how hard is budget travel via couchsurfing apps these days?
hello everyone,
the day after tomorrow a friend of mine and me will set out on a trip to the south of europe. our plan is a budget holiday - we want to hitchhike to get around and couchsurf for accomodation. i downloaded bewelcome and couchers, since they seem like the couchsurfing alternatives which stay true to their concept. we struggle, however, to find hosts. we messaged quite a few people yesterday evening and today morning and have only received one answer - a denial.
i know that one day is a very short time, but when spending more time on the apps, i start to recognise a seeming pattern: most of the people are inactive. they probably created an account and never logged in after. the others are people who have stuck around for a very long time. they have many references and proper accounts but many explicitly write that they only host people with a lot of references as well.
my account is proper in both apps. i spent quite some time writing about myself - more than many other users. i added one or more photos and i can't imagine that the accounts do not look legit. i also proved that i read the account details of the hosts in my requests. i showed that i take interest in them (which i really do) and did not just copy and paste the same message over and over again. one mistake could have been that i sounded like someone who mainly wants a free place to sleep. but i just tried to stay polite and not too greedy - i offered help in the household but didn't expect them to show me around.
i must say that i do have a hypothesis on how people think on the apps. when cs was created, the internet was a completely different place - being social in a bigger dimension. now things have changed; it's all about money and self validation, true friendships hardly take shape online. the active users are mostly around 45 to 50 - they seem to be the og users from the early, beautiful days. i can imagine that they want to stay in their bubble and are not interested in young (we are 18), new users. they probably get spammed nowadays with low effort requests and do not even bother anymore, which is sad, but understandable.
now i wanted to ask you for advice. is finding hosts really that hard? are we just impatient? and what would you do instead? we thought about cheap airbnbs, youth hostels, camp sites or just sleeping in hammocks somewhere like vagrant holiday ;).
or otherwise, since the social side of the internet is dead, i had imagined that just talking to people might be the solution. approach them and ask if they know a park or something where we could sleep in our hammocks - maybe they would let us sleep at their place eventually. i thought that this form of authenticity could work nowadays but my friend is sceptical. either my estimation of humanity is far too positive or his is too negative.
this is ultimately the goal of the trip. to find out how people treat strangers like us in these situations. we still want to know a bit more in advance. i would be happy if someone responded - thank you very much!
EDIT: we got inspired by youtuber reuben schmitz and his free world trip series. we are aware, however, that a camera can be quite an advantage when asking for help. we wanted to find out if people are really helpful or mainly interested in being seen on youtube.