Bedroom - from 9flats.com

My name is Greg and I have recently started working at 9flats.com. So yes, I’m a little biased about local travel but I just wanted to write down my first thoughts and impressions before I am completely enveloped in the company and unable to write anything without ‘inserting campaign messaging here’.

Previous to this job, my experience with local travel took me for a month across the Middle East, during which I couchsurfed. I thus enjoyed the excitement of independent travel on a shoestring and benefited from the generosity of locals, to whom I am still to this day very grateful. Yet as fun as it was, the process of finding a couch was at times laborious and the conversation with hosts, invariably awkward.

Fast forward several years and one arts degree. I find myself at 9flats, promoting local travel for a living but also quietly evaluating how what is offered stacks up against my experiences of both local and traditional travel.

Whilst it is clear to me that staying in private accommodation offers a distinct advantage over a hotel in providing an authentic, more ‘local’ experience, do the newer kids on the local travel scene (9flats.com, Airbnb) have the same pitfalls as couchsurfing? Or have they in some way evolved? Are we witnessing the rise of Couchsurfing 2.0?

Well in some ways, yes. But that’s not to say that traditional couchsurfing has become the proverbial neanderthal. Both have their place within the local travel community. Couchsurfing is free and the element of the unknown can certainly add a bit excitement to proceedings. Couchsurf Sapiens (as I’m now calling it in my head), with its vetting procedures, peer review, secure payment systems and insurance packages does away with this to some extent. It is of course, not free, but in exchange you are guaranteed never having to sit through another evening of the Jordanian version of ‘X Factor’, something which I personally would pay a premium for.

In disrupting the normal pattern of finding holiday accommodation, sites like 9flats.com want to offer the best of both worlds. So for those of you a bit wary of couchsurfing in general or who, like me, need a certain level of security to sleep easy during your travels, it seems that ‘social travel’ has evolved to meet our needs. Once I’ve built up some holiday pay, I might just go and verify this for myself – round two Tel Aviv?

Everyone I’ve met who works at 9flats really does live and breathe local travel, which is why it seems obvious for us to be part of the Local Travel Movement. Yes, as I said, I’m a bit biased, but I’m pretty excited about the chance to make travel more social, and destinations more local.