There is a new way to hop around the world for travellers whose budgets can't keep up with their wanderlust, and the perks may be more than financial. Couchsurfing.comis a Web site that connects travellers to people who are willing to host strangers in their homes for free. You might expect that to be a small group, but you'd be wrong. The site has more than 670,000 members in 231 countries, with 5,000 new members signing up every six weeks. When sisters Martina and Brittany Fields of Norfolk, Va., went backpacking last year, they stayed with strangers in Germany, France and the Netherlands over the course of two months. "I didn't want to stay in a hostel because I wanted that experience of meeting the locals and going to the local places," Martina says. "If you go to the hostels you're just going to meet other Americans."

Casey Fenton, co-founder of the Couchsurfing Project, felt the same way. After scoring a cheap ticket to Iceland, he sent e-mails to more than 1,500 university students in Reykjavik asking if anyone wanted to put a friendly American up for the night. The result was amazing.

Not only did students offer Fenton a place to stay, many wanted to show him "their" Reykjavik. He had such a great time that he decided never to go back to that traditional tourist trap, the hotel. He recruited three friends with various skills and the Couchsurfing Project was born.

"Couch surfing is a global hospitality network and the premise is that a traveller can stay anywhere in the world, for free, in someone's home, as long as they are willing to sleep on the couch," says Dan Hoffer, another of the four original founders.

There are similar hospitality networks aiming to link travellers with free accommodation, but Couchsurfing is by far the largest, Hoffer says. Other sites include GlobalFreeloaders.com,founded by Australians, and HospitalityClub.com,founded by a German. It's evident that Couchsurfing's members derive benefits much greater than a place to crash for the night. "You have the opportunity to make friends you will keep years and years later," Martina Fields says. She and her sister still keep in touch with most of the people they met while couch surfing, and they were able to return the hospitality when a friend who hosted them in Berlin came to Norfolk and stayed at the Fields's house.

The average age of the site's members is 27, but couch surfers

range from 18 to 89. Rick and Cherri Feineis of Virginia Beach, Va., are a married couple in their 40s who joined the site together after Rick read a magazine article suggesting that travelling businessmen could use the site to save money. But since the couple do a lot of world travelling, they decided they might as well let the world come to them. They were also already involved in a local program to place Sudanese refugees in temporary homes.

"We'll open our home up and see who comes," Rick said at the time.

Their first couch surfer was a Saudi Arabian backpacker named Yasser, who proposed to cook for them in exchange for sleeping in their home. They agreed to the arrangement, but there was tension in the house. The young Sudanese boy staying with them was afraid that the backpacker might have bad intentions.

"Here was a Sudanese refugee whose family was slaughtered by Muslims, and here was this Islamic person, and the Sudanese was terrified," Rick says. "He thought he was going to kill us in our sleep. That was what he experienced as a child in Sudan."

Yasser arrived and Rick describes the experience as a "genuine cultural exchange." The Saudi Arabian cooked Philly cheese steaks (using halal beef ) and all said grace at the table. The group smoked flavoured tobacco from the hookah pipe Yasser brought from home and the family took him to a reggae bar. The Sudanese and the Saudi Arabian got along, and Yasser and Cherri write each other every month.

Fear of being murdered by a couch surfer is in fact a common reaction from the uninitiated. Martina Fields's parents were understandably leery of the idea of their two daughters sleeping on strange couches in faraway countries, even though they had faith in their daughters' good judgment. But the sisters persuaded their parents after showing them the diligent planning that was their groundwork for spontaneity. This consisted of sifting through member profiles to find people they

would be comfortable staying with. They communicated with their first host in the Netherlands for a month and a half before they met him. After they got to Europe, they would search for hosts in their next destination, communicating with them for a few days before meeting.

The Web site has a mechanism for gauging a member's trustworthiness. The first level of security is the reference system. Members can write a testimonial about their experience with another member, and rate that experience as negative, neutral or positive. This information is prominently displayed on a member's page.

There is also a verification system, where members make a donation to the Couchsurfing Project so the site can verify that the billing address on the credit card is the same as the address listed on the site.

If you are really concerned about safety, you can stay with a member who is "vouched for."

"If you want to put your trust behind another member, you can do so openly in the community by saying, 'I vouch for this person.' You need three vouches in order to be able to

vouch for anybody else," says Rachel diCerbo, who heads the member disputes and safety team at the Couchsurfing Project.

The most basic safety precaution is to read a member's profile thoroughly and look at their photos, diCerbo says. The site gives members the tools to make safe decisions, but it relies on couch surfers to do their own research. The site recommends that couch surfers always have a backup plan and money for a hostel or hotel.

Problems are rare. Only .02% of experiences are recorded as negative. DiCerbo has had to remove only two profiles because of reports that couch surfers were stealing from their hosts. The overwhelming majority of member disputes she handles are due to miscommunication and personality conflicts.

Unconvinced? Maybe you just have to try it to believe it. Even for the skeptical, it takes only a few good experiences before couch surfing feels natural, says inveterate couch surfer Ashley Sawyer, 24.

"I am to the point where I cannot travel and get introduced to a big city any other way than couch surfing," Sawyer says. "Hostels and hotels are so boring even if you can afford them. It's so much cooler to see the different sides of the city, to see the life of it itself and from the viewpoint of someone who actually lives there and has a home there."