A friend in every port

Remember when our grandparents thought of going on holiday, they always chose places where they had relatives or friends to stay with? Now an international cultural exchange project, CouchSurfing, is enabling people across the world to do that and more.

This non-profit Internet-based community is a meeting ground for people who like to travel and people who like to meet travellers. How it works is simple "" when CouchSurfers travel to Paris or Panipat or anywhere in between, they can stay as guests of local members, or if they choose, meet them over coffee or a drink, for tips on how to best to enjoy the place.

At first glance, the idea seems almost preposterously naïve. I mean hundreds of things could go wrong on a strange couch belonging to a stranger in a strange country, couldn't they? CouchSurfers say a resounding no. "You just have to trust "" after all, nobody's going to come across the seven seas to rob their host!" says Manish Sinha, head of account planning in an ad agency in Mumbai, who's hosted a couple of CouchSurfers since he signed up on the website five months ago.

Aparna Shekar, a 26-year-old MNC executive and a Couchsurfing ambassador, adds, "The system works on testimonials that are based on actual experiences. Members can vouch for people they've met or stayed with, and these testimonials are for public view online. So when one's looking for someone to stay with across the world, whether he or she has been vouched for, or the number of friends he/she has in the CouchSurfing community, gives them a measure of confidence."

The website also offers an optional service of name and address verification and many members opt to stay only with those who've been verified.

In spite of all these checks and balances, CouchSurfing essentially does remain a leap of faith (although project statistics report that only 0.2 per cent of interactions through the website have been rated negative). In return, CouchSurfers say they gain incredible travel experiences impossible to achieve with guides and guidebooks alone.

"When my husband and I CouchSurfed in Spain and Portugal, our local hosts told us where to eat the best local food, which tourist traps to avoid, how to travel cheaply etc," says Shekar.

"The best part of our trip was not that we were hosted by fellow members, but that we got to experience different cultures through the eyes of locals!" Zelia, a Portuguese CouchSurfer currently holidaying in India, says the same thing, "It enables me to interact with many different people and get to know places from their point of view."

A member since 2004, she has travelled to Estonia, Latvia, Poland and other countries by CouchSurfing. It's cultural exchange of the best kind, she says. S hekar has fond memories of cookouts with her Spanish hosts, where she cooked Indian and they cooked Spanish.

Sinha says the long conversations he had with Bob, a 64-year-old American CouchSurfer he hosted, helped him to understand what the American dream was about.

The initial idea of CouchSurfing was born out of need "" 26-year-old Casey Fenton got a really cheap air ticket from Boston to Iceland on the Internet, but was too cash-strapped to afford a hotel there.

From a university database, he got the emails of 1,500 students and wrote to all asking if anyone could offer him a couch to sack out on. Several wrote back enthusiastically, and the seed of CouchSurfing was sown.

If people thought this was yet another one of those ideas that merely sounded brilliant but never ever fully took off, the stats proved them wrong: Since its inception in 2004, there have been a total of 1,72,784 converts to CouchSurfing, representing 21,102 cities in 213 countries. Even in India "" often perceived to be a nation of unadventurous souls who only holiday if they can claim LTC benefits "" there are about 1,000 CouchSurfers (of which 510 are in Mumbai alone).

Growing the way it is, with roughly 3,000 new sign-ups every week, CouchSurfing is proof that even in the troubled, often cynical times we live in, there's no dearth of people ready to trust one another and share their life experiences.

Steven Platteeuw, a Belgian CouchSurfer, writes on the website "" "I didn't know anything like this was possible, but fortunately I have been proven wrong!" Caroline Wyatt from France sums it up effectively: "CouchSurfing has managed to give evidence to the theory that there are people in the world whom we may trust blindly.

That we can arrive in Paris, St Petersburg, Rio de Janeiro, Montreal "" anywhere, really, and find someone of the same mind as ourselves. That we can tread our feet across every square metre of the globe, and someone else will be there with a pillow, a smile, and sometimes even cab fare to the nearest bar... quite simply put: CS makes me happier."