We’ve now added response rate and response time on user profiles, so you can get an idea on how likely it is a user responds to your request and how long to expect them to take to respond to you! It also influences your search ordering: how high up the top in the search you show up (try to get back to requests in two days).
Hi Aapeli 
Can you elaborate on what is calculated in response rate? Is it just host requests or also normal messages? What are the possible response rate descriptions and what thresholds are they set to? Thanks for all and any additional info!
Yes, I was wondering about this too.
When a user receives a host request, a “response” is any acknowledgement (i.e. accept/reject/message) to that. Response rate is the proportion of requests that received a response. We then compute response time as the duration between when the request was sent and the first response. If the host didn’t respond yet or at all, then response time counts as “infinite”.
The categories are:
The time estimates are the 33rd and 66th percentiles. So if a third of the user’s fastest responses were in less than 1 hour, and the third of the slowest responses were more than 20 hours, then it’ll be reported as “1 hour to 20 hours”. For example, @jesse’s profile says: “usually”: so between 66% and 90%. And response time is 38 min to 4 days: so the fastest third or responses are < 38 min and the slowest third are > 4 days.
I think the handbook will be updated at some point with this info.
Oof… I need to work on responding faster!
I like how he used you as an example, ahah!
Thank you for the explanation Aapeli! I will add this to the help pages of Couchers.org!
PS: If anyone is interested in helping write our handbook (a more detailed guide about couch surfing, our values, how to use the website, etc) please email volunteers@couchers.org !