CouchSurfing

CouchSurfing is a hospitality cult started by Casey Fenton. Among followers of the cult it's common (but not necessary) to "surf couches". That is, to visit the houses of other followers and sleep on their couch, or sometimes in a bed or on the floor. The cult's "leadership team", based in California, encourages followers to get "verified".

Avid followers can often be found to talking less about travels than about profile optimisation and forum reputation.

There are many levels of membership in couchsurfing.org. Everyone starts as "standard member". After having gained some recorded experience, a standard member can ask to be promoted to the status of "couchsurfing ambassador". As an "ambassador", the member receives a little yellow flag on his profile (a sort of medal), a better placement in the search results and a couple of other candies. There are many levels of ambassadorship. City ambassadors are below country ambassadors that are below continental ambassadors that themselves respond to global ambassadors. None of those levels actually give more power (unless purely psychological), they just structure the memberbase according to a hierarchical scheme based on a "first there first served" scheme. (Some find it lamentable, but ambassadors love it, and standard members usually don't care.)

They don't advertise on the website and fuel themselves only through member-cash-flow. But instead of calling for donation, they sell a profile-upgrade for 25€ that they call "verification" instead of "donation" and try to make it look like they are just covering the costs of the operation, while 90% of the income of the website relies on it. And their income is set to top one million USD in 2009 with many 10's of 1000's being spend on "collectives" where the "core team" gathers to work on "expanding" the site, though users of the site haven't seen any significant improvement since 2006, with the exception of increased pressure to verify and glossy documents saying how wonderful everything is.

Co-founder Dan Hoffer jokingly remarked: "We might be a cult". 

The so called BaseCamp, in San Francisco, allegedly has dedicated rooms to sexual encounters that come with anal beads. 

More information

 * Parallels between CouchSurfing and Scientology
 * Is the Couchsurfing collective a cult?