Couchsurfing....

Tomorrow, I will be hosting my first Roosky couchsurfer.

Since late 2009, I’ve been hosting and have lost count of the number of guests who passed through my house in Dublin - it must be over 100 - and I still haven’t met the ‘axe-murderer’ many of my friends have expressed concern about.

For the guest, couch surfing is a great way to meet a country and opposed to just passing through and for the host, a good way to travel, without going anywhere. Ideally, it’s a cultural exchange and the majority of guests have been wonderful positive people with stories of their travelling and often a meal cooked in the style of their country.

On the couch surfing website, you set up your profile, giving whatever information you can about yourself and the accommodation you offer and, if you are an axe-murderer, then you should put this on your profile.

Some site users simply don’t have space for a guest, are sharing living space with others and can’t host or are on the road themselves and there’s a choice of three status buttons on the site to make it clear by stating, ‘Couch Available’, ‘Maybe host’ or, ’No couch available’. You can always meet a surfer for coffee before offering your couch - not that practical - or offer a couple of nights with an option for more once you’ve met and get on.

When I joined, Couchsurfing was a not for profit organisation and had over a million members around the world. I’d heard about it some years earlier but at that time had no couch and didn’t look further into it but, in 2010, I was planning a trip to the USA. Nashville, Northern California, Flagstaff, Arizona and back to Nashville for the last week of the month long trip. I realised that I’d bed spending a day and a night in San Francisco, a place I’ve wanted to see since the ’60’s and felt that a hotel in SF, might as well be in anywhere in the world.

My brother and I were talking about this and Philip asked me if I’d thought about couch surfing and I set up my profile the following day. I found a host, Casey, fairly quickly and as it turned out that Casey lived at the actual CS bat-cave (not Casey, the founder, though I met him while there). Toward the end of 2009, I hosted a couple of people, one girl who looked remarkably like a young Joan Baez actually decided on an impulse to leave Greece for a while and actually sent me a request from the airport before getting on the plane for Ireland. She stayed for a week or so and I thought she was daft enough to fit in and work with a fried who has a crazy hostel in Co. Clare. She did - for several months.

I saw CS pass the 2 million mark and 3, 4, 5 and 6 but also saw the quality of couch requests suffer a bit - people who’d heard ‘free places to stay - yay’ and who’d send requests like ‘Hey man, you look like a really interesting person to stay with and we’re coming to Ireland and we love everything Irish’ and such, cut and pasted to just about everyone listed as having a couch available in Dublin. Funny thing is, if they bothered to fill out their profile with some solid info about themselves - their interests and philosophy, then I might take a gamble and offer a couple of nights - usually with a positive outcome.

For about a month before moving to Roosky, I’d changed my settings to ‘couch not available’ but, once settled a little here, I put it back up but had difficulty changing my location on my profile and in the first four days, got about a dozen request from people who hadn’t read even the first line on me edited profile which stated boldly, ‘READ THIS BEFORE SENDING A REQUEST: I no longer live in Dublin!!!’

It was a pleasant surprise to receive a lovely request from a traveller looking for a quiet place to stay and enjoy country life. She also has more references than I do - all positive. (references can be left by hosts and guests on each others profiles) - Perhaps she’ll turn out to be the axe-murderer but I doubt it and look forward to meeting my first Roosky surfer.