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Before Airbnb, I Hosted Over 150 International Travelers in My Home for Free
Looking back on a big part of my 20s and 30s
My first was shortly after I graduated from college in 1991 — Andreas, a 19-year-old German NFL fan. The last person I remember was a middle-aged man from Israel, maybe 2007, who asked me to sleep on the pullout sofa with him, not for sex, just for human contact. I did not. Maybe because he had previously insulted the looks on my face when we went dancing earlier in the evening, but probably because that was I line I had never crossed with visitors.
Between the ages of 22 and 39, I hosted over 150 international travelers in my home, one to five nights at a time, through Servas, a global hospitality network founded in 1949 to promote world peace and understanding through travel and hosting. I have yet to use it for travel myself.
Though I often look back on my 20s and much of my 30s as that time I worked away too much of my life, my travel ambitions swirled down the drain, it was also the time when I was actively hosting visitors in my free time. I recall that visit requests began dropping off in the mid- to late-2000s when free couchsurfing briefly became a thing before the advent of Airbnb in 2008, and the novelty of free couch space was overtaken by couches, then rooms, then entire…
