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Couchsurfing is a new favorable way of traveling nowadays. Couchsurfers, do not stay in hotels or hostels as their first choice, but rather set upon their journey through a hospitality exchange network (i.e. couchsurfing.org) that enables travelers to locate locals who would offer them free accommodation This study aims at observing those couchsurfers’ travel motivation, participation characteristics and travel experience and is constructed as a qualitative research. As for the research data, eight Taiwanese couchsurfers are selected to constitute our study samples. The study findings are as follows: The age between those couchsurfers ranks from twenty-two to thirty-three, mostly unmarried; educational background shows they are either masters or bachelors. As for occupation, majority of them are students or work in service industry. Their estimated income is between twenty thousand to forty thousand New Taiwan dollars. As for their personal characteristics, three types of the followings: openness to experience, extraversion and agreeableness can best represent those couchsurfers in this study. The destinations of their journey locate mostly in Europe and Japan. They like to travel solo or with a few company only. The duration of their lodging depends on their interactive situation with hosts, and on hosts’ habits. They gain their traveling information from their hosts firstly, from internet blogs the second, and then from guide books the last. The types of motivation of couchsurfers can be analyzed consequently as two types. The first type is push factors, which are: cultural motivation, interpersonal motivation, self-actualized motivation. The second is pull factors, constituted of the features of journey’s destination and the lodging conditions provided by their hosts. To couchsurfs, free hostage, curiosity towards people and culture, and different experience of way of living are most concerned. From anticipated phase, on-site activities to recollection phase, couchsurfers’ travel experience is a serial process, focusing mainly on educational orientation experience and fulfillment orientation experience; and supportively on adventure experience and entertainment experience.
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