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It’s hard to have food poisoning quietly.
My teeth chattered between heaves. The intermittent splashes echoed against the tiled walls. I tried to slow my frantic panting but could only stop for a moment before more of my dinner involuntarily came up.
I ran the tap to drown out the noises I knew were leaking into the hallway. After all, this wasn’t my house. I sat in a cold sweat on a stranger’s bathroom floor, the sickest I’d been in years, 7500 km from home.
That stranger, Thomas, was in the next room. We’d met just a few days earlier in Zagreb, where he went to university. Thomas often met up with travelers like me, giving them tours of the city, and sometimes a couch to crash on. That evening, he’d told me stories over pizza about the people he’d met – a man crossing Europe by foot, a woman who drew comics strips of her travels. I imagined the story he’d tell his future guests about me; the girl who went to the washroom and never left.
“I did not sign up for this,” I thought.
Except I did. I never would have found myself with food poisoning in Croatia had I not stumbled upon couchsurfing.com.
I don’t remember how I learned about Couchsurfing. I just remember signing up as soon as I did. I filled in my name, my address, and described my interests and hobbies. I pored over the profiles of experienced users for inspiration and then tried to make myself sound as interesting as possible without setting anyone up for disappointment. I wrote and re-wrote my profile, stressing over how I would come across to a stranger through a computer screen.
I wasn’t sure back then why I was so drawn to Couchsurfing. Making your way around the world only to sleep in a stranger’s living room didn’t sound very glamourous, but the fact that millions of people were doing just that told me there was something to it. It felt exciting, spontaneous, and adventurous.
It felt like something people like me didn’t do.
Maybe that’s why it captivated me. I secretly loved the shocked reactions from friends and family when I explained what “hospitality exchange” was. Maybe, like a true Winnipegger, I liked that it was free; Couchsurfing explicitly forbade host and surfer from exchanging money, and the site itself promised never to charge users a fee. It could have been the fact that nobody I knew had ever done it, and I wanted to be the first.
To be honest, I know the reason. It’s the same reason Couchsurfing’s founder gave in an interview. An avid traveler, he wanted so badly to talk to people in the places he went, but his anxiety got in the way. “They seem so interesting,” he told one podcast host, “but I’m just too afraid.”
“I’m just too afraid.”
It would be impossible to count how many times these words, or some iteration of them, run through my mind in a day. Every decision, every action, is preceded by an anxious back-and-forth, a frantic battle between what I feel and what I want. Do I speak up? I’d like to, but what if I sound stupid? Should I introduce myself? I could, but what if I make a fool of myself? Do I reach out? I want to, but what if they hate me?
So, imagine my delight at finding a platform that did all the hard work for me. When I signed up for Couchsurfing, I imagined all these worries disappearing. It was a built-in conversation starter. I dreamed about traveling and meeting couchsurfers all over the world. I could be the carefree, confident person I assumed other couchsurfers were. It seemed like an escape from how I felt at the time; shy, anxious, and very alone.
But as my flip-flops flip-flopped up the hot sidewalk to my first-ever Couchsurfing host’s home, my idealistic vision of what was about to happen started to crack. I sweated anxiously into my backpack straps, blaming it on the hot Australian sun beating down on me. Regret started creeping in.
I triple-checked the address, imagining the embarrassment that would come with knocking on a stranger’s door. Then I remembered that’s exactly what I was doing.
I took a deep breath, knocked, and waited.
Couchsurfing and most hospitality exchange platforms work something like this:
Users fill out a profile indicating, among other things, where they live. Travelers, or “surfers,” can search their destination for someone with an open couch – a “host.” Surfers send requests to the hosts they’d like to stay with, and if a host accepts, the surfer has a place to stay for a little while, and maybe a new friend.
When a rag-tag group of staff and volunteers built the website in the early 2000s, its main use was facilitating this exchange. The founder called it a “trust network,” and soon, Couchsurfing and its utopian set of ideals spread throughout the backpacker community.
But it wasn’t just gap year students and hitchhiking hippies that flocked to Couchsurfing. Retirees, families, and everyone in between hosted and surfed around the world. This was the “spirit of Couchsurfing” the site’s die-hards raved about: generosity, acceptance, and kindness toward strangers, without expecting anything in return. After just a few years, the platform had a community of users in almost every country.
And these communities were active ones. Users organized Couchsurfing meetups for travelers and locals alike. For many, Couchsurfing felt like magic. The community that formed out of helping each other felt bright and authentic in an increasingly dark and divided world. But behind the scenes, the website wasn’t as community-minded as its userbase.
Couchsurfing tried for years to register as a non-profit, tax-exempt organization in the US, but was ultimately unsuccessful. In 2011, Couchsurfing accepted millions of dollars in investment capital and became a for-profit company.
