Toward Sustainable Couchsurfing: A Comparative Study on Hosting Motives and Behaviors between the USA and China

Abstract

Couchsurfing has become a global phenomenon, and its sustainable development highly depends on hosts and their behavioral choice. However, there was seldom discussion on hosts’ motives and behaviors. This study aimed to identify the dimensions of motives and behaviors among CS hosts and explored the cultural differences between the US and Chinese hosts from the perspective of altruism. A total of 462 questionnaires (246 Americans and 216 Chinese) were collected from multiple sources. The findings reveal that CS hosts have definite altruistic motivations, namely relaxation and pleasure, socialization, knowledge enhancement, and escape, which are reflected in behaviors through hospitality, close interaction, daily life involvement, and trust establishment. CS should be a win-win situation both to the hosts and surfers in a nonmonetary way. Hosts are heterogeneous groups with significant cross-cultural differences between the US and Chinese samples.