A Very Costly Suspension

Last January for a holiday in NYC I sent without success about twenty hosting requests previously edited by a veteran member. I was asking also some  cultural and touristic information and also to be able to meet some local members for a chat and a drink. But sadly I was blocked by several members leading to a suspensión and preventing me from sending more requests and looking for informations  )
  
Cheap hotels or students centers hardly exist at least not in  Manhattan so I was left with one of the cheapest Airbnb room in town : a minucle place, no window, shared bathroom (but well...) There was also a small microwave oven but while on vacation I did not feel like warming up supermarket food to live on. So more pleasant to eat out most of the time.
Due to the suspension I had no time to get in touch with hosts even for some hanging around like some discovery walks attend some musical. Altogether the material expenses came out pretty costly not to speak of the absences  of meetings with NYC hosts or surfers.

Still  at the last minute I was invited by a Brooklyn host who saw a public request I posted in December and offered me to stay five days. Since I was offline and could not contact this host a friend put us in touch directly (by email).

It would take  a lot of active denial not to accept the idea that blockings and subsequent suspensions are definitely the opposite of the Couchsurfing spirit, something should be done to stop those problematic actions.
  

  

The difficult request issue in Couchsurfing

    I shall never know why  I have been suspended last January (January 2017) when I needed the most to be in touch with the Couchsurfing world: several blockings triggered a suspension.  If some hosts pay attention to the entire profile, most  of them a lot focus on the age and gender, the two main filters even if no one wants to acknowledge it, 
Once you are over 40 years little by little it becomes more difficult to find a couch and this whatever well written the request is. So it becomes almost impossible when one is 40 years and over to find a host. True there are exceptions  but they are far from being the rule rather the exception and most elderly people have to stay in small hotels or in cheap Airbnb  sometimes of a lousy quality. This is what happened to me during my first ten days in New York. Eventually there was a small miracle and at the last minute following a public request I was invited by a host so I could stay a few more days.