Couchsurfing - Crowdsourcing the Bohemians...

Oh, to be 23 and free of any societal shackles. How I would love Couchsurfing? Actually, given an average age of what looks to be late 20s/early 30s, it's probably a poor crutch.

Couchsurfing is an amazing website with the simple mission of helping people stay for cheap in other foreign cities by pairing bohemina travellers with available spaces in the potential hope that the community reciprocates. As I was peering through their back-story, I recognized quite a bit of canadian-based leadership in helping build and manage this world.

After a website crash of their site in 2006 nearly wiped them off the map after 7 years of existence, their community rallied even stronger and crafted their revised mission statement "Participating in a Better World, One Couch at a Time." Cool.

With 887 new couches being furnished every hour and a community of 530,000 couchsurfing members, there are very few places in the world that you can't travel via a magic sofa ride (227 countries are represented).

It's a compelling insight as even for business travellers, the quality and breadth of hotel amenities nearly always ranks as a rather costly, secondary item in contributing to the overall satisfaction of the trip. Essentially, couchsurfing takes away that nuisance cost.

Not only is there the primary benefit of matching people with couches, but from a word of mouth standpoint - they also are doing things right with online 2.0 tools - a wiki, groups, chat service, member profile, developer collectives, a vouching system for security purposes and offline meetups.

So when you're travelling to Prague and you:

- have three dollars in your pocket

- want to make local friends fast

- find the intimacy of a couch so much friendlier than a hostel or hotel

- make new international friends for life and pay back the favour down the road

Give Couchsurfing a try!