“The era of cheap travel is over. Its not the easiest time to involve in a global backpacking trip that lessens our wallets today, and the cost of international travel remains high. So you need to be pretty resourceful. And one of the big phenomena of recent years is couchsurfing – online networks that link you up with someone in a faraway place willing to let you stay in their home for free.”

See the BBC News piece about couchsurfing below. It’s about traveling to Tokyo, one of the world’s most expensive cities. So, if you decided to couch-surf to save money, why not saving a little bit more on international roaming charges by using ArrivedOK to automatically notify both your friends at home and your host at your destination that you just arrived?

Check it for yourself: if an Orange UK subscriber makes three 1 minute calls from Singapore to UK (to wife, mother, and boss), he totally pays £4,35. If, instead of calling, he sends 3 text messages, he pays £1,50. With ArrivedOk he can do the same for just £0,50. Not mentioning that it is completely free now, while Public Beta Testing lasts. See how it works.

External links:

• Couchsurfing in Wikipedia
• Perhaps the most well known network of such kind is CouchSurfing.com with over 700 thousand members in more than 200 countries.
• About Better Than the Van community
• Couchsurfing meets Twitter. Some interesting couchsurfing cases.