While Couchsurfing remained free to use, many users were angry that their community had gone corporate. Bit by bit, the company’s business side began trickling in. Now, ad revenue made recruiting new members more attractive than maintaining the old communities that had built the site in the first place. Disagreement on how to make a business out of connecting people led the company to burn through staff and CEOs. As Couchsurfing became more mainstream, reaching roughly 14 million members, many users declared Couchsurfing dead.
But the website was just a small part of what Couchsurfing was; it had always been about moving online connections into the real world. Couchsurfers worked around the limitations of the website, and the community thrived. The “spirit of Couchsurfing” was still there, some users claimed. It was just a bit harder to find. But could it survive without the website that had started it in the first place?
Daniela opened the door to a short, sweaty, sunburnt 22-year-old with what I’m sure was a poorly concealed look of apprehension on her face.
Nonetheless, she let me in, leading me to the spare bedroom to set down my bag.
Daniela was Italian, on a working holiday visa in Australia. She rented a room in the house, waiting until her roommates were out for the weekend to let strangers in. Daniela spoke quietly and carefully; I answered her questions with spurts of anxious chatter, distracted by the nervous buzz growing in my brain.
The scariest thing about anxiety is how it distorts my perception of reality. Logical thought crumbles into zigzagging, disorganized panic. A personalized “fake news” broadcast plays in my head, turning my train of thought into self-sabotaging propaganda. It can convince me of anything, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Sitting in Daniela’s living room, I was suddenly certain she didn’t want me there. I assumed her house was a revolving door of worldly and well-traveled couchsurfers who were much more entertaining than I was. I convinced myself she’d felt such disappointment when she saw me at the door. Never mind that she’d told me exactly where she lived, had a bed ready for me, and had literally told me she wanted to host. “She’s probably figuring out how to tell me to leave without sounding rude,” I thought.
But she didn’t. And she didn’t the next day, either. We spent the next few days exploring the city, sharing the finest of Italian and Canadian cuisines (pasta and poutine), and meeting other travelers at Couchsurfing meetups. When it came time for me to leave, it felt strange to continue our lives with just a nice memory and a hug goodbye.
But wasn’t that what I’d wanted? A nicely packaged escape plan, an arm’s length friendship before I hit the road again. Every so often, the thought would pop into my mind to send Daniela a message. But just as quickly, a louder one took over. “What if they hate me?” Once again, my mind convinced me I would be wasting both of our time. I told myself she’d probably forgotten about me the second I walked out the door, relieved that I’d finally left. And so my anxiety kept me quiet.
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As I dragged myself out of Thomas’s bathroom, I prepared a variety of excuses in my head. We were planning to visit a local pub that evening, but I was wary of going anywhere I couldn’t reach a toilet at a moment’s notice. I racked my brain for reasons to stay in that were less awkward than puking my guts out.
But sometimes Couchsurfing is just that – awkward.
Once, in a small town in the Polish countryside, my host pulled out six shot glasses and a bottle of homemade vodka after dinner. She poured us each three, slamming hers back like water at a breakneck speed. As she set her last glass on the table, she urged me to hurry up, confused as to why I hadn’t done the same. I slowly raised the first glass to my lips, wincing as the liquid burned my throat.
Another time, my host made me a bed in her living room, laying blankets down on the couch. She then proceeded to point out her collection of exotic, poisonous pet spiders in tanks on the shelf next to it. I watched them wide-eyed late into the night.
Or, when I began hosting in Winnipeg, my guest and I spent an entire evening discussing our shared love of cult documentaries. We both fell silent when we discovered the next host she had lined up belonged to one.
Over time I’d developed a list of topics that could steer the conversation to where it felt safe. They usually took the form of questions. Where’s your favourite park in the city? What’s the best café? Where have you Couchsurfed before? I could talk to strangers and avoid crumbling into an anxious mess if I had a plan and didn’t stray from it.
But this time, a bad pizza dinner had ruined that. I rounded the corner and shuffled toward the living room. But when I got there, I found Thomas in the same, sickly state as me.
We spent the evening stuck in the apartment, taking turns in the washroom. I tried to keep the mood light as we struggled to keep water down. I asked what else I should see in the city once we felt better. We talked Couchsurfing to death. But eventually I got to the end of my list of pre-approved small talk, and I had to deviate from my usual script of stories and questions. Thomas told me how he felt growing up in a place where war was still fresh in peoples’ minds. I shared my fear that the person I put out to the world wasn’t the person I really thought I was, and we debated which was scarier – striving to be that person, or staying comfortable the way it was.
