BT optimism up, but shadows remain
BT optimism up, but shadows remain
https://www.hotelinvestmenttoday.com/Forecasts/BT-optimism-up-but-shadows-remain
NATIONAL REPORT – Business travelers are regaining confidence heading into the final months of the year with 43% of respondents to the latest Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) survey stating they are optimistic about the industry’s outlook for the rest of 2025 ─ a significant jump from 28% in June.
Canadian respondents are especially more upbeat, with more than half (54%) expressing optimism, versus 23% in June. It is, however, still 33% below optimism levels compared to November 2024.
At the same time, GBTA said concerns among travelers remain relative to still-anticipated decreases in business trip volume, spending and revenue at their organizations for 2025.
The data collected from October 2-15 from 591 GBTA member and non-members also suggested business trip and traveler preferences and patterns are also evolving, and new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) are reshaping how companies anticipate managing travel. Yet, challenges persist ─ from traveler accessibility gaps to the impact of government actions ─ and continue to redefine the landscape.
Here are some of the other highlights from the survey results:
U.S. government actions continue to cast a shadow over business travel spending, volume and revenue outlook. One-third of global buyers (35%) expect their company’s 2025 travel volume will decline due to U.S. government actions, with an average expected decrease of 19%, mirroring similar levels reported in GBTA’s June poll.
Also in line with June results, 30% percent of global buyers expect their travel spending to decrease in 2025, by an average of 19%.
The October poll shows EMEA-based travel buyers are least likely among other regions to expect a decline in volume (29%) or spending (23%).
Global travel suppliers are feeling a bit more confident about business travel revenue for 2025. Fully, 37% expect an impact to their business travel revenue (an improvement from 48% in June), with a similar anticipated decrease of 16% on average.
Revenue concerns continue to be most pronounced among lodging suppliers (59%), but consistent since June (58%). Travel management company (TMC) respondents are less likely to expect a decrease (32% in October versus 48% in June) while more airline professionals expect a decrease (50% October versus 39% June).
It is likely that declines in second and third quarter volume and spend are not able to be “made up” in the fourth quarter, Thus, the fairly stable view of slower/lower growth for 2025, even as optimism rebounds.
Business travel patterns shift toward longer, multi-stop trips. Nearly two in five travel buyers (39%) report a rise in “linked” or multi-meeting/multi-destination trips. One-third (33%) have seen longer trip durations and another third (32%) say day trips have decreased in the past year. (In GBTA’s 2024 poll, 53% of buyers reported seeing more linked business trips, 36% reported longer business trips and 27% cited fewer day trips versus 2023.)
Premium economy bookings are on the rise, especially in EMEA, where 45% of travel managers noted an increase.
Travel policies tighten on short-term rentals, while employees are willing to pay for better experiences themselves, without reimbursement expectations. Corporate travel programs are split when it comes to employees and short-term rentals: 57% of policies prohibit use of platforms like Airbnb and Vrbo, while only 8% always allow them.
Meanwhile, whether for convenience or comfort, some employees are deciding to cover what their travel policies don’t. Two in five travel managers (43%) say their employees at least occasionally pay out-of-pocket for travel upgrades, most often for flight cabin upgrades (78%) followed by airport lounge access (30%) and extra hotel nights (29%).
Blended travel continues to gain ground, boosting employee satisfaction. Fully, 43% of travel programs now have defined policies for blended or “bleisure” travel, with 71% of buyers citing benefits of improved employee satisfaction and 68% noting better work-life balance.
However, concerns remain for travel managers around duty of care (59%), expense tracking (55%), and insurance coverage (46%).
Agentic AI adoption accelerates, but data privacy concerns loom. The industry is embracing agentic AI, with nearly half of suppliers and TMC professionals (49%) and one-third of buyers (33%) reporting their companies are already experimenting with autonomous AI. (In GBTA’s February poll, 34% of travel buyers said they planned to apply AI in their travel program in “significant ways” in 2025.)
Top applications for both travel buyers and suppliers and TMCs are customer service, traveler personalization, and automated itinerary planning. Additionally, half of buyer respondents (51%) are planning to use agentic AI for expense reconciliation.Data privacy and security along with integration with existing systems are top concerns for buyers, suppliers and TMCs.
