Felicity Loughrey interviews a man who took his last US vacation the easy way – surfing the couches (and spare rooms) of willing single women.
Thirty-six-year-old set designer Adrian Jones logged onto the travel networking website couchsurfing.com after reading about it in a magazine. Soon he was on a journey across America staying in the spare rooms of single women.
What is CouchSurfing.com?
It’s a network of different people who list their couch. If you’re looking for a couch to sleep on you type in the postcode of the city and it gives you people with available couches.
I had to go on this trip across the country, so I thought why not sign myself up. When I was in a bind in LA and I needed a place to stay for a night, I thought, why not give it a shot?
So you email people and say I’m interested in these dates and they email back and say, ‘Hey, are you a serial killer?’
There are three basic levels of security in terms of who has been checked out. There’s a little padlock icon. If the padlock is unlocked that means you’ve just signed up. You lock in your address so you can’t change it. They have your credit card so that confirms your address. And the third one is that they send you a piece of mail to your home address and you have to type in that code.
What was the person like who you stayed with in LA?
The woman I stayed with was about my age, she worked for a marketing company and she was a triathlete. She had a two-bedroom loft apartment and so I had a bed to stay on.
Most of the people on the site are fairly young. My desire to stay with a bunch of 21-year-old guys in a frat house was low. So I ended up with mostly women and a handful of men. Mostly women because I just knew that their couch was likely to be a little bit cleaner than a 21-year-old guy’s couch. And being a 36-year-old guy that’s kind of important.
When you first open the door was it awkward?
It definitely was a little awkward. People have their profiles on the website so she knew a fair bit about me and I knew a bit about her. But in general I think people who are open to that kind of thing are pretty chill. That’s the thing about the website, if it were like Myspace, where everyone has heard of it, I don’t think I would have used it.
What happened on your second night of couch surfing?
My second night was in Dallas and I had no place to stay. I was meeting with an artistic director of a theatre there and doing some touristy things. I ended up staying with another woman. She was in her late-20s and was getting her masters in American history. I stayed there for two nights. I got there late-ish on the first night and then the next evening she invited me to go to a bar for a battle of the bands where a friend of hers was playing. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. You’re supposed to hang out and get to know people and see a part of the city you might not have seen. That’s exactly what happened. Which was great. She took me to this part of town where all the bars and clubs are. She knew all these people at the bars as she had been working there. It was local knowledge.
Did you give these women a hug when you left?
I didn’t hug the first one. She’d left early in the morning. She left me alone in her house. Like, levels of trust that are unheard of in this day and age. But on both sides too. I was leaving my whole life in their apartment – my bag, my computer, everything.
What’s nice about it is that the Internet allows you to feel a little bit more comfortable with strangers, as long as there’s some level of security with it.
Would you do it again?
I would do it in Europe. There are a lot of Europeans on the site. The other thing about Europe is that it is so much more expensive.
Have you listed your couch?
Yes. I haven’t had anyone stay. Being in New York, I imagined I’d have a fairly in-demand place to stay. I’ve emailed with some people but the schedule hasn’t worked out…
