For once, I actually have a piece of good news to share regarding the new Couchsurfing redesign.

In the middle of this avalanche of bugs, broken features, questionable design choices, safety concerns, loading errors, resuscitated references from banned users, etc., the profile character limit has been dramatically increased.

Bios can now contain up to 5,000 characters (prompts not included). Alleluia!

Many users are currently confused about how to set their profile to “Not Accepting Guests” on the new Couchsurfing design, so here’s a practical explanation.

Previously, Couchsurfing had three very clear hosting statuses:
• Accepting Guests
• Maybe Accepting Guests
• Not Accepting Guests

Those options have now disappeared entirely.

Honestly, I don’t think that’s accidental. Whether someone actually hosts travelers or not has become secondary on the new design. Hosting isn't the platform’s central focus any longer.

As a consequence, every user is now treated by default as a potential host, including people who have never hosted before and have no intention of ever doing so.

At the moment, the only known way to temporarily stop appearing as available to host is surprisingly convoluted:

1. Wait until someone sends you a hosting request.
2. When the request arrives, you’ll first see “Accept” or “Decline.”
3. You must first click "Accept". That's crucial. Why, you may ask? Because confusingly, “accept” at this stage actually means “accept the chat conversation”, not the hosting request itself.
4. Once you accept the chat, you’ll then be able to decline the actual hosting request by clicking "Decline" at the bottom of the screen.

At that point, Couchsurfing will give you several “declining reasons”:

• I don’t want to host right now
• I can’t host because of my living situation
• I don’t live in the desired destination
• I can’t accommodate the dates or traveler number
• This person made me feel unsafe or uncomfortable
• Other (please explain)

If your goal is to stop appearing as available to host, you must select:
“I can’t host because of my living situation.”

Doing so seems to remove your profile from host search results for six months.

However, there are several important issues with this system:

a) The duration is completely fixed and cannot be customized. It’s currently six months because Couchsurfing decided so. If they silently change it tomorrow, users will most likely not even be informed.

b) There is no visible countdown or setting allowing users to check when this six-month period expires.

c) Once the six months are over, your profile will quietly return to host search results automatically, meaning you’ll potentially start receiving hosting requests again and have to repeat the entire process from scratch. Rinse and repeat every six months.

d) You can still receive stay requests even when you're not appearing in search. Why? Because any user coming across your profile will still be able to send you a hosting request, even if you recently clicked "I can’t host because of my living situation".

e) The decision is irreversible during that period. If you suddenly want to host again two weeks later, there is no way to reactivate hosting visibility manually.

f) Users do not receive any confirmation, notification, or email stating that they have been removed from host search results.

g) As long as you haven't received any hosting request, you are treated by default as a potential host, and there's nothing you can do about it (besides... deleting your account, of course.)

The old system was simple, intuitive, transparent, and user-controlled. The new one is confusing, indirect, opaque, and quite restrictive.

That said, I suppose that makes sense somehow if hosting travelers is no longer considered the platform’s primary purpose.

First, let me clarify something: I personally dislike this redesign intensely. I dislike the bugs, the broken features, the incoherencies, the endless loading errors, the removal of useful hosting tools, the bizarre focus on sexuality and lifestyle signaling, and the overall “Tinder-meets-Meetup” atmosphere the platform increasingly gives off. I genuinely hate it.

But what I think, and what many longtime users think, is ultimately irrelevant from a business perspective.

Uncomfortable as it is to admit, this redesign will probably make Couchsurfing more profitable in the long run.

Why?

Because most of the platform’s most active users, especially those with hundreds of references accumulated over many years, are effectively locked into the ecosystem. In theory, people could massively migrate to alternatives like BeWelcome, Couchers or Trustroots. In practice, however, only a tiny minority will actually abandon years of history, references, trust, and community presence for platforms with dramatically smaller user bases.

That’s why so many people complain while relatively few leave.

