[welly]

I used to be very involved with couchsurfing in the late 2000s and early 2010s I had a high number of women couchsurfers, which came about from having positive feedback from other female couchsurfers, because like you they had their own bed and I wasn't trying to have sex with them.

It started being a concern because I began to think that people looking at my profile would assume that I was just looking to host women which wasn't the case at all. But from speaking to my guests, they said they chose me to host them because of the positive feedback from other female couchsurfers.

I do miss couchsurfing, I met some great and interesting people and have been thinking about getting back into it but have concerns about the direction couchsurfing has gone. I now live on a narrowboat on the canals in the UK and I think it'd make an interesting place for couchsurfers to stay.

[dkersten]

I hosted a lot of people in summer of 2008. All of my housemates were into couchsurfing too (mixed gender house: two guys and three girls, that probably helped), so there was a period where we always hosted at least one person. One weekend, for a couchsurfing event in my city, we hosted 12 people at once! We eventually stopped hosting because people got busy and priorities changed, but our experience as hosts was very positive and I still attended local couchsurfing meetups for the next year or so. I made many friends and contacts through it.

We never received any negative feedback and were in high demand. Aside from that one super busy weekend, where things did get a bit cramped (but people knew in advance that it would be), nobody shared any beds or couches and couchsurfers had rooms separate from the hosts. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Sharing beds with the host is... creepy (unless the person was given their own bed/couch and they mutually decided they wanted to share a bed, of course).

I miss couchsurfing too. I stopped being part of it around the time it got a sense for being a bit commercial. My circle of couchsurfing friends did it for the cultural exchange and at some point it drifted from that to just free accommodation and drinking parties. At least that’s the sense I got.

[welly]

You certainly do hear creepy stories about hosts surprising guests by only having one bed. And more than that. Of course, if everything is mutually agreed then that's fine.

I was actually pretty surprised when I was speaking to another couchsurfing host how many women he'd hosted that he'd slept with. Perhaps I'm (or was) naive but it never occurred to me that people would use it for hooking up.

[dkersten]

Yeah. It’s sad really.