These were the exact conversations I’d set out not to have, the ones I’d been sure would reveal me as the person my anxiety told me I was. It had also told me that letting anyone, especially a stranger, know I was struggling was the scariest thing in the world. But that day, a stranger was all I had. Keeping up appearances didn’t matter after the seventh trip to the bathroom that night. I wondered if they’d ever mattered in the first place.
Hospitality exchange platforms rely on a few things. In Couchsurfing’s case, some of these things are worked into the site’s values. According to the website, Couchsurfing needs a “spirit of generosity,” “tolerance, respect, and appreciation for differences,” and “a desire to learn about one another” to survive. In short, hospitality exchange relies on users being kind to each other.
This makes it sound as though the direction of Couchsurfing is in the hands of its users, and that is partly true. But Couchsurfing also relies on a web of factors its users cannot control.
When international travel slowed down because of the COVID-19 pandemic, activity on couchsurfing.com naturally slowed, too. Borders closed, flights were cancelled, and inviting a stranger into your home was labelled dangerous for an entirely new reason. But shortly after the pandemic began, Couchsurfing lost even more users. This time, it was the platform’s fault.
In May 2020, Couchsurfing added a paywall, locking about 25 per cent of members out of their accounts without warning. For many, this felt like the ultimate betrayal; Couchsurfing had maintained the platform would always be free to use, yet here they were, doing the opposite. For most users, it wasn’t the fee, about $2.50 per month, that stung. It was the fact that Couchsurfing had lied.
It was the final nail in the coffin for some that felt the community had been going downhill for years. After all, none of the subscription fees would go to the surfers, hosts, or volunteers who built the community; Couchsurfing said they needed this money just to “save” operations because of the pandemic. But, in the same breath, they claimed they’d been testing new ways to monetize the site for years. For something that called itself a “trust network,” the platform had proven itself untrustworthy.
It was a sad end to the Couchsurfing story for those who left the platform by lockout or by choice. The community that had once felt immune to corporate greed had caved. It felt as though the claims of Couchsurfing being “dead” had finally come true. But while Couchsurfing had hogged the spotlight for over a decade, other platforms had thrived under the radar.
Some catered to specific niches, like WarmShowers.org for bicycle travelers. Some, like Host a Sister, operated solely as a Facebook group and did away with the need for a separate platform altogether. Another platform, Couchers.org, was formed in response to Couchsurfing’s paywall, and recently got the official non-profit status that Couchsurfing couldn’t. All of them are free to use and state they always will be…but then again, so did Couchsurfing.
While the landscape of hospitality exchange has changed, as long as there are hosts and surfers, travelers and locals, there will always be Couchsurfing in one way or another. Perhaps the future of hospitality exchange is one that’s more spread out and less prone to collapse.
“Hi Daniela, how are you?”
“Hey, how’s it going? Not sure if you remember me, but…”
“I’m so sorry to bother you, I was just wondering…”
I hammered out greetings on my keyboard almost as fast as I deleted them. None of them sounded like quite the right thing to say to someone I hadn’t talked to in six years.
It’s not that I didn’t want to keep in touch. I did. Or at least, part of me did. But the part of me that was always second-guessing, the part that always seemed to hold me back, said not to. Sometimes I wonder what my life would look like if I could act without that voice telling me to do the opposite. Where would I be? Who would I have connected with if I could type a simple message without calling my entire value as a person into question?
I finally hit “send” and waited for a response.
When I first started Couchsurfing, I hoped it would act as a nice buffer between me and the outside world. I imagined it would let me travel and talk to people without revealing too much of myself. I thought I could use it to justify taking up any space at all. I wanted something in common with people, something to fight back against what my anxious brain was telling me: that I wasn’t good enough, and that I was the only one who felt that way.
But that’s not what happened. I was still nervous around people. Anxiety still hijacked my thoughts. But eventually, I began to emerge. I realized I didn’t need an excuse. Couchsurfing wasn’t what I had in common with the people I met — being human was. Being afraid of something and doing it anyway — that is what the “spirit of Couchsurfing” means to me.
A few days later, Daniela replied, and we started talking about Couchsurfing. I didn’t tell her how nervous I was when I showed up on her doorstep. But what I didn’t know is that she’d had the same experience.
“I was so shy and embarrassed,” she typed, “expecially not much confident to speak English.”
I hadn’t known it at the time, but I’d also been her first Couchsurfing guest. I’d spent so much time worrying about how strangers saw me that I hadn’t thought anyone could feel the same. It feels both funny and sad to imagine two couchsurfers trying their best to hide their nerves, worried they’re alone in their anxiety.
It’s been over two years since I’ve hosted or surfed with Couchsurfing, and I’m not sure if or when I will use it again. But I think about the people I met and the experiences I had almost every day. Couchsurfing taught me it’s human to be afraid. But sharing that fear with others helps us get through it.