I have found that feature (surfers posting planned visit dates to area and party details) very useful. In HK there is in normal times a vast excess of demand over supply. I sometimes have a gap in availability to fill but if I change my setting to “Available to host” I am flooded with requests and surfers are frustrated. It is not easy to create an automatic diary facility to cover situations like “one couch available in spare bedroom for one person willing to share for last 4 days of April”.
so it would be kind of an optional calendar that hosts set up and guests can see? Another thing I can think of is, when guests are sending a last minute message and choosing their dates, they actually can only choose between those four days that you’d have a gap and a date in the future where you’re available again.
which could also help people who can only host on weekends or on weekdays. so if you as a host can only host on monday and tuesday your guest would have to choose on a monday-tuesday date on a calendar. I don’t know if this made sense lol
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We definitely plan on implementing a public trips feature down the road. It’s a highly requested and helpful feature - especially for big cities / popular travel destinations. Right now there is less need for the feature since the Community is still growing, but rest assured it will be implemented!
@eloi I really like the idea of an advanced availability calendar. There are plans to implement an optional availability calendar similar to what CS has on their native app, but it would be cool to see if we can enhance it a bit further.
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Ref Calendar : may work for some people , especially if hosting only one or two people at a time, but I have found that when I have reached capacity depended on various factors such as relationship status (if any), acceptable bed configurations, availability of clean sheets of appropriate size (I like to protect the furniture!) , etc. I would generally not ask a male and female unknown to each other to share a small bedroom. All rather difficult to program but I do not know how many people that would apply to. Certainly needs to be optional. Plans change and it is sometimes possible to fit people in.
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If I can put my two cents in for the public trips feature: I always found it anoying on CS that i would be flooded with “offer to host” offers even though I specified that I am just looking to meet up.
So maybe add a feature where you can distinguish between looking to crash and looking to hangout on those public trips. That way, the locals can filter for either or both types of travelers.
I hope my explanation makes sense and am curious if other people find the distinction i explained useful?
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Makes sense to me. I think distinguishing between being open to accommodating and open to meeting up in host settings is also desirable if not already covered.
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It is also useful in the opposite situation. I live far out of the city and get very few requests; almost all my guest came because I had a chance to invite them and explain both how they would get there and what there was to see and do out my way. But it also gives other less desirable hosts (first time hosts, for instance) a chance to make their case.
On the flip side, when I have posted a public trip I have too frequently been flooded by people trying to sell me services. Not sure how that could be reduced.
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Just my two cents, I think this feature would actually do a lot to grow the community faster. I’m sure there’s already a road map, but it seems like the sooner the better.
As a traveler brand new to the site, you can look up a city like New York and see there’s a bunch of hosts already. Cool. I can sign up and send a request right now.
As a host, right now there’s no obvious indication of traveler activity. Maybe they sign up anyway, create a profile, and maybe someone will send a request this week… or this month… or maybe they forget about the site, stop logging in, and get filtered out for inactivity.
With public trips, a brand new host can see activity, immediately join, create a profile, and send a message to a traveler that day.
The points have already been made why this is a badass feature for a lot of reasons, but I also think it’s just as important as Events as far as attracting and keeping people on the site as the userbase builds towards critical mass.
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