Ways
Everything we've learned about spending less on accommodation, so you can travel longer, travel better, and spend more on the experiences.
Over the past three decades, Tim and I have travelled to more than 140 countries and territories, and accommodation has always been one of the biggest variables in our travel budget. We've slept in everything from a tent pitched in a Scandinavian forest to a gorgeous apartment overlooking Lake Lausanne. We've crewed on a yacht across the Caribbean, cycled across continents, and spent long stretches in some of the world's most expensive cities without spending a fortune on where we slept.
Along the way, we've used most of the strategies in this guide ourselves. A few we know from friends and fellow travellers. And one, in particular, has completely changed the way we travel over the last eight years, and we'll tell you all about it in Part 3.
This guide is everything we know collected in one place. Not a list of theoretical options we found on the internet, but real approaches we've genuinely investigated, tested, or used ourselves, with honest assessments of what each one requires and what you actually get in return.
We hope something in here opens a door you didn't know was there.
Sharyn & TimWhat "Free" Really Means
Both are true here. Many of the approaches in this guide can genuinely eliminate your accommodation costs. And that can produce a richer travel experience than paying for a hotel, because the free accommodation often comes with things money can't buy: genuine connections with locals, access to neighbourhoods tourists don't usually stay in, and the kind of unhurried, immersive travel that's hard to sustain when every night's sleep comes with a bill attached.
At the same time, most of these approaches involve giving something back. That might be your time, your skills, your property, your loyalty, your flexibility, or your willingness to put up with a degree of uncertainty. None of that is a bad thing. But it's worth going in with clear eyes about the exchange you're entering into, and a genuine commitment to honouring your side of it.
We're not looking for free rides. We're looking for genuine exchanges where everyone benefits. The strategies that work best are the ones where both sides feel like they got a good deal.
Choose Your Path
With more than thirty approaches in this guide, it helps to know which direction to head in first.
Loyalty programs and rewards accumulate over time without requiring you to change how you travel.
What you own can be exchanged for stays in the places you actually want to visit.
This is the category we know best. Housesitting is here, along with volunteering, teaching, crewing, and more.
Hospitality exchange networks where genuine human connection is very much the point.
Wild camping, religious institutions, overnight transit, and others that don't fit neatly elsewhere.
Some accommodation providers will reward you for being a regular or loyal guest. You're still spending money, but you're spending it strategically enough that some of your nights end up being free.
Platforms like Booking.com and Agoda offer their own loyalty programs: Booking.com through Genius rewards providing discounts, room upgrades, and free breakfasts across a wide range of properties, and Agoda through its own rewards scheme which is particularly strong across Asia. The advantage over brand loyalty programs is flexibility: you're choosing the best available option each time, not the best within a single chain's portfolio. Genius status on Booking.com unlocks gradually through bookings and the benefits build over time.
Some companies hire mystery shoppers to stay in hotels and report anonymously on the guest experience. The free stay is real, but it comes with a genuine professional commitment.
You'll need to assess and document the property to a specific brief, meet deadlines, and deliver a polished report. This is a job with real expectations, not a free holiday with paperwork attached.
Companies including Best Mark (US and Canada), Coyle Hospitality, True Guest (US), Secret Shopping (UK), Mystery Shoppers Ltd (UK), and Secret Customer (Australia) are among those that offer these opportunities.
Hotels occasionally offer free nights as goodwill when something has gone wrong, as a loyalty reward, or as a promotional offer. If you experience a genuine problem during a stay, raise it constructively with someone who has the authority to do something. Be reasonable, be polite, and you may find a complimentary night or an upgrade materialises. Don't invent problems that don't exist, and don't direct frustration at staff who had nothing to do with the issue.
Many hotels and guesthouses run deals along the lines of "stay five nights, get one free," either through their loyalty programs or as standalone promotions. These appear regularly in email newsletters if you're subscribed to accommodation providers you use often. Always check that the headline rate hasn't been inflated to absorb the cost of the free night before assuming you're getting a genuine deal.
Some hotel chains and resort groups offer complimentary nights, points, or vouchers in exchange for attending a presentation about their holiday ownership programs.
We've never done this ourselves, and the sales environment is reportedly high-pressure. Go in forewarned and read any terms carefully before accepting an invitation. That said, some travellers do come away with genuine value.
NerdWallet has a useful article explaining how these presentations typically work and what to watch out for.
If you own a home, vehicle, or boat, you may have something other travellers want just as much as you want what they have.
For those who own a campervan, motorhome, or caravan, the same exchange logic applies as home swapping. Swap My Van and RV Worldwide facilitate vehