How Host a Sister Facebook group improves safety for female travellers (2024)

I was 18 years old when I first travelled independently: a short camping trip to Parashar Lake, in Himachal Pradesh, India.

At first, finding myself alone more frequently than I had foreseen, I was disappointed – many solo female travellers on Instagram raved about their experiences, after all.

So, like any other oversharing teenager on the internet, I took to social media to rant. And that is when a stranger popped into my DMs to tell me about Couchsurfing, which offers introductions to travellers who just want to socialise with locals as well as those looking for a bed – or couch – for the night.

I morphed into an adventurous, carefree teenager and found someone to meet up with, through Couchsurfing’s “hang-outs” section, on my next solo trip, to McLeod Ganj, Dharamsala, also in Himachal Pradesh.

A few years later, I would bump into a fellow female traveller in a remote Himalayan valley who told me something I had already realised, if I’m being honest: “Couchsurfing has become the Tinder for travellers.”

I wish this chance meeting had happened earlier, so 18-year-old Avantika could have avoided a far-too-pushy 24-year-old man in McLeod Ganj.

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Heart racing, fighting back tears while trying to get away from a large man in a strange city, way past dark, young Avantika had managed a quick, polite, “I’m OK, thanks”, before half running towards a guest house, glancing over her shoulder every few minutes. She cried herself to sleep that night and swore to never even consider sleeping on a stranger’s couch again.

My experience wasn’t as bad as some, and an ever-growing catalogue of horror stories recounted by women who have used Couchsurfing inspired Rashvinda Kaur, a Malaysian entrepreneur based in New Orleans, in the United States, to offer an alternative.

Kaur had come across a Facebook post by a woman who had been sexually assaulted by a male Couchsurfing host that encouraged other women to share similar experiences, some of whom offered their own homes as safe spaces.

“I have never Couchsurfed before, so I was shocked to know that this is the reality of the app for female users,” says Kaur.

Couchsurfing was conceived by American Casey Fenton and launched as a website in 2004, but increasingly, the concept has divided the travel community into two polarising sides: one (mostly men) sings the praises of a platform that has helped millions travel far and wide on a shoestring budget; the other (mostly women) recounts stories of psychological, emotional and sometimes physical violence and abuse.

Facebook groups and subreddits are dedicated to such crimes and the 2023 documentary Bad Host tells the stories of three women who were raped by their Couchsurfing host, an Italian police officer, and how they fought together for six years to see justice.

It was this spirit of sisterhood Kaur found on the Facebook thread that inspired her to establish Host A Sister, in May 2019, the aim of which is “to band female travellers from all over the world to help each other to carry on exploring the world”. Her Facebook page now has more than 550,000 women members, most offering female travellers a place to stay, a meet-up in their home city or a buddy with whom to explore a foreign land, all on a voluntary basis.

The group is moderated by 12 volunteers in different time zones who each spend two or three hours a day overseeing the group. Bella Ross, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, in the US, was one of the site’s first.

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“I believe in what Host A Sister represents to women around the world,” she says. “It is a different, safer way to travel, knowing that our sisters come together to create this safe space.”

Host A Sister members include Kirsi Asposalo, who opened her home in Finland to female strangers for dinner on Christmas Day 2023.

“Through the group I have learned that hosting is a way for people to give kindness into the world, and feel good about themselves in the process,” says Kaur. “It is a way for them to step out of their comfort zones.”

Acts of kindness by the group have included women opening their homes to others during humanitarian crises such as the 2022 repeal of Roe v Wade – which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion in the US, where some states still allow terminations - and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“We actually came to know about the Russian invasion through the group,” says Kaur. “Within 48 hours of the war breaking out [in February 2022], there were thousands of posts from women all over offering food, accommodation and even transport to refugees.”

One Facebook post at a time, I realised that trusting a stranger online can lead to positive experiences. I finally broke my “no strangers’ couches” rule in November 2023, during a month-long trip to Sri Lanka. Not only was I hosted, I also found two other women landing in Colombo on the same day as me.

My host was Mariyan Malki, who has a room to rent in a small house in Sigiriya, in Sri Lanka’s Central Province, a village known for the Sigiriya Lion Rock, an ancient rock fortress recognised by Unesco as a World Heritage site.

“[My partner and I] have been hosting through Couchsurfing for nearly five years and have hosted over 350 people,” says Malki. “We have met some really nice people who were easy-going and grateful at the same time. But the majority were difficult to deal with because they expected a hotel-like space with all the facilities and would even complain about a lot of things.

“Host A Sister is a more reliable platform because, through Facebook, the guest and the host can transparently connect and get a sense of the nature and the background of [each other] before the visit, which is a very important factor for me as a woman.

“As a host also I can openly write about what we can offer and what type of personalities are welcome.”

With taking turns to drive our self-drive tuk tuk, finding ways to placate our taste buds after shared spicy meals and looking out for each other, Sri Lanka turned out to be quite the adventure for me and my newly acquired sisters.

One of them was Safé Khiari, a Tunisian sales representative living in France.

“Travelling with these lovely ladies in Sri Lanka inspired me to host other sisters and bring that spirit of travelling, sharing and discovery back home,” she says.

However, even for a cause as noble as Host A Sister, online conflict is not uncommon. When the bombardment of Gaza began, after the October 7 attack on Israel, Facebook group members started offering to host either Israeli women or Palestinian women only, keyboard warriors making it especially difficult to moderate the group, according to Kaur.

“So many people started reporting the group for hate crimes that we were on the brink of getting suspended. I had no choice but to disallow any posts about the Israel-Palestine issue at all.”

Ensuring safety for pet sitters or home swappers and dealing with guests and hosts who cancel at the last minute are other issues that members of the group regularly confront. As is managing expectations of would-be travel buddies.

“Setting up good communication through a WhatsApp group ahead of meeting up and being clear about budgets and things you’d like to do can be effective ways to avoid disappointment when travelling with strangers,” says Giulietta Boakye, a Ghanaian-Italian human resource worker who was joined by a Singaporean and a Nigerian-Belgian she met through Host A Sister on a trip to Finland.