And from a purely financial perspective, the company likely considers that entirely acceptable. Even if a portion of experienced hosts and longtime users disengage, the platform can still increase profitability if it succeeds in boosting subscriptions, engagement, visibility, social interaction, and user activity among newer audiences.

The uncomfortable reality is that the traditional hospitality-exchange model itself isn’t where the money is.

A broke backpacker trying to save money by finding a couch for two nights is not a particularly lucrative customer. What is potentially lucrative, however, is transforming the platform into a broader social-discovery ecosystem centered around Hangouts, chatting, “connections”, visibility, and endless interactions.

That’s also why the platform increasingly feels less like a traditional HospEx network and more like a hybrid between a social app, Meetup, and a dating platform that carefully avoids explicitly calling itself a dating platform.

The redesign, the marketing language, the removal of most hosting-focused tools, the emphasis on “mingling”, “vibes”, “sharing something real”, sexuality fields, Hangouts, and engagement mechanics; all of it points in the same direction.

Many longtime users are angry because they still see Couchsurfing as a hospitality exchange platform. But the company itself views it as something else entirely.

And financially speaking, I’m convinced this strategic shift will work.

This redesign isn't incompetence. It is simply the logical outcome of a company optimizing for engagement, subscriptions, monetizable social interaction, and growth metrics rather than for hosting culture, trust, transparency, or community values.

I hate admitting it, but from a purely corporate perspective, this strategy may ultimately prove very effective, even if it alienates some of the people who helped build the platform in the first place.

In short, they already proved in the past that they could ignore users’ wishes, feedback, and concerns without suffering any serious consequences... and they will probably get away with it again this time.

The harsh reality is that our naïve little hospitality-exchange utopia was never particularly profitable. Hosting broke backpackers (no offense meant here) does not generate highly monetizable interactions.

Social discovery, endless chatting, visibility, flirting, and dating-app dynamics, on the other hand, absolutely do.

Patrick Dugan knows that. Hence the new design.

If you receive a hosting request that you want to decline, there are currently two different ways to do it , and they do not have the same consequences.

1. Declining the entire chat

You can click the “Decline” button located at the bottom of the screen.

Doing this declines both:

• the chat itself
• the hosting request contained in it

However, there is an important downside: the conversation immediately disappears from your inbox and, as far as I know, cannot be recovered afterward.

So this method is basically irreversible. If you later change your mind, want to reread the request, or simply realize you clicked too fast… too bad. The chat is apparently gone into the digital void.

2.Accepting the chat first, then declining the request separately

You can also click “Accept” in the lower-right corner.

Despite the wording, this does not mean you are accepting the hosting request itself. It only means you are accepting/opening the chat conversation.

Once the chat is open, you may decline the hosting request separately afterward.

At that stage, I personally would not recommend typing an explanatory message in the normal chat window immediately, because the app will later guide you through a separate decline flow anyway:

• first, a pop-up asks you to select a reason for declining,
• then another window appears where you can optionally explain your decision in more detail.

(Although I’m still not entirely sure whether writing something in that second explanatory box is mandatory. If someone knows, feel free to confirm.)

Anyway, I hope this makes the process a bit clearer, because the new UI seems to have been designed by people whose primary mission was apparently to maximize confusion (and engagement, and clicks... and profit, of course!).

I would have liked to attach screenshots to make the process clearer, but doing so would make it easy for Couchsurfing staff to identify my account if they happen to read this thread.

Considering the platform’s rather hostile attitude toward criticism, uncomfortable questions, and pretty much any form of non-cheerleading feedback, I’d rather stay anonymous. I hope people will understand why.

PS: Every hosting request I have declined since this catastrophic redesign was launched was handled on a laptop through the Couchsurfing website. So I can only confirm that this is how the process currently works on the web version.

If anyone has already declined requests through the Android or iOS app and noticed major differences in the process, please feel free to share them in the comments. It would probably help other confused hosts trying to navigate this UX obstacle course. Thank you for your collaboration.

