Promoting hosts on community pages?

[alesdvorakcz]

Hey everyone!
I am thinking about feature to ‘promote’ less known destinations or hosts who do not live in typical tourist destinations, capital cities, etc. These hosts gets less requests because they are usually ‘less visible’. It would be nice to have some tools how to help them find a surfer/visitor too.

Here are some examples of situations I am thinking about:

• a host live in less attractive destination (more far from a tourist destination) and wants to get more requests
• a host live in a city without local community and and wants to offer different experience couch surfers even don’t know they can have
• a host have a time specific window when he can offer hosting
• sometimes a traveler want to visit experience ‘local lifestyle’ in countryside (or outside of tourist destination) but they do not know where exactly to go.
• a traveler or road trip is looking for places on the way (going from point A to point B but they could choose route according to some hosts on the way who could host them in between)

My idea how to solve it:

• make a feature similar as ‘public trip’ feature but for hosts. Some place where they could post they are looking for a surfer at some specific area, specific time, etc. This could be for example in a community page (someone from country side could post this to a nearby community of a city or to a countrywide community)

What do you think? Do you have other ideas how to help people to connect in these situations?

[gjw]

I’d like something like this @alesdvorakcz, I’m in the middle of the countryside these days and get almost zero requests on any platform.

Reminds me of an earlier conversation about different icons for the search map.

Different colors for pins on the map according to host status

I guess it would make it a lot easier to find a host if there are different colors for people who are open to host. Right now they are all greyed out and you have to click several times because you find people who Don’t host or are just “maybe” hosting. An additional feature would be a filter to toggle some options for pin colors if you just want to filter people who are open for meet-ups or by gender (not for dating, obviously, but especially for women who prefer to stay with other women).

Personally I’d like a pin that denotes: “I’m not in a city. I’m in the middle of nowhere. There’s only me and fields. You should come and see both!”

@alesdvorakcz

• a host live in less attractive destination (more far from a tourist destination) and wants to get more requests
• a host live in a city without local community and and wants to offer different experience couch surfers even don’t know they can have
• a host have a time specific window when he can offer hosting
• sometimes a traveler want to visit experience ‘local lifestyle’ in countryside (or outside of tourist destination) but they do not know where exactly to go.
• a traveler or road trip is looking for places on the way (going from point A to point B but they could choose route according to some hosts on the way who could host them in between)

I think several of these could be resolved by filtering. As for me, I’m mostly interested in meeting people. Where they happen to be is of secondary concern. In other words, I’m happy to travel to the middle of nowhere to find good people and would like better ways to find them. An “exclude cities or urban areas” checkbox in advanced search would be a possible solution.

[alesdvorakcz]

I like the idea of having “I am in the middle of nowhere” pin and the filter option as well.
I cannot really imagine having current map search for cities when there will be 10k+ users in a city but in less dense areas just having the map search will be great improvement over Couchsurfing.

But I still think something like ‘reversed public trip’ for hosts could be helpful.