You’ve created your profile and you are excited to use CouchSufing to help you achieve your first trip, but how on earth are you supposed to find you first couch? Hopefully this tutorial will help.

Step 1: Your Destination

The first thing you need to do is tell the CouchSearch system where it is that you want to go. If you look up at the top of the website, you’ll see the CouchSurfing header

which features (from left to right) the word “CouchSurfing” (clicking that will take you back to your default Place Page; the nearest metro area to where you call home), a house in a square (clicking that will take you back to your default Place Page; redundancy), a box that asks you “Where would you like to go?”, a big blue button that says “Surf”, and a bunch of other things we don’t need to use at the moment.

We are going to focus on putting our destination in to the search bar that asks, “Where would you like to go?”. For the purposes of this demonstration, I am going to assume that we are going to Toronto, ON, Canada.

So, in doing so, this

becomes this

and all that remains is to click the big blue “Surf” button.

Step 2: How Many People?

On the next page, you are greeted with your destination’s Place Page.

The thing that you want to do on this page is specify the number of people you have in your traveling party. Resist the urge to ask for a couch in conversations.

Instead, click on “Any”

and select the number of people in your traveling party.

Then click “Go!”

Step 3: Get Specific

On the next page, you are greeted with a view of the map of the area you wish to surf, as well as a seemingly endless list of CouchSurfers in the area.

However, not all are hosts and not all are who you want to stay with, so the next task is specificity. To achieve this, scroll down

until you find the left hand side of the page showing additional options.

There are lots of options you may wish to select, but you have to do it one option at a time. For now, I’m going to focus on the most important option: “Find: Locals”.

Click it and wait for the list to repopulate.

Step 4: Select a Potential Host

Here is our repopulated list:



For demonstration purposes, I am going to pretend to want to stay with this guy.

Perhaps I read his “About” and found it succinct and I enjoyed it. Perhaps not. At any rate, he’s the host I want. So I click on his name, and it takes me to his profile page.

Step 5: Send a CouchRequest

On this page, I make sure that I thoroughly read both his profile and couch information to make sure that we are a good fit. Once I am sure, I click on the orange/white button that says “Send CouchRequest to …”



and so should you. Up pops a form {not pictured} that I fill out and then hit “Submit”.

to return to the search list and find other hosts to target.