Amid revenue declines, Park Hotels & Resorts execs say liquidity remains strong
Hotel REIT scaled back fourth-quarter projections
Park Hotels & Resorts has allocated $220 million in renovations for several properties in its portfolio, including the Hilton Waikoloa Village on Hawaii's Big Island. (Hilton)
https://www.costar.com/article/1661002480/amid-revenue-declines-park-hotels-resorts-execs-say-liquidity-remains-strong
Hotel room revenues dropped more than 6% year over year in the third quarter for Park Hotels & Resorts, and company officials are lowering their fourth-quarter projections. But Park executives stress the company remains in a strong position financially.
Speaking during Park's latest earnings call, Chairman and CEO Thomas Baltimore Jr. said the company still has significant liquidity, particularly after reworking its now $1 billion revolving credit facility.
During the call, Baltimore repeatedly pushed back on questions on whether the company was worried about cash flow with analysts pointing to a decision to not declare a special dividend in the fourth quarter.
"So clearly no liquidity issues at all," he said. "This was just a conscious effort that we thought a 9% to 10% dividend yield, which is far in excess of any of our peers, was really the right threshold."
Across Park's hotel portfolio, revenue per available room fell 6.1% for the quarter, driven by a 3.5-percentage-point drop in occupancy and a 1.7% drop in average daily rate.
The REIT scaled back its full-year 2025 outlook and now projects RevPAR to fall between 1.8% to 2.5%, down from an earlier projection of flat RevPAR performance to a 2% drop.
Sean Dell’Orto, Park's executive vice president, chief financial officer and treasurer, said there were reasons both specific to Park and affecting the broader travel industry behind the drop in expectations.
"In our last call, we talked about [being up] 3% to 5% in [the fourth quarter], so you're noticing about a 350-basis-point drop relative to that expectation," he said. "It's kind of a mix of macro trends and near-term disruption, as well as a little Park-specific [issues] sprinkled in there."
Dell’Orto said about 150 basis points of the drop are "general trends" in travel, 100 more are from the government shutdown or other cuts in government travel, with the remainder disruption from renovations or in major markets where Park's hotels are present.
Baltimore said the company now has $2.1 billion in liquidity and no pressing debt maturities.
Near-term strategy
For the time being, Park officials remain committed to a capital strategy of making improvements to their existing portfolio and selling off 15 hotels designated as "non-core" en route to a portfolio Baltimore described as "20 high-quality assets in markets with strong growth fundamentals [and] limited new supply."
He added the company has invested roughly $1.4 billion in its core properties that make up 90% of the company's value, and that is only likely to continue.
"We're generating significant returns and higher returns through our development and strategic ROI activities than we can generate through acquisition," he said. "So we're strong believers in that, and strong believers that there's a lot of embedded upside within this portfolio."
During the third quarter, Park closed the Embassy Suites Kansas City Plaza and terminated the property's ground lease, noting it was only slated to account for $0.2 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization for full-year 2025.
The company is currently doing $220 million in renovation work at the Royal Palm South Beach Miami, Hilton Hawaiian Village Waikiki Beach Resort, Hilton Waikoloa Village and Hilton New Orleans Riverside.
Third-quarter performance
During the quarter, Park recorded a net loss of $14 million — down from $57 million in net income for the same period in 2024 — with adjusted EBITDA of $130 million, down from $159 million.
For the first three quarters of 2025, Park has recorded a net loss of $73 million, compared to $153 million in net income during the same period in 2024.
Total revenue came in at $610 million, down from $649 million.
As of press time, Park's stock was trading at $10.30 a share, down 25.3% year to date. The NYSE composite was up 12.3% for the same period.
Procurement efficiency: A modern strategy for state and local leaders
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insights/procurement-efficiency-a-modern-strategy-for-state-and-local-leaders
By partnering with their procurement teams, state and local government leaders can improve procurement efficiency using proven practices and leading-edge AI.
Against a backdrop of new federal priorities and global economic uncertainty, state and local leaders face mounting pressure to deliver more with less. Fortunately, bringing together proven best practices with new AI capabilities can help make procurement more efficient, offering these leaders an enormous opportunity to capture savings. Collectively, state and local governments disburse more than $4.5 trillion annually,1 and procurement efficiency is one of the most powerful levers—if not the most powerful lever2—for significant savings. In fact, according to McKinsey purchasing and supply management data, the savings potential may be higher in state and local government than in any other sector.
