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>> Free local digs help Couch Surfing
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by MICHAEL-OLIVER HARDING

PAI, THAILAND—Organizations aiming to revolutionize the way people travel are sprouting up faster than frat boys at a Full Moon Party, but the four-year-old non-profit Couch Surfing (CS) is taking intercultural exchanges beyond your token social networking tool. The Web-based initiative facilitates connections between like-minded travellers intent on experiencing life abroad at a safe distance from all handicams and fanny packs.

Travelling members (surfers) pore over the Web site’s profile pages to single out members located along their itinerary. Once the search engine filters out gender, age and availability preferences, surfers are left with a suitable crop of potential hosts to send requests to, with free temporary lodging and camaraderie usually topping travellers’ wish list. I caught up with co-founder Casey Fenton and members of the organization’s latest collective—what the group calls its “full-time nomadic headquarters”—as they wrapped up four months of work and play in northern Thailand.

“When you’re travelling, would you stay with a friend of yours?” asks Fenton. “How about with a friend of a friend? And a friend of that friend? Well, that’s Couch Surfing.”

From concerned to couch curious

Fenton, an Alaska-based computer programmer, stumbled upon the University of Iceland’s online student directory while planning a trip to Reykjavik a few years back, and the find promptly gave rise to a game plan. “I built a personalized spam program and wrote a quick script,” says Fenton, “asking people whether they’d let me crash at their place for the weekend to give me an insider’s glimpse of the city.”

Some 1,500 e-mail requests yielded over 50 enthused replies by the following day, confirming that the appeal of Fenton’s movement-in-the-making was far greater than anticipated. “I would never in a million years have had the chance to experience all the things I did had I stayed in a hotel,” he argues.

In the past year, the CS membership has risen from 200,000 to 500,000 to include all manner of thrill-seekers, from mathematicians to high school dropouts to acupuncturists to sculptors, representing 226 countries. That’s what drives Fenton’s unequivocal commitment to the organization.

“When I hear from people that travelling seemed a little scary, and that after they had CS experiences they feel that the world is more accessible and that they have a friend waiting for them in a faraway land, that’s really powerful,” he says.

Members with specific skills, be it online marketing, Web design or system administration, can also apply to volunteer for the organization’s ongoing collectives, where members manage the Web site and refine the system from an ever-changing destination—Pai, Thailand being the fifth and latest locale.

Yet the donation-driven organization was initially met with apprehension, as some saw a project granting strangers access into their guarded dwelling as iffy. But Fenton says it follows in the footsteps of trailblazing ventures like eBay. “When eBay first started off, many people thought it was a crazy concept,” he says. “But eBay overcame that using technology and references, and so have we.”

Web developer Jeff Knurek, who goes by his CS username Grandvizier, has witnessed his own family make a change of heart, describing his father as couch curious. “My parents were definitely freaked out about the organization for so long,” he says, “but now they’ve turned around, and my dad just recently asked me if he’s too old to join!”

THE PAI COLLECTIVE: (counter-clockwise from back)
Shelley Meabon,Jeff Knurek, Matthew Brauer,
Casey Fenton, Mellington Cartwright, The Rachel

Montreal’s divan roots

Among CS’s most devout adherents is a very active Montreal community that has responded in droves to the organization’s philosophy, and that doesn’t surprise Fenton one bit. “The city is a crossroads for the world, and it has to do with the mindset of Montrealers,” he says. “They’re very interested in meeting people from other parts of the globe and are really curious people.” In fact, Montreal held the unofficial title of CS international capital—the city with the highest concentration of Couch Surfers—until our Parisian cousins relegated us to second place last August.

Montreal-based CS global ambassador Eric Lesage, aka MrRico, cultivates our local community by throwing events and greeting new members. He attributes CS’s local popularity to our city’s cosmopolitan nature, the open mindset of residents and the size of apartments, making it “fairly inexpensive to rent out a big flat and feel comfortable hosting surfers in a space that’s bigger than a shoebox,” he says.

The organization’s Montreal roots go even deeper, as the city hosted the first CS collective in 2006 with participants from France, Japan, Wales, the U.S., Finland and the Netherlands. The group operated out of a 6 1/2 on St-Denis and, in June, 2006, worked around the clock to relaunch the entire Web site after what became known as “the Crash”—a June, 2006 server failure brought on by the site’s exploding popularity.

Breaking through barriers

As for collective members in Pai, Thailand, a popular stopover for backpackers near the Myanmar border, the bulk of their time in the Land of Smiles was spent building volunteer teams in areas like technology, marketing and member communications, which future collectives can now build from. And that’s no easy feat, according to Lesage.

“Having volunteers from around the world in different time zones makes it a continual challenge,” he says. “All organizations have head offices where volunteers regroup to get the info they need. CS, being a work in progress, is still paving the road as it develops.”

For Mellington Cartwright, aka Melly-Mel, a CS Nomadic Ambassador from Udon Thani, Thailand who works on developing communities of surfers in areas where CS hasn’t made substantial inroads, the country remains difficult to break into.

“Most people in Thailand live with their families until they get married,” she says, “unless they’re migrant workers and move to Bangkok, or are Western-minded. So we haven’t yet found a way to really translate the Western concept of couch surfing to Thai culture.”

But this is a challenge the collective embraces wholeheartedly, as they talk of expanding their mission of intercultural understanding. “Wouldn’t it be great for it to become normal someday for a teen in the middle of Iowa to say, ‘I’m so happy my parents are hosting a Romanian guy next week,’” says The Rachel, a collective member who first got her CS feet wet during the Montreal collective (and who, because she deals with member disputes and safety, wishes to divulge her username only). “I think it would break down a lot of barriers between people.”

For more information, visit www.couchsurfing.com.