As Elisa Comer looks for a house with no front door, no visible address— just a square kitchen window next to a dive Sushi restaurant that she’s supposed to crawl through— she begins to wonder what exactly she has gotten herself into. Comer wanders around the west Hastings area in Vancouver, British Columbia—the West Hastings area is often referred to as the Tenderloin of Vancouver—until she reaches her kitchen window, where she will be couch-surfing for the first time with a fellow couch-surfer from the Couch Surfing Project’s community. “When [her host] Alex first said go through the kitchen window, I kinda laughed cuz I thought he was joking, and then a few minutes later I knew he was totally serious,” Comer says.
Comer, one of the 644,074 females registered on the Couch Surfing Project’s website, hopes that she experiences a successful surfing, like 1,654,242 couch surfers already have using the website. The idea behind couch-surfing, a wildly growing trend, is generally that one member of the community stays with another member while traveling. While there are many other benefits to couch-surfing besides free lodging, the reliance on trusting strangers is the only way to have success while couch-surfing, which can lead to issues such as safety and security.
A major concern for travelers is safety and security during their trip. People like Comer, who have fewer reservations about security than others, says that safety is one of her top concerns while traveling. “If I don’t feel safe, I’m gone,” Comer says. She felt that although the security was rather lax in her host’s home in Vancouver, seeing as how anyone could open their unlocked kitchen window, she was safe with so many people staying together—there were thirteen people sleeping on the floors of the small one bedroom apartment.
After talking to over forty people— individually, in groups, and through the couch-surfing message system— I found that not many safety and security issues have come up, or at least have not been reported to the Couch Surfing Project. Most of the issues are small, and fairly common sense items; issues that can be expected during couch-surfing are equivalent to those if you were to open your home up for a party.
THE COMMUNITY’S TIPS
To help ensure the safety of both couch-surfers, as well as hosts, the Couch Surfing Project has put together some safety guidelines that specify dos and don’ts for smart surfers. The list, which is a basic bullet point list of tips, gives basic, common sense traveling advice, with few tips specifically for couch-surfing. For example, they suggest filling out your profile completely, and only surfing with those whose profiles are completely filled out, as well as never making couch-surfing arrangements via telephone, email, or in person, but through the messaging system set-up on couch-surfers.
SOLVING A COUCH-SURFING PROBLEM
“Don’t move!” Lan Nguyen shouts to her friend Roxi as she points to the shards of glass that are scattered all over the linoleum floor. Ngyuen starts looking for the broom to clean up what was formerly known as her couch-surfing host’s kitchen window. Nguyen, along with two other friends, are in Canada couch-surfing while on a hiatus from employment. Something going wrong while your host is out of the house is always nerve-racking, but when you met your host only twenty-four hours prior, a body-altering tenseness starts to take over as your mind races in anticipation of their reaction.
The Couch-Surfing safety guidelines say that if you “have an issue with another [couch-surfing] member, the first step is to discuss it with them if you feel comfortable doing so.” So the young women nervously called their hosts to let them know that while dancing around the kitchen, Roxi’s arm hit and broke the window. “They were totally cool about the situation. We paid them for the damages, and then they took us out for drinks,” Nguyen says. The community also has a safety committee that can be contacted if members are unable to solve the problem themselves, or if there are legalities included in the problem.
SECURITY
The wooden front door swings open as a few small kids say “Trick or Treat.” In broken English and at slightly different times, three young men from northern Basque country anxiously respond with an enthusiastic “Happy Halloween.” The three men are staying in San Francisco with a first time couch-surfing host, and longtime San Francisco resident Brooke Bates. “They didn’t know what Halloween was. So I showed them pictures and told them what was up,” Bates says. After Bates explained Halloween, and got them all jazzed up to participate, she had a small dilemma. They were planning on getting back at different times of the night, and Bates was unsure about giving them a key to the house, like a lot of couch-surfers do.
After making other arrangements with her roommates, Bates decided not to give them a key. “They were awesome but I’m just not down to give up my house keys to strangers—no matter how cool they are,” Bates says. Many couch-surfing hosts feel that there is no safety or security threat when giving surfers a key to a home so that they can come and go whenever they please. But others, like Bates, feels more control of the situation when she knows that “nobody else is runnin’ around with my house keys.” Security of your home is a concern for a lot of surfers and host who participate in the Couch-Surfing Project.
While the Couch Surfing Project has a system in place for safety concerns, security matters are mostly left up to the surfer, and to a small degree the host. Being aware of normal couch-surfing procedures is the smartest way to travel safely. For instance, having a complete profile and leaving honest feedback of hosts for future surfers is an easy way of taking precautions, as well as taking advantage of the vouching system set-up on the website.
EYES OF THE COMMUNITY
This community is like every other community— sometimes things can go wrong and sometimes do. The couch-surfing project is run on the basis that members look out for each other, every time that a reference is written or read, every time a member participates in couch-surfing group activities, or contact the safety committee for problems, all of these help the project (community) run smoothly.
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