Matthew R.

AVOID COUCHSURFING.ORG AT ALL COSTS! THEY ARE PRACTICING EXTORTION AND SHOULD BE REPORTED!

Further to my previous review and having been forced to pay the Couchsurfing fee which were actually call "contributions" although with no access to your account until you made the contribution, this company went far beyond the greed factor and into the realm of "extortion!" My account was active still for many more months to come due to the fact that I reluctantly paid the fees, however, a new pop-up on the CS site came up stating that "due to Covid19" they are requesting more money than what was previously asked for and still calling this a contribution all while blocking access to everyone's accounts regardless if they've already paid the fees or haven't! While I don't have an issue with the site itself and the experiences I've had thus far, it definitely left a bitter feeling when everyone was locked out of their account around Covid and asked to pay a fee in order to access any of your information, friends, contacts, reviews etc. There was a lot of hype about this and the fact that this site was always supposed to be free, but that's no longer the case! They went beyond just asking for donations (which I'm guessing many would have done!) You were forced to pay the fee or wouldn't have access to any of your account information. What's actually worse is that I've learned that Couch Surfing isn't charging for every country! As far as I'm aware, it's Canada and the United States right now. I recently had a surfer who mentioned this and as much as I hated to go back to Couchsurfing and pay my yearly fee, I was compelled to do so because of the history I had already established on the site. I simply cannot believe the audacity of this company and the fact that charging a fee is NOT universal as it would just cause them to lose more customers. Unbelievable!