From today on, you can share and write about your experiences with other Trustroots members!

Trustroots has been growing at a steady pace since 2014, and Trustroots members can tend to share a common mindset. A vast majority of the community are helpful, kind, responsible and respectful to others and when there are disputes, our large support team is there to help.

That said, sometimes members would like to understand before requesting a place to stay with a member, what experiences did this Trustrooter have so far? What kind of experiences have others had with them? Will our expectations from meeting fellow members likely be met with this person?

Well, now you can read about what other members’ experiences have been and share yours! After you’ve met, hosted, or stayed with someone, you can elaborate on the experience from your perspective. Every experience is unique and nice to share.

There are multiple reasons why someone would want to read or share an experience;

• It’s a way to say “thank you” in to someone who has helped you.
• One can get an idea of an experience you could have with this person. Maybe the person(s) enjoys long conversations, takes their guests on tours, is busy or not busy, or enjoys a faster or slower pace of life. You can get an idea through the experiences posted along with their bio.
• You may want to see if the persons is active in the community — Perhaps you prefer to stay only with those who clearly demonstrate a level of generosity in hospitality and have some more experience than others.
• Perhaps you’d like to understand what kind of people someone is meeting and how? Did they meet only with one gender, or families, or a certain language, or geographic region? It can give cues to the type of person the host has accepted in the past that could serve your research in picking a host.
• A sense of safety and being able to trust fellow members is quite important. While experiences can never be a truly proactive safety feature all the time, it does help significantly to reduce risks for those using Trustroots.

How to Share your Experience with Others

To share about your experience, press “Share your experience” on their profile page.

This is how shared experiences look like. You’ll get a brief summary on top as well.

How does sharing an experience look like?

These experiences will then appear on both of your profile pages after both of you have written an experience, or after 14 days have passed. After this two weeks limit, you can still share an experience but you will not be able to add recommendation.

Bad Actors

What if your experience with another person using Trustroots was not great?

We take trust and safety seriously at Trustroots and if a said member has clearly behaved against our rules or otherwise disrespectful to you, or those you are traveling with please report them to support. If you, or someone you know, have been witness or a victim of a crime, please report it to the local police immediately, and inform us as well.

Posting a public “bad” experience on the said users profile may not be enough to inform future members about this person. So, we would appreciate if you report it to the support team, even as a precaution and make support aware of the member. If members can’t be recommended they will need to be asked to leave the community ultimately.

This is Just a Start

As with Trustroots culture, this is our first iteration of experiences. We take everyone’s feedback, observe, listen, and re-iterate continuing to make the design as functional and beneficial for the wider community.

For now, we shall see how people begin using the feature and adjust where needed. Please share your feedback to [email protected] or in these comments. Nothing is final ever with Trustroots. We are a social experiment in community/hospitality exchange and will always improve and continue to serve all of the amazing community around the world.

What’s Next on Our To-Do List?

• Add more nudges to sharing your experience, such as in emails, “adding contact” flow, and with the message inbox
• Sending reminders a few days before, and at the time when the 14 day limit passes and a experience becomes public
• Adding the ability to sort experiences by gender, recommendation, date, relation, and the amount of text written
• Adding someone as a contact while you’re writing your experience with them

Finally, thanks for your patience! We know this was long awaited feature.

We would like to thank all the volunteers who made experiences possible for the Trustroots Community. A Big Thanks to :
*Hlib Babii, Nick Sellen, Noah E, Chagai Friedlander, Shawn Saleme

Please feel free to share your thoughts and feedback about experiences in the comments!

Photos courtesy of WikiMedia (1, 2, 3). Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.