Couchsurfing gave me lifelong friends and relationships. For years it was my favorite thing on the internet, and I defended it long after most people I knew had quit. So this isn’t an easy decision, and it isn’t a complaint about the people I met through either site. Most of them were generous, curious and kind.
The problem is the company in the middle, and it’s the same problem on both platforms. They promise that money has been taken out of hospitality. It hasn’t. It has moved, and it now flows to the one party that carries none of the risk.
How Couchsurfing came apart
Couchsurfing began in the early 2000s as a nonprofit, built largely by volunteers and paid for by donations. In 2011, after the IRS turned down its application for tax-exempt status, it converted to a for-profit corporation and raised $7.6 million from Benchmark Capital and the Omidyar Network. A $15 million round followed in 2012. The founder said he got 1,500 emails in the days after the conversion was announced, many of them from members who had been told it would always stay a nonprofit.
Venture money needs growth, and Couchsurfing chased it. Under the CEO hired in 2012, membership doubled. It also filled up with people who wanted a free bed and had no interest in the exchange. By the end of his tenure the company had spent half its funding and laid off 40 percent of its staff. In 2012 it also rewrote its terms of use to give itself a perpetual, irrevocable, sublicensable license to everything members posted. After the backlash some of that was walked back. The trust didn’t come back with it.
Hosts felt the change first. The inbox filled with copy-pasted requests from blank profiles with no references. People turned up treating a stranger’s home like a free hostel. And something Couchsurfing’s own rules forbid became common: people using the site to make money. Its conduct policy says asking for money in exchange for hosting is a violation, and that members can’t use the site to promote a business. Toward the end, I saw the free couch come with a tour you were expected to pay for, or a business pitch over breakfast. A platform doesn’t write help pages titled “Someone Is Charging for Their Couch” unless it keeps happening.
Then, in May 2020, with travel shut down by the pandemic, Couchsurfing put the whole community behind a paywall. Members who had spent years hosting, writing references and running local events were locked out of their own profiles until they paid. The researcher Katarzyna Gajewska, writing that summer, noted that only about 343,000 of 15.4 million profiles had ever completed a hosting exchange. The real asset was the profiles: years of unpaid hospitality, turned into a database.
Free isn’t the same as safe
The darker side was there the whole time.
In 2015 a court in Padua sentenced Dino Maglio, a police officer who hosted on Couchsurfing, to six and a half years for drugging and raping a 16-year-old Australian girl who had stayed with him with her mother. Investigators looked into similar accounts from about fifteen other women from seven countries, all of whom had found him through the site. On Long Island, a bartender named Dennis Edison was sentenced to ten years for drugging and raping a German tourist who was couchsurfing at his apartment.
Those are the cases that reached a courtroom. A 2024 study by Skyler Wang at UC Berkeley interviewed 40 women who had used both Airbnb and Couchsurfing as guests. They overwhelmingly saw Airbnb as the sexually safer of the two. When a guest pays, the relationship is buyer and seller, the expectations are fixed, and the platform has a process if something goes wrong. When nobody pays, the guest often feels indebted, and the host decides what the debt is. Wang concluded that Couchsurfing’s reciprocal exchange and lack of safeguards “increase sexual precarity.”
Taking money out of hospitality doesn’t make it pure. It makes the terms unclear, and whoever has more power gets to set them.
Workaway: the same model, with a fee on the traveler
Workaway is built on work exchange, and I have no quarrel with the exchange itself. Trading help for a bed is old and honest when both people know the terms. My quarrel is with who gets paid.
The traveler pays Workaway $69 a year, or $79 for a couple. The host lists for free. The host gives a bed and usually food. The traveler gives a set number of hours of work. Workaway says the exchange is about culture and learning, and it requires hosts to say so in their profiles. Its own site also says it’s “not a way for hosts to substitute paid employees with volunteers.” Visit enough hostels, guesthouses and farms on the site and you’ll see how often that line gets ignored.
