Welcome to my couch: Why some people attract more guests than others on Couchsurfing?

Abstract

Couchsurfing is a social networking platform that helps travelers in finding a free couch (or place to stay). However, not everyone is lucky to find guests on this platform. It has been observed that some hosts have to put more effort to get a couch request from surfers, because of their low popularity. In this thesis, we collected public data of 47 564 hosts which span across 65 cities and 6 continents to understand the characteristics of popular hosts on Couchsurfing. This is the first quantitative research on this topic that uses a dataset of that size. It is important to note that we focused on the popularity with respect to hosts and not to guests. Our findings reveal that i) popular hosts have fewer friends than somewhat popular or unpopular ones; ii) hosts from Europe hosted surfers from more countries than hosts from other continents, and iii) popular hosts have a bigger percentage of positive personal references than somewhat popular or unpopular ones.