ABOUT COUCHSURFING INTERNATIONAL, INC.:

• It is a for-profit corporation, not a community-run nonprofit project.
• The company remains remarkably opaque about basic information such as the number of active users, internal staffing, decision-making process, or even leadership visibility.
• The current CEO has ties to Palantir Technologies, which understandably raises questions for some users given the platform’s enormous amount of personal and travel-related data.
• Over the years, Couchsurfing has broken virtually every major promise and principle it originally promoted to its community.

ABOUT THE NEW DESIGN:

• The redesign appears to have been deployed without meaningful consultation with many experienced users, longtime hosts, or even former Ambassadors.
• The platform now encourages users to disclose sensitive personal information such as sexuality and drug preferences, something that may create very real privacy and safety risks in countries where homosexuality and/or drugs remain socially stigmatized or even illegal.
• Reviews written by users banned for serious misconduct (including sexual offenders) became visible again after the redesign.
• Hosts’ addresses are now automatically shared with guests shortly before arrival, with no user control over this behavior.
• The platform also started displaying the first letter of users’ last names without explicit consent. For people with uncommon names, this can significantly reduce anonymity and make identification much easier.
• The redesign treats everyone as a potential host.
• Important trust and reliability metrics such as “response rate” and “last login” disappeared, despite being essential for travelers trying to identify active and reliable hosts.
• Search results are heavily dominated by inactive profiles, while active hosts become difficult to find.
• The hosting calendar (one of the most useful tools for active hosts) was removed entirely.
• Other useful features (messages templates, bookmarks, etc.) are also gone.
• It is no longer possible to search specifically for hosts available during particular travel dates.
• Apparently, there is no clear way to cancel an already accepted hosting request, even in situations involving safety concerns.
• The ability to explain why a hosting request was declined has been removed.
• Hangouts now reveal users’ location, raising significant privacy and safety concerns, especially in small towns.
• Changing our password is currently impossible or unreliable.
• Exact ages have been replaced with vague age ranges.
• Bios now have a very restrictive character limit (300 characters), making detailed self-descriptions nearly impossible.
• The website and app are noticeably slower than before.
• The new design was deployed in an extremely unstable state, with countless bugs, broken features, crashes, loading failures, and usability problems that strongly suggest little or insufficient real-world beta testing before release.

(And yes, this list is still far from exhaustive. Feel free to add more.)

A long and detailed list of issues had previously been posted by another user, but both the thread and the account disappeared. Make of that what you will.

In the meantime, I’ll try to rebuild a comprehensive list from scratch. If you’ve encountered additional bugs, inconsistencies, missing features, or strange design decisions, please reply below and I’ll keep updating this post.

At the moment, these are some of the many issues users are reporting:

CONNECTION, PERFORMANCE & GENERAL STABILITY

• Many users are still unable to access their accounts. Some receive an “Unable to activate account” error, while others constantly get “Network unavailable” pop-ups despite having a perfectly functional Internet connection.
• Some users report being unable to log in at all. After receiving a login link by email, they are redirected to an account creation page instead of their existing profile, as if the platform no longer recognizes their account.
• Some users can successfully log in but are then met with an “IdentityNotFound” error, leaving most of the platform unusable. Profiles, messages, events, and other pages appear empty, while many buttons fail to function entirely.
• Even users who successfully log in are frequently greeted with “Something went wrong on our end. Please try again later.”
• The website and app are noticeably slower than before. Opening pages, loading conversations, or navigating profiles can take several seconds.
• Both the Android app and the website frequently become slow, unresponsive, or display repeated connection-related errors.
• Some members who recently paid for their subscription are suddenly being prompted to subscribe again.

