Accommodation aggregator AllTheRooms has taken another step towards its ambitious plan to list "every room, everywhere" by integrating Couchsurfing inventory into its search results.
AllTheRooms, which featured as a Tnooz startup pitch back in November 2013, bundles content from a range of providers from booking.com and Expedia to Groupon and Hotwire via Hostelworld and Glampinghub.
With Couchsurfing having a reported one million options, AllTheRooms now has more than six million places to stay on its books, backing its claim to be the world's largest accommodation search engine.
AllTheRooms founder William Beckler suggested that the rest of the industry was running scared of Couchsurfing because hosts do not charge guests.
This threatens not only the accommodation providers themselves but also the ecosystem of search sites servicing customers.
He says:
"We believe that the travel industry is broken...Rather than giving customers what they are looking for, most accommodations search sites think in terms of maximum profit per visitor. Instead of showing the user every available option, they show only the options that make them the most profit."