I'm a CouchSurfer myself (in fact, I'm hosting a traveler right now) and I have to say a couple of things about his CouchSurfing advice. 1) Do not use CouchSur

I'm a CouchSurfer myself (in fact, I'm hosting a traveler right now) and I have to say a couple of things about his CouchSurfing advice. 1) Do not use CouchSurfing if you just want free accommodation. The author says this, but it needs to be emphasized. I've never met a CouchSurfer that likes hosting people who just want a place to crash. The goal of CouchSurfing is to meet people you otherwise wouldn't meet and learn about places and cultures in ways that are usually impossible. If you genuinely want to get an insider's view of a place and you want to connect with local people, then by all means CouchSurf, but otherwise stick with hostels. 2) CouchSurfing has a bootstrapping problem. Most hosts and travelers won't want to host you or be hosted by you unless you have a few friends and references on the site. But it's hard to get friends and references unless you stay with people or host people. There is a way to get around this, though: local meetups. Most reasonably sized cities have a group of CouchSurfers that have regular meetups, either weekly or monthly If you go to a few of these, you can get some friends and references on the site, and then it'll be much easier to find hosts and/or surfers.