to avoid people having pets. Those are just examples of what to
look out for.
(3)
Contact
the hosts
Once you see
several hosts that you are interested at staying with, you need to contact them
through the website. For the first message, just briefly introduce a little bit
of yourself, tell them what the dates you will be there, and politely ask if
they are interested at hosting you.
Active members of
the website may reply to you very quickly. If a host that you contacted did not
reply to you after 24 hours, I would recommend you to contact another one if
time is important to you. You can simply cancel the request once you find a
host.
You may need to
communicate with the potential hosts several times in order for them to make
plans for your arrival. That is normal.
(4)
Request
accepted and you are ready to go
If everything is
fine, the potential hosts will accept your request through the website. Now,
you have found a free place to stay and you are ready to go.
Similar with
Airbnb, safety is our major concern while using Couchsurfing. For people who
are interested at using Couchsurfing, my tips for safe stay are the same to
those who use Airbnb. For details, please read my post “5 Tips to Travel with Airbnb Safely”.
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