“Do we still have a TV?”

That’s the text message I got from my husband as I walked up the steps to our Brooklyn apartment on a Friday afternoon last fall. I was fairly sure that we did. I opened the door. Cats, check. TV, check.

He needed to know because we’d just entrusted a stranger, by most senses of the word, with keys to our home and with it, access to everything we own. It was with the same implicit trust she’d placed in us when she asked to spend a couple of nights on our futon, sight unseen.

We did this through Couchsurfing.org, whose motto is helping you “meet and adventure with new friends around the world.” No money changes hands. Maybe a drink or a meal out, or a promise of an open couch in return, should you find yourself in Barcelona, Budapest or Bali. Another service, Airbnb, lets people rent out their homes, rooms, tree houses or whatever other dwellings they choose.

These are just two of the online tools that help people who want to branch out beyond hotels, motels and hostels and explore peer-to-peer accommodations to stay in the homes of ordinary people.

Reasons to do this are as varied as the places where you’ll rest your head if you sign up for them — to save money, to see places underserved by traditional lodging services, or simply to meet locals.

While neither is particularly new (the idea behind Couchsurfing dates back to 1999, while Airbnb launched in 2008), both are gaining traction beyond adventurous city folk and student travelers with the help of social media and old-fashioned word-of-mouth. To get started, simply visit their websites, browse the offerings and sign up for an account to make the arrangements.

Hosting can be a treat, too. Left without a real vacation budget last year, hosting Couchsurfers in our small one-bedroom apartment was a way to invite people from faraway places into our little corner of the world. If meeting interesting people is one of the best things about traveling, why not have the people come to you?

We had guests from Austria, Australia and more. Some did the dishes. A couple of women from Sweden, we barely saw, their presence indicated mostly by humungous suitcases and late-night entries. But they were sweet, in their early 20s and orbiting a different realm. One morning, I made pumpkin pancakes for one of them. One night, my husband and I went to sleep instead of going out with them to hear a DJ. I felt old.

One Couchsurfer hung out with us all weekend as we introduced her to such time-honored American traditions as brunch, a Bloody Mary and a Sunday evening dance party on the bank of one of New York’s most polluted waterways, the Gowanus Canal. We walked around a stretch of Brooklyn we’d never seen before and happened upon a small cat colony in an abandoned building.

She was back on our futon over Thanksgiving, after traveling to other U.S. cities. In the intervening weeks, we’d followed one another on the photo-sharing site Instagram. That’s how it came to be that we had no qualms leaving her in our apartment alone while we visited family for Thanksgiving dinner.

Whether or not you let them stay when you’re not home is obviously up to you. For us, it comes down to knowing enough about our guests by spending time with them. Your home is not a hotel, so people shouldn’t expect that they will automatically be handed keys. The only thing you’ve promised is a roof.