In an ongoing effort to improve the Couchsurfing experience, we’re testing a new search feature in a handful of test cities: Paris, Seoul, Istanbul, Salt Lake City and Mexico City. We’re hoping that this feature will lead to more successful connections between surfers and hosts.
Couchsurfers write over 66,000 Couchrequests per day. In a recent analysis, we found that travelers tend to request similar dates. This means that hosts inevitably end up with multiple requests for the same dates, sometimes for dates that they’re already hosting.
Many hosts have also given us the feedback that they’re getting more Couchrequests than they can handle. Furthermore, some hosts aren’t receiving as many Couchrequests as they’d like. This test should begin to address all of these issues and is the first step toward building a host calendar, a feature many of you have been waiting patiently for!
If you’re searching for hosts in one of these test cities, we ask you for the dates of your trip. If you’re just browsing, or don’t have dates in mind yet, these dates are optional — you’ll still be able to browse host search results as usual. If you give us the dates if your trip, we won’t show you hosts who are already hosting their maximum number of Couchsurfers on those dates.
We’ll use the results of this test to help us continue to make enhancements and new features that improve the hosting and traveling experience on Couchsurfing. We look forward to learning from the results!