Workaway also forbids any money between host and traveler. I ran into that rule from the host’s side. I don’t live at BaoHouse, the old house I own in Otaru. When guests stay there, I pay all the utilities, and in a Hokkaido winter that mostly means kerosene. I asked if travelers could chip in a few dollars a day toward the heat and hot water. Workaway told me to remove it or lose the listing. The traveler had already paid Workaway for the introduction. The cost of keeping them warm was mine to carry.
Since Workaway charges for the introduction, I read what it takes on in return. Its terms say you use the site “entirely at your own risk.” It is “not a party” to any agreement between host and traveler. It isn’t an insurer. It “does not monitor” either side, and it is “not, in any way, responsible for guaranteeing the safety” of anyone. Its ID verification, by its own description, “will not identify past misconduct or prevent future misconduct.” The help desk promises to try to give you helpful information. If a guest won’t leave, the advice is to call the authorities and then tell Workaway. Workaway itself sends volunteers elsewhere for insurance. Some competitors at least offer to help a volunteer find a new placement, or pay for a hostel, when a stay goes wrong.
Workaway doesn’t even keep track of who is where. A host’s calendar marks whole months green, yellow or red. Nothing records who has agreed to come, when they arrive or when they leave. Couchsurfing, whatever else went wrong with it, at least gave hosts a calendar that showed exactly that.
The customer and the inventory
Put those pieces together and the business model is plain. The traveler isn’t the customer, and neither is the host. Both of us are the inventory.
On Couchsurfing, members’ profiles and goodwill were what the company had to show investors. On Workaway, travelers pay for access to hosts’ homes and hosts’ work, and hosts provide all of it free. In both cases the platform collects the money and disowns the risk. The traveler pays to work in a stranger’s house without insurance or anyone to call. The host opens the house, covers the bills and takes on a stranger with nothing behind them. The company in the middle writes the rules and is responsible for none of it.
This is why the “no money” rule bothers me. Airbnb at least sits inside the transaction it profits from: it takes a cut, and it carries some of the responsibility. The hospitality-exchange platforms take the fee and leave the responsibility with the host and the guest. That isn’t a gift economy. It’s an exploitation play on everyone who shows up.
What I’m doing instead
BaoHouse is still open to guests, and the same questions apply to me, so here are my terms. I ask guests to help with the house and to take part in what goes on there. I don’t offer guarantees, and there’s no insurance company behind me. I also don’t charge anyone, and nobody in the middle takes a fee. The terms get said up front, between me and the person staying, before anyone books a flight.
Guests request stays through Hearth Surf on Xcrol, the small social network I built. It’s free, it has no ads, and it takes no cut.
I’m not the only one trying something different. Couchers.org started in 2020 as a nonprofit alternative, with a rule that it can never become a for-profit company. Whatever platform people use, the test I’d put to it is simple: who pays, who profits, and who is left holding the risk when something goes wrong? By that test my own setup is simple. Nobody pays, nobody profits, and the risk sits with the two people who agreed to it, where both of them can see it.
~CD
Sources
– Workaway terms and conditions: workaway.info/en/info/terms-conditions
– Wang, S. (2024). “How Platform Exchange and Safeguards Matter: The Case of Sexual Risk in Airbnb and Couchsurfing.” Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 8, CSCW1. doi.org/10.1145/3653695
– ABC News (Australia), April 15, 2015: Italian policeman convicted of raping Queensland teen he met on Couchsurfing
– CBS News: New York bartender sentenced for rape of German tourist couch surfing at his home
– Katarzyna Gajewska, “Gift or Data Platform? Capitalist Hospitality and Couchsurfing’s New Paywall,” LeftEast, August 24, 2020
– Inverse, “Paradise lost: The rise and ruin of Couchsurfing.com”
– CouchSurfing (Wikipedia): corporate history, funding and staffing