![]() ![]() We were exhausted and didn't have the energy to really do anything after our 6 hour plane flight. We had literally just gotten in at like 4 pm, put groceries down on the counter, and the little buggers were on them almost immediately. But when we got there it was full of cockroaches. When my fiance and I stayed at a place in Paia on Maui, the place looked immaculate from the pictures. Only last month have I received the first "worthy" request, where somebody actually read my profile and seemed to have some of the original couchsurfing spirit. and also out of curiosity about how bad it could really get. I kept my profile up in hopes that things would eventually return. I knew at least 15 ambassadors personally who deleted their profiles around the same time all these changes were happening, particularly because their feedback was being completely ignored. This was also true of tens of CS friends, many of whom pleaded with the new management to stop breaking things and to listen to their feedback. I went from hosting people every week, making lots of spontaneous trips and organizing events to not being involved at all. The site was rather quickly overwhelmed with people who just wanted a free hotel while they go out and party, while the core community abandoned the site, leaving a vacuum to be filled by people who didn't care about the original "spirit". search and the groups got progressively worse), among reasons. ![]() For me it was apparent that they new owner only cared about the number of users and proceeded to advertise instead of relying primarily on word-of-mouth, ignoring critical feedback from core members/ambassadors, as well as destroy the usability of the site (e.g. I went looking for some of them but the best I could find was on Quora. There are a ton of reasons which were laid out by multiple disgruntled ex-couchsurfers in a myriad of blog-posts. I wouldn't attribute any of the downfall of Couchsurfing to AirBnB, rather the new owners. The crook makes more than that from a single scam. I reported the scammer to AirBnB, got a refund + $100 but they did not do anything other than $100 fine to the scammer. If he books it at the higher price he kicks out the first renters with the "next year booking" scam. The scammer lists the same property twice with ~30% difference in price using slightly different photos and descriptions. Then it dawned on me that the scammer changed the dates of stay to the next year and added $20 just to distract me. In the morning I looked at it again on computer (as opposed to the phone) and saw something odd: the dates of stay we crossed and replaced by the exact same dates. That was small and I did not want the hassle of arguing but just decided to leave it till morning. On the night before check-in at about 2am I got a text from the host asking me to increase the price of stay by $20. ![]() I booked a place in Reno a week in advance. Here is another scam that someone tried to pull on me. ![]()
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