How women travellers’ Facebook group Host a Sister offers members a safe place to stay and introduces travel companions
- Horror stories about solo women travellers’ experiences with Couchsurfing inspired Rashvinda Kaur to start the Host a Sister Facebook group
- The group has more than 550,000 members, who offer each other places to stay, companionship on visits, and local insight
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.”