On the surface, procurement sounds simple: It’s about getting the right stuff at the right price at the right time in the right way. But in the real world, capturing savings in procurement is anything but simple, and most procurement leaders and government executives would agree that their teams leave value on the table. Government procurement involves technical, policy, and regulatory complexity. Even when governments identify potential savings, these complexities can slow or stymie efforts to capture value.
Navigating procurement requires expertise as well as partnership between agencies and their procurement teams. Senior government leaders often find procurement opaque and even frustrating. Procurement teams often speak their own language and prioritize internal processes and procedures over counseling their customers on how best to achieve their mission outcomes. Working together, senior leaders and procurement teams can seize opportunities to use AI to bypass inherent complexities and transform how procurement gets done.
When implemented properly, new AI tools and approaches can greatly improve procurement performance. They can help capture efficiencies across each element of the process, including the following:
*- The right stuff: Better defining requirements, avoiding “gold plating” (adding features or requirements beyond the original scope unnecessarily), and consolidating options to pool purchasing power can lead to significant savings.
*- The right price: Consolidating purchases, renegotiating contracts, leveraging economies of scale, and improving invoicing can lead to significant savings.
*- The right time: Streamlining procurement processes helps avoid unnecessary delays and ensures that citizens and state employees have what they need when they need it.
*- The right way: Modernizing procurement practices can make spending more transparent, reducing waste and fraud and reinforcing public trust—all while complying with public procurement laws, rules, and other regulations.
To be sure, agency leaders and procurement teams alike may be confused or even intimidated by some of the hype surrounding recent AI developments. And caution in adopting new technologies is warranted, especially in the public sector where the expectations for accountability, transparency, and risk differ from the private sector.
This article explores how partnerships between agency leaders and their procurement teams can realize considerable savings via a procurement transformation grounded in mutual understanding and enhanced by the power of new AI approaches. The potential size of the procurement savings prize is illustrated with big transformation wins garnered by some state and local governments. Last, this article details a structured approach to develop and implement a modern procurement strategy that works, even given the complexity facing state and local governments.
Eyes on the prize: Big wins show big potential
As McKinsey has written previously,3 among major efficiency measures available to state and local governments, procurement offers the greatest opportunity to capture significant cost reductions and savings (Exhibit 1).
Exhibit 1.
Capturing procurement savings requires persistence and skill. This is because government procurement does not usually consist of a single “black box” containing a complex, opaque function that can be hard to understand and even harder to optimize. Rather, most local and state procurement consists of hundreds of these black boxes, each with its own idiosyncrasies. Consider the diversity of potential spending categories, such as IT megaprojects, janitorial services, highly specialized lab equipment, fuel, and building materials.
Nevertheless, the successful outcomes from state and local government procurement transformations noted below show that it can be done:
*- Up to $350 million in recurring annual savings: A major municipality identified savings through a rapid assessment of its third-party procurement spend. It analyzed approximately $4 billion in spending data, conducting deep-dive analyses in target categories, including a maturity assessment of construction procurement practices, contract rate analysis for professional services, and rate variation analysis between municipal and state-level facilities management contracts. By benchmarking against comparable peers and engaging with domain experts, the municipality was able to further highlight opportunities among high-impact value levers. And by identifying potential “quick win” initiatives and defining implementation sprints, the municipality can now target prioritized categories based on impact and feasibility.
*- Up to $150 million savings in the near term and $230 million in the long term: One state identified these savings through a diagnostic and analysis of one of its single largest contracts governing the state’s employee benefits plan. The state used the analysis to prepare a procurement strategy tied to market benchmarks and user preferences before reprocuring those services.
*- More than $25 million in recurring annual savings and upskilling of talent: One regional transportation authority identified sizable savings through its full-scale procurement transformation. An assessment of procurement spending and processes helped the authority identify opportunities to capture financial savings and improve operational efficiency. Building on these insights, it developed and implemented a portfolio of targeted initiatives to realize these opportunities. A transformation office was established to implement the initiatives and track improvements and savings as they were accomplished. The authority ensured that employees had the skills needed by providing more than 200 employees with upskilling sessions and online education resources as well as establishing a new learning steering committee to guide learning and development and succession planning and to implement e-learning.
Another state outlined a path to capture savings and improve services with an enterprise-wide transformation diagnostic (see sidebar “How one state modernized procurement to pursue an ambitious cost savings target”).
How to capture procurement value: The essentials
Behind every procurement success story is a strategy grounded in best practices proven in both the private and public sectors. Every state and local government executive would benefit from understanding the fundamentals (outlined below) of generating efficiencies. Likewise, procurement teams could consider how to clearly explain these fundamentals to other government executives and with a keen understanding of how to support the delivery of mission impact.
*- Know the spend. A comprehensive spending analysis is foundational to any successful procurement transformation. After gathering quantitative data (such as annual contract costs) and qualitative data (such as deliverables and statements of work), procurement teams could consider building a baseline of enterprise spend, using analytical AI to identify inefficiencies and opportunities for optimization.
*- Select initial categories. To achieve the greatest impact, teams can prioritize categories with significant spending. But nuance matters. Some categories ripe for attention may include potential gold-plated items—think laptops with unnecessary features or capabilities—where demand could be shifted to more basic, lower-cost models without losing functionality. Similarly, in some categories (such as those for certain kinds of equipment), shifting to aftermarket service providers, rather than relying on new purchases, might be beneficial. To ensure competition, potentially high-impact categories can be prioritized, namely those with multiple providers. Such categories typically present the most immediate opportunities to save on costs through competitive bidding and contract renegotiation. Using analytical AI, teams can identify spending patterns and opportunities for consolidation. This data-driven approach helps focus efforts on areas with the highest potential impact.
*- Create a shared opportunity map. A comprehensive procurement opportunity map provides a strategic blueprint for action by detailing planned initiatives, estimated cost savings, and implementation timelines. It is important to prioritize quick wins to demonstrate the transformation’s value to the full range of stakeholders and thereby build momentum. Contract timelines can provide horizons for wins: Some will have near-term impact, while others can be deprioritized until the contract is recompeted. Highlighting early wins can also help garner stakeholder buy-in and build support for broader initiatives.
*- Benchmark against industry standards. Comparing procurement performance against other public- and private-sector organizations can help identify gaps and set ambitious yet achievable goals. Government leaders often benchmark against past spending internally, but external sources of comparison can reveal real value capture opportunities.
*- Implement category management. AI tools can support category management to gain insight into market trends, supplier performance, and cost-saving opportunities. AI-powered tools can also automate routine tasks, freeing up procurement professionals to focus on strategic activities.4 Teams can create tailored strategies for each category, considering factors such as market dynamics, supplier capabilities, and internal demand. These strategies should aim to optimize total cost of ownership, not just purchase price.
*- Understand demand and managing for efficiency and value. In some cases, leveraging cooperative purchasing agreements may deliver great value for the state while reducing administrative work for the procurement team. In others, states may prefer to pool demand for better pricing through statewide contracts. Regardless, understanding demand—including opportunities to standardize product and service specifications across agencies and eliminate gold-plating requirements to reduce costs—is an important first step.
*- Enhance supplier relationships. Building long-term relationships with key suppliers is vital because such strategic partnerships can help facilitate better pricing, boost service levels, and enable innovation in product and service offerings. Implementing supplier performance management using analytical AI tools can monitor supplier performance continuously and in real time to help identify issues early and ensure suppliers meet contractual obligations.
*- Govern for continuous improvement. As the waves or sprints of procurement transformation progress, regular reviews and feedback loops can unlock continuous improvement. Teams can determine a rhythm for how often and in what manner the team reviews progress and outcomes after each sprint. Teams can then take stock of what worked, what didn’t work, and what they’ve learned, and then they can revisit the target categories to determine which to prioritize based on new insights. The cycle helps ensure continuous assessment, learning, and improvement in procurement processes—and it helps embed new capabilities across the procurement organization and other agencies.
All regular reviews of procurement processes and performance should involve the procurement team’s agency or business stakeholders and focus on identifying areas for improvement. Further, establishing continuous feedback loops with suppliers and internal stakeholders helps identify issues early, foster a culture of collaboration, and provide incentives for improvement.
How to preserve procurement value: Harnessing technology and AI today
The essentials of procurement transformation may appear familiar, but capturing value consistently is an enduring implementation challenge. But analytical AI and other digital tools can be game changers in procurement, enabling smarter decision-making, faster processes, and better overall outcomes. Predictive analytics, for example, can forecast demand for more accurate and efficient purchasing, and automation can reduce time spent on manual tasks (such as extracting data from PDF deliverables) while enabling at-scale analysis (see sidebar “Leveraging contract AI to reduce costs and boost compliance”).
All too often, value “leaks” from procurement processes or transformations become “one and done” initiatives rather than enabling ongoing continuous improvement. Across a range of state and local governments, for example, we have seen how a potential stream of procurement savings can be reduced to a trickle by a series of seemingly minor leaks in compliance, control, and visibility.
Analytical AI tools and techniques are now offering new ways to seal the pipes of procurement, so to speak.5 In the private sector, such benefits are now being captured by category managers at companies that have prioritized strategic AI development and adoption. One chemical company, for example, has built and deployed an AI tool to conduct autonomous sourcing with a successful pilot in the consumables category. With an agent preparing and executing tenders, requiring minimal human intervention, the company was able to realize significant value: a 20 to 30 percent increase in full-time equivalent efficiency, increased visibility and control, and additional value capture of 1 to 3 percent.
While AI is evolving rapidly, some government organizations have already proven AI’s potential to equip business leaders and procurement teams with advanced capabilities to capture the full potential for procurement savings.6 Contract noncompliance and “maverick spending” (unauthorized purchases not aligned with overall procurement strategy that can cumulatively erode savings) are two common sources of value leakage. Supplementing traditional procurement management with analytical AI can improve the speed and insights from regular audits and performance reviews to identify and address noncompliance issues and ensure that suppliers adhere to contract terms and conditions. According to McKinsey analysis, organizations have saved an additional 1 percent in total procurement spending by not paying incorrect invoices. Likewise, analytical AI can improve a procurement team’s abilities to monitor spending patterns at a granular level and thus identify and stop maverick spending.
AI technology can also support real-time monitoring and predictive analytics, which are essential to proactive planning and informed decision-making. By allowing organizations to monitor procurement activities continuously and in real time, AI helps organizations identify potential issues before they escalate and increase visibility into spending, contract compliance, and supplier performance. And predictive analytics enables and enriches forecasting of future procurement needs and market trends (see sidebar “Process mining leads to big wins in Oklahoma”).
These AI-enabled approaches to capture and preserve savings go hand in hand with modernizing and streamlining government procurement overall. In practice, this means government procurement teams can also develop requests for proposal much more rapidly by using agentic AI and copilots, expedite proposal review and assessment, engage with suppliers more strategically, and provide overall better-quality service to their customers. Thus, such AI-enabled transformation of procurement practices helps deliver not only the right cost but also the right stuff at the right time in the right way.7
How to enable sustained success
Treating the steps above as a stand-alone checklist will not deliver an enduring change in how a state or local government procures goods and services. Instead, successful government leaders focus equally on how the work gets done, not just what is required to capture near-term savings. Government executives, therefore, can work with their procurement leaders to build healthy organizations that are aligned, can execute, and can renew their ways of working as their operating context evolves.8
*- Invest in procurement talent. Procurement expertise provides the foundation for success. In many state and local governments, however, such expertise has eroded over the past decade. Seasoned experts are retiring, and cities and states often have not backfilled their ranks as part of overall administrative staff reductions. Such trends may appear “penny wise” in the near term but are ultimately “pound foolish.” Governments need to seek new talent as well as deploy the best talent available in designing new processes, including those relying on technologies such as automation and gen AI, to improve productivity.
*- Assemble a cohesive enterprise team. Procurement transformation cannot be left to procurement teams alone. Ideally, end-user agencies and departments partner closely to establish priorities and problem-solve with their procurement colleagues to promote shared accountability and transparency. Lasting change involves engaging stakeholders across agencies, including procurement officers, department heads, and finance leaders. The team approach not only helps ground the opportunity map in the realities of day-to-day operations but also helps align decision-makers.
*- Build a learning engine. Training and development are integral to sustained procurement excellence, especially given technological advances in AI. For example, ongoing upskilling, training, and development opportunities for procurement professionals ensure that team members apply leading-edge skills and knowledge to daily activities, planning, and special projects. And sharing best practices across agencies and departments helps cultivate a culture of knowledge sharing and collaboration, which enhances overall procurement performance.
Compass bearings for government ‘business’ leaders
Procurement is critical to government performance and should not be left to procurement experts alone. The “business” leaders in a state or local government, whether in a governor’s or mayor’s office or leading an agency, have special roles and responsibilities in accelerating a procurement transformation. Procurement experts can guide and coach such leaders to help forge impactful partnerships. Success requires these government leaders to embody certain characteristics:
*- Savvy. Government leaders need to know the fundamentals of procurement. This takes some effort; internalizing this article’s main points is a good first step.
*- Bold. While quick wins are important, enduring procurement impact at scale starts with an ambitious long-term vision that supports an administration’s strategic agenda. Done right, procurement reform can provide the right stuff at the right time and the right price, and its savings can be redirected into sustaining mission priorities.
*- Clear. As the saying goes, “Vision without execution is a daydream.” Bold aspirations need to be translated into clear targets for procurement performance, whether typical cycle times, savings targets across a spending category, or performance KPIs for suppliers. Such clear expectations help drive innovation and continuous improvement as well as transparency and accountability.
Now more than ever, state and local governments need to steward every dollar. Procurement is complex. Transforming it requires technical, analytic, and interpersonal acumen. Instead of shying away from the complexities of procurement, government executives should lean into procurement transformation. This means giving it their time and attention, first by learning procurement essentials and the potential for new technologies. Then government executives and their procurement team partners can chart a course to achieve bold but practical savings ambitions across their government, thereby better meeting the demands and expectations of the communities they serve.
Is Couchsurfing Still a Thing? How the Once-Free Travel Community Changed After Going Corporate
Photo by Nathan Fertig on Unsplash
https://www.fodors.com/news/hotels/is-couchsurfing-still-worth-it-how-the-once-free-travel-community-changed-after-going-corporate
I still believe that crashing on a stranger’s couch is the best way to travel, but Couchsurfing isn’t the best place to find couches anymore.
Couchsurfing launched in 2004 after co-founder Casey Fenton emailed over 1,500 students in Reykjavik asking for a place to stay. Dozens offered to open their homes. The Couchsurfing website was a place to make that experience accessible to backpackers worldwide. People could offer their couches, spare bedrooms, or even floors to budget travelers. It gave backpackers a free place to stay and a way to “live like a local” and it gave hosts a chance to meet people from around the world. Surfers would give back by cooking a meal from their culture, sharing a language, or teaching a skill. But Couchsurfing has changed dramatically going from a non-profit organization to a for-profit, and some members feel the platform has lost its radical community-centered roots.
I first started using Couchsurfing in 2011 during my final year of university. I went to meetups in Halifax to get acquainted with the community, and then, during a graduation trip to Newfoundland with some friends, I decided to try surfing. We shared stories in the local pub over Screech rum, and then my two friends and I piled onto one futon at night. We would have had to pay around $40 each per night to stay at a hostel—well out of our budget at the time. Discovering Couchsurfing was like discovering a secret, a way to travel the world on a tiny budget and meet cool people along the way. I was hooked.
Over the next few years, I surfed around the world and hosted in rented apartments while living in Nafplion, Greece, and Barcelona. In Wellington, New Zealand, I spent a day watching the red carpet for the premiere of The Hobbit with Couchsurfers I’d met a few days before. In Japan, I rolled up my futon and made sushi on the floor with hosts who’d go on to become lifelong friends. In Istanbul, my hosts took my friends and me out for organ meat wraps and were shocked when we loved it. They also hosted my friend for a week while she waited for a new passport after hers was stolen. It was a community for people with a thirst for adventure and unconventional lifestyles.
Couchsurfing, which seems like a shell of its former self, no longer feels like the backpacker haven it once was; I rarely use the platform anymore. Any community that’s been around for two decades is bound to change, but Couchsurfing has evolved far beyond its idealistic origins.
Couchsurfing Becomes a B-Corp, Gets Venture Capital.
In its early days, Couchsurfing was run by collectives of volunteers who offered their skills to help build and maintain the website. So when Fenton, the co-founder, announced in 2011 that Couchsurfing was denied its non-profit status and becoming a B-Corp., a classification for a for-profit business that has a positive social impact, there were mixed reactions in the community. According to a blog post from Fenton, becoming a B Corp was the only way to continue existing as an organization, and would help the site and community grow and evolve. Some members understood the need for more financial stability, while others felt like the founders had sold out.
Meanwhile, the founders and their new CEO, Tony Espinoza, raised over $20 million of investment funding over the next year. While Espinoza would resign after a short 18 months, the membership of the website doubled to 7 million users under his tenure.
Couchsurfing struggled to find its footing under this new corporate model. In 2015, Patrick Dugan, who also ran a private equity firm (which has since been scrubbed from the web) became a majority shareholder and took over as CEO. Most of the staff and original volunteers, including the founders, were laid off or quit. The platform continued to grow. But some members were losing trust in the company, feeling like these new members were just looking for a free hostel and didn’t embody the ethos of Couchsurfing. There was a movement from Couchsurfing members spread through blogs and Facebook groups to leave the platform to other hospitality exchange alternatives.
Dugan knew he had to start generating income for Couchsurfing to survive. But the company never found a reliable way to make money. From paying for verification, which only a small number of members did, to ads that brought in a tiny amount of revenue each month, nothing was working, according to a Couchsurfing blog post explaining the decision.
COVID-19 and the Paywall In May 2020, Couchsurfing implemented a subscription model of $14.29 per year. The paywall ensured the company could survive the pandemic. As a travel service that is the antithesis of social distancing, the pandemic posed major challenges. But the paywall went up without member consultation and locked users out of their profiles, giving rise to concerns around data privacy.
Fenton had promised in a 2011 blog post that “Couchsurfing would never make you pay to surf or host.” Members felt the paywall was the last straw after nine years of watching Couchsurfing struggle to maintain the community they’d helped build. They started leaving, searching out or creating alternate platforms.
Lyda Michopoulou, 38, from Greece, started using Couchsurfing in 2006 when they were in university. This led to a decade-long involvement with the platform. “At first, I was mostly surfing. I visited the Netherlands, Germany, France–I went all over. Then, when I had to stay home for exams, I started hosting more. It was another way to give back to the community.” Lyda got involved in the broader community, hosting potlucks a couple of times a month on their big balcony in Thessaloniki. But when the paywall appeared, they logged out of Couchsurfing for the last time. “It became too corporate,” they told Fodor’s.
Discussions within Couchsurfing communities like this one on Reddit show that Lyda wasn’t the only one who left after the paywall.
Safety Concerns on Couchsurfing Safety has always been a concern on Couchsurfing, especially for women. And some women don’t feel like their concerns are being taken seriously.
Kathi, 35, from Germany, who asked to be identified by her first name only, has been using Couchsurfing since 2012. She liked that the platform facilitated helping people without the exchange of money. Kathi spent New Year’s with Couchsurfers she met in Edinburgh and went dancing under the stars in Halifax, which led to a group road trip and a swing dancing camp in Prince Edward Island. But she’s also experienced predatory behavior on the platform. She said that Couchsurfing wouldn’t remove the host’s profile even after she reported his behavior.
Kathi still uses Couchsurfing for meetups, but she now mostly uses the women-only platform Host A Sister when she wants to host or surf.
A Change.org petition from 2010 shows this issue is nothing new. But over time, Couchsurfing’s lackluster response may have been a contributing factor in driving members away from the platform. Couchsurfing did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
So, Is Couchsurfing Still a Thing? Not all Couchsurfers feel the platform has changed. Nikki Battyanyi, 30, started hosting surfers in Iceland with his sister in 2015 and continues to use the platform today. “I don’t think it has changed much for me. I love it. I would recommend it 100% to any traveler,” he said.
If enough people hadn’t felt it was worth it to pay the annual membership fee, Couchsurfing would have probably had to shut down. But for many, the community isn’t what it once was. As a former avid Couchsurfer, it’s clear to me the platform has changed—and not for the better. The community that had made me feel like I’d found my unconventional community has become just another traveler’s meetup.
While issues of trust between Couchsurfing and its members may play a role in this change, it’s also possible Couchsurfing just got too big, losing its sense of shared values within the group.
I still believe in the idea of Couchsurfing–and inviting strangers into your home has been around since long before there was technology to support it. But I’m not sure that Couchsurfing is the best place to do it anymore.
Alternative sites like Trustroots, BeWelcome, Couchers, Host A Sister, and Warm Showers are trying to capture the community feel of Couchsurfing’s early days. But they’ve not gained a big enough user base to truly be a replacement.
As for me, I’m on Trustroots but haven’t surfed or hosted with it. I’ve paid the Couchsurfing fee and occasionally open the app, looking for events or meetups. I’ve met a few lovely people from it in the last five years, but it’s not something I recommend to travelers anymore. I’ll try some of the other alternatives next, continuing my search for a community like the one I’d grown to love all those years ago.
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