Couchsurfing the movie
Here it is: a promo by Couchsurfing founder Casey Fenton and sidekick to introduce ‘Couchsurfing: the movie’. Watch and learn, people. And prepare to cringe. It’s essentially a shout-out ahead of a documentary they’re planning. They are looking for three Couchsurfers with "inspiring missions". Candidates are being asked to send in a short video message and, if Couchsurfing HQ likes what they see, they’ll pick up the tab for your dream trip (or the production company they’re teaming with, or one of their partners, will.) Great opportunity, eh? Except they’ve made it sound like the most bog-standard travel comp in history. "My inspiring mission? I totally wanna go to the Amazon, and, like, meet local tribes and stuff." Hopefully, the finished product will be a different story and have a very different style. Otherwise we could be in for two hours of "hilarious" (ahem) tongue-in-cheek comedy, followed by you-had-to-be-there outtakes. It seems the site with details for video applications, csthemovie.com, is currently down. Which makes me wonder is this sequence supposed to be on the internet at all, or has it leaked? Did they really want to show this to the world?
I cringed as expected. What a shocker!
That’s put me off couchsurfing – I’ll stick to Hospitality Club.
And it’s a little unrealistic to find fellow couch surfers in the Amazon Rainforest or some of the more adventurous destinations when internet access is hard to come by.
@ Steve – Glad I wasn’t the only one!
@ Heather – V good point! There is also very little said about wanting to get know other CSers, getting a real local perspective – or any of the other things that makes CSing unique. I think they lost the plot here.
Interesting note: 4 out of the 5 official members of the Board of Directors of CouchSurfing Inc. are shown in this video.
The leadership of CouchSurfing is not extremely smart, but Heather, I still think Hospitality Club is worse: there is no official organization and there are many known cases of censorship, e.g. mentioning “couchsurfing” in a message will lead to deletion and removal of forum discussions about Hospitality Club.
For now, just use CouchSurfing, but don’t donate (or “get verified” as it’s called).
Cheers for stopping by Kasper. And I agree – don’t give up on CSing because of this.
What matters for most people is their personal experience of HC or CS, not what goes on behind the scenes.
I’ve had gd experiences with both sites (and many others). Although, admittedly, I usually gravitate towards CSing now.
Yes, the video was a bit cheesey –and I actually shot it – lol… but I assure everyone, this was just a fast video experiment which has no reflection about how we plan to shoot the actual film. We were some using cheeky examples at the time while in the infant stages of the idea to try to show the unlimited potential that this movie has. Yes, it was shot at the CS collective so these were mere examples of missions – not actual ones. In the next video, I agree, it would be more powerful and genuine to use CSers actual proposed missions and create a more serious less cheesey piece for the website: http://www.csthemovie.com which will be finished soon and I encourage everyone to create a 3-5 minute video and keep giving their (respectful) opinions. Cheers, Alexandra.