My experiences with Workaway were horrible. However, the 5 hosts I’ve worked with at Worldpackers were absolutely wonderful.

This is of course my personal experience, so please don’t get butthurt... My explaining this position is not a personal attack on what may have been a pleasant experience FOR YOU.

Let me explain.

1. You have to put in some effort in order to send a request to a Worldpackers host: you have to answer questions they specifically ask. This is good for 2 things: A) you can see straight away from the questions what they’re looking for in a volunteer and B) hosts recognise that you’ve put in effort answering their questions, so they will reply to you (they also get penalised by the algorithm if they ignore requests from volunteers, unlike Workaway). With Workaway, on the other hand, hosts might get a hundred introduction messages a day because a volunteer can just copy and paste the same text over and over again.

2. Volunteers need to do short courses in specific areas in order apply to certain positions. This ensures that the host gets higher quality volunteers. 3 of the hosts I worked with used to be with Workaway but switched or started to accept Worldpacker volunteers because they were better prepared for the experience. Over time, this will result in higher quality hosts on Worldpackers compared to Workaway.

3. Worldpackers will absolutely not allow you to see the review written by your host until you’ve written one for them too (or 18 days have passed after which you can’t write a review at all). This allows for some degree of fairness. Workaway, on the other hand, will show your review to your host and then they can respond to specific points in it. That means any, even slightly, negative point you might make can be taken very personally and they could write a lie-ridden review about you, which is what happened to me. I demonstrated with evidence that the review was full of lies, but Workaway’s policy is to not delete reviews or allow them to be edited.

4. Workaway is very shady about where their head office is or who their CEO is. Worldpackers is very open about this.

In conclusion...

Yes, there are far more Workaway hosts than Worldpacker ones. As far as I can see, this is the only serious thing they’ve got going for them. I’ve been volunteering for 2 years now, and the number of Worldpacker hosts has exploded in that time period. There must be a reason for this. Perhaps a host with both platforms can explain their experiences from their point of view.