Don’t get me wrong, I can relate to much of what you’re saying. It wouldn’t necessarily surprise me if the root of the problem here is that some people are just flakes. If that’s the case I think some of the suggested/planned features mentioned above will at least help us cope with that. My point is just that it might still be worthwhile to troubleshoot the problem a bit more before jumping to that conclusion.
Are the people leaving you hanging even seeing the requests? (If they aren’t we could attempt to improve the way notifications are handled.)
Did they try/fail/erroneously think they hit “reject” and it just didn’t work for some reason or something of that nature? (New platforms tend to have bugs.)
If people are legitimately reading the request, wanting to respond but then getting busy and forgetting, are there ways to improve the way we remind people? (Getting really advanced here, but could we figure out the optimal time to send someone a reminder so that it is effective?)
There might be some low-hanging fruit here to be picked. It’s hard to say without data though.
The timeliness however must be also on the other side: on another community on 15 morning, around 6:40 I received a request asking to stay “one or two night from tonight”.
When i was awake enough, around 7:30, I replied telling that would have been possible for that evening, not for the next one since i was waiting 5 other guests, but he should have confirmed no later than 11:55.
No answer. only today 19 i got a reply telling that had seen my reply only today and had already passed my city since he had no other replies.
In the last two days for today i had received 5 requests for a total of 8 people. Since it would have been the first day without guests after a string of 15 guests in one week I had decided that I would have accepted only one request for one or two people.
To everyone i replied within 5 minutes from their request.
Only two replied within 30 minutes and another after more than 6 hours (was for the next day, not next month !) from two of them I have not yet received their answer.
Incidentally I would have hosted the first that replied, but i discouraged them since for tomorrow they ad plan in a place outside the city in the other direction, so i recommended them to look for hospitality on the western part of the city, that would have assured them at least 45’ more of sleep.
Since they were lucky people (beside being two young women) after less than 2 hours sent a message that had found a good solution and would have not come here. In the meantime came the answer from another group so i told them that I was waiting a reply from other people and I had given time until 19:15 to tell me if they wanted or not, so i could not accept them until that time. then arrived the third and I told them to wait until 2030.
At 2010 no answer from the group on hold. I called them and they told me that had already found another accommodation, at my question why then they did not told me, cancelling from the waiting list and allowing me to rpopose to other people they muted … the third one never answered
(and two never answered after my first answer …)
So how guests pretend to have replies when thmselves ignore when hosts answer ?
I have sent a request yesterday evening to another Londoner host, which profile shows:
He replied 6 hours ago saying sorry and rejected it.
I was expecting that because this guy has decided the following, but still I tried:
Additional information
I believe Couchers is for young travellers so I always give priority to under 25’s
He is 63 but he thinks that guys over 25 should not use Couchers, I guess he won’t use it for sending any requests.
Being around his age, I certainly don’t have any priority or, to say it frankly, any chance to be accepted.
Too bad he did not mention my age as a reason so I also loose a chance to reply to him with my previous statement. I will let it be but it makes me sad (for him).
Strange for sure, but not yet dangerous I guess, specially because he did mention it in his profile.
I also think couchers should be open to anyone, but due to cultural differences I can understand some people who do restrict the requests one way or an other.
Hi, I will never judge anyone even if they do something negative, every person has reasons to behave the way he does that we cannot guess or even understand.
No danger for sure if he fancies men under 25 as long as he doesn’t hurt anyone, this is his life.
It just takes out the chances for “older people” to be his guests and if everyone starts doing that, then we are in trouble I am just joking.
In fact we should not play the “police”, the freedom to chose our hosts or guests is up to us.
It goes the same for the choice of gender which is strongly debated in another thread.
I read the word “creepy” in many topics, from someone’s standing point what is judged creepy can be judged convenient from another standing point.
We should only address issues when there are serious complaints and hear both sides in such cases without jumping to bad conclusions.
Someone can put deliberately his host in trouble to pursue his own agenda and vice-versa.
I do agree with you but I can guess that this person would not use Couching or other similar website for his travelling activities but only for hosting his guests, so he knows what he is doing.
He will not give any chance to anyone rejecting his requests.
If someone hasn’t logged in for 3 months or more they should not show up in searches unless it’s “all members.” “Dead” profiles should NOT show in a search. That’s another thing I disliked about CS, 100s of dead profiles. I think profiles need this kind of time limit to avoid CS’s dead profile thing.
Heather, you are partially right, but some people just don’t have time to log in each and every time.
I know this sounds silly, however, in my case, I get little to no requests, when I get a request, I do get them by mail, than I usually reply within 24 hours.
The point is, why should I log in on something that has “no activity” (at least for me)
Therefor I did only log in when I need it.
To be fair, this was in the CS days, here on couchers I try to be more active and help the comunity, but still is hard sometimes.
another way would be prompting “inactive” users if more than x time (e.g. 6 months) go by without logging in the app. that way you wouldn’t rely on getting requests on a regular basis to open / log in the app
@Richee, how flipping difficult would it be to just log in once per week, activity or not? @Heather: +1 and having been one of the maintainers of a publicly accessible z/OS mainframe system, we went further, anyone who created an account and who subsequently did not log in for four weeks, had their account mercilessly terminated. We also terminated other accounts after a year of inactivity. Maybe harsh, but on a system with limited resources, it kept things tidy!
As a host, I would decline him. I won’t house men who only house women. I wish every guest wrote a review but if the only guests are women, how comfortable would they be writing a negative review? I’ll check in with the women’s meetings!
they are correct with what they are saying,Belfast has very few hosts on Couchers.org and many are inactive or profiles are not filled in. They should be monitored and deleted if inactive for longer than a few months without explanation or interaction with the site and if i could help with this ,i will. maybe this could be a rule of membership to Couchers.org so people would know that the profile will be deleted if not being used for a specific period.
Heather,i only hosted women/children/animals during my cs days and if you can find my references on cs you are welcome to contact any of them about me and my hosting preference,i would hate to think that you are saying that the host does not have the ultimate right to allow whom they want into their homes as you stated that you would not host the man who only hosts under 25s, so you would be doing what you are against others doing…choosing their preferences. hosts decide who stay in their homes and travellers decide who they ask to host and whom they stay with…thats it summed up.
Hello Emily… i understand there is a lot of tech work and organisation needed for couchers.org to succeed but surely the most important thing now is to get people hosting/couching in as many cities as you can. I had over 150 good references on cs but now i am starting over again with none as are others who hosted/travelled on cs,that is fine but if i and other hosts do not get requests to host or see who is coming to Belfast then i am useless to this project. I hope it all works out as i enjoyed my 7 years as a host on cs and would like to continue contributing on couchers.org. alla best
Hi Rikki! Can’t argue with that. However, I wasn’t sure which post of mine you’re replying to Don’t be afraid to quote or copy/paste the parts of the thread you’re replying to so we can respond better. Thank you for your ideas.
or, to say it frankly, any chance to be accepted.
Don’t be afraid to quote or copy/paste the parts of the thread you’re replying to so we can respond better. Thank you for your ideas.