PROFILES, BIOS & PHOTOS

• Bios now appear to have a very restrictive character limit, making detailed self-descriptions nearly impossible.
• Users can no longer add captions or descriptions below photos.
• Reordering profile photos or selecting a new main picture often fails entirely, with the app displaying: “Could not reorder photos. Please try again later.”
• Some users report that profile photos they previously uploaded have disappeared entirely after the redesign, with multiple pictures missing from their accounts for no apparent reason.
• On the desktop/laptop version, only the first 7 profile pictures are displayed. Users with more than 7 photos cannot view, reorder, or delete any pictures beyond the 7th position.
• Photos suffer from multiple upload and display issues.
• Exact ages have been replaced with vague age ranges.
• The “Places You Visited” section now mixes cities and countries together in a confusing manner.
• The old world map showing previous hosts and surfers' location has disappeared and has been replaced by a much less informative list of flags.

HOSTING SETTINGS & AVAILABILITY

• Everyone now appears to be considered “available to host” by default. The old and very clear hosting-status system (“Accepting Guests,” “Maybe Accepting Guests,” “Not Accepting Guests”) appears to have vanished.
• The hosting calendar has disappeared, meaning hosts can no longer clearly block unavailable dates.
• It is no longer possible to search specifically for hosts available during particular travel dates.
• Hosts’ addresses are now automatically shared with guests 24 hours before arrival, with no apparent option to disable or customize this behavior.
• There appears to be no clear way to cancel an already accepted hosting request, even in situations involving safety concerns.

SEARCH, FILTERS & DISCOVERABILITY

• Search results are heavily dominated by inactive profiles, while active hosts become difficult to find.
• It is no longer possible to sort hosts by useful criteria such as last login, hosting activity, response rate, or experience level.
• Several extremely useful search filters appear to have vanished entirely, including filters related to distance, hosting activity, last login, response rate, and availability.
• When searching for hosts on the map, results are centered aggressively around the city center. Hosts living slightly outside the center may become practically invisible unless users manually resize or move the search area.
• Bookmarks are gone.

MESSAGING, REQUESTS & COMMUNICATION

• Some users report that conversations are no longer sorted chronologically and instead appear in a random or inconsistent order.
• Email notifications for new messages appear to have disappeared or become unreliable for many users.
• Inbox search now appears limited to usernames only and no longer works properly for keywords, cities, or locations.
• Message templates are gone.
• Hosting requests also appear severely limited in length, making personalized requests much harder to write.
• Couch requests malfunction frequently. “View Request” often fails to load or throws an error message.

REFERENCES, TRUST & SAFETY

• References written by users who were banned for serious safety violations reportedly became visible again after the redesign.
• References written during the migration/update period seem to have disappeared for some users.
• Members are now being asked to disclose their sexuality in order to “tailor preferences.” While optional for now, it is unnecessary and inappropriate on a HospEx platform.

HANGOUTS & EVENTS

• Group hangouts have been removed.
• In Hangouts, group chats have been replaced by direct messages only. Many users are concerned this will encourage more inappropriate one-on-one behavior and reduce transparency.
• Hangouts now reveal users’ exact locations, raising significant privacy and safety concerns.
• Some users report that previously blocked members are visible again in Hangouts. If blocked users can once again see each other’s profiles and activity, this may create significant privacy and safety issues.
• Hangouts location data also appears unreliable at times, with users being shown in cities or even countries they have already left.
• The event map is cluttered with numerous irrelevant events unrelated to Couchsurfing or the local community.
• Event descriptions cannot be edited properly after publication.
• Public trips cannot be edited properly.
• Incoming trip information is inaccurate for many members, with old trips appearing as future trips or vice versa.

MISSING FEATURES & OTHER REGRESSIONS

• The 3-month verification reward previously earned through hosting is gone.
• Password changes reportedly no longer work properly for some users.
• For many Android users, the app icon is now simply a solid white circle.

Unfortunately, this list is probably still incomplete. If you’ve noticed additional bugs, missing features, regressions, inconsistencies, or questionable UX decisions, feel free to share them below and I’ll continue updating the thread accordingly.

Thank you for your collaboration.