My #1 advice for low-budget-traveling (free accommodation)

In this video, I’m going to talk about the main reason how I can afford to travel so much: I almost never pay anything for accommodation!
For low-budget-travelers and people that want to experience the local culture of a country, this is the best way to travel!
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Couchsurfing. Some people love it, other people would like to love it but are scared that it’s not safe.
In my opinion, everyone that has even just a small interest in traveling should have a Couchsurfing profile. It’s almost free, you make a lot of new friends everywhere and you always have a local that can show you around or even help you out if you have questions or problems.
That is why in this video, I want to show you what you should know about Couchsurfing and how you can get started.
First of all it’s good to understand that there are two kinds of people on Couchsurfing.
1. The travelers
2. The locals/non-travelers
Who the travelers are should be clear. These are the people like me for example, who travel the world and seek for people to meet or places to stay in the places they go. They might also host people occasionally but they have a big passion for traveling.
So let’s talk about how to get started on Couchsurfing and after that we’re going to talk about in which ways you can use the app
First of all: No, Couchsurfing is not free. It used to be but a while ago they decided that a subscription model would be a better alternative, compared to ads on the website. So now it costs $14 per year which is basically nothing and absolutely worth it in my opinion.
Hosts do not expect you to pay anything for your stay. However, I like to invite them for a drink at a bar or a dinner just as a nice gesture to say thank you. But even that is really not expected!
The five main features of Couchsurfing are:
- Find hosts to host you
- Find surfers you can host
- Connect with other members for advice or meet ups
- Find events that happen in the city you’re in
- Find people to hang out with through “hangouts” (only available on the mobile app)
So, how do you find hosts:
There are two ways: First of all you can write requests directly to people that offer to host others. For that you click on “find hosts” and type in the place you want to go to.
Then you just send a request so someone and wait for their response. It’s pretty important to write a good request. I’ve found this video a while ago which helped me a lot, I’ll show it to you at the end of this video. It shows pretty well what makes a good couch request.
Usually you then get their number and do all the further communication through WhatsApp.
The second way to find hosts is to create a public trip on your dashboard.
That way other people can see you are traveling to a certain place. And in the description of your public trip you can say something like “Hey, I’ll be in Bogotá for three days, if someone could to show me around or even host me, please message me”.
If you do that a couple of days or weeks in advance, in most places, you will get multiple hosting offers, and that’s actually the way I met most people.
But of course, if you don’t want to get messages from random people, you will probably prefer the direct request method.
Finding surfers that you can host is basically the same thing just from the other perspective.
Either you receive requests from people to stay at your place. Or you can look through the “find travelers”-tab to see who is coming to your city and needs a place to stay.
However, before you actually start hosting people, you should get some references from personal meet ups or people that hosted you. Otherwise, people will probably not trust you enough to stay at your place. At least that’s what I have heard so far.
Through the “find travelers”-tab you can also find people to hang out or travel together with. I personally have never done it this way but of course you can also send messages to other travelers if you think you’re a good fit :)
There are also Couchsurfing-Events all around the world that are organized by other members. Usually they are meet ups at a bar or group tours around a city for example, but I have only been to one so far so I can’t give you a good picture on how it typically works.
Last but not least is the “hangouts” feature which is only available on the mobile app.
I love this feature! Basically how it works is that every day you can tell the app that you want to hang out with people today and then you see all the people in your city that also want to hang out with someone and then you can start a chat with people to discuss what you want to do.
I did this in quite a few cities and I always had a great time!