Nov. 8, 2006 — Jim Stone, a 29-year-old from west Texas, has been traveling nonstop since March of 2004.
Sometimes in a pickup truck and other times on a motorcycle, he's trekked through much of the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Europe. But he's slept in a hotel just one night over that stretch of nearly 1,000.
That's because Stone is part of a growing network of people online who've gone a step beyond hotels, hostels and even apartment swapping in their travel planning: They sleep on each others' couches.
A number of Web sites have sprung up to help pair travelers searching for a place to crash and hosts with a spare couch. Sites like hospitalityclub.org, couchsurfing.com, globalfreeloaders.com and place2stay.net are often free, serving only as middlemen and offering tips on how to find successful matches.
The sites aren't moneymakers. They're largely the creations of 20-somethings bitten with wanderlust and the hope to help bridge together people from different cultures. They often depend on volunteer administrators to help manage the Web operations.
Among the biggest is hospitalityclub.org, a site founded in 2000 by Veit Kuehne, who was then a 22-year-old business student. Kuehne wanted to use the Internet's reach to help foster the ideas of a group called Servas, an international peace organization that encourages cultural exchanges through travel.
The site grew to 1,300 members by 2002, 100,000 members by January 2006 and 200,000 by September.
From his home in Dusseldorf, Germany, Kuehne said hospitalityclub.org funds itself through online advertisements, which pitch student-exchange programs, Thailand volunteer opportunities or cheap tickets to west Africa.
"We're not really soliciting donations yet," he said.
Kuehne said he doesn't get a salary from the site and has been depending on volunteers to help develop and operate it. Living off savings recently, he found a cheap, $200 plane ticket to India, where he plans to spend the winter working on the site and benefiting from lower living costs.
The west Texan Stone uses another site, couchsurfing.com, where membership has catapulted to above 128,700 since launching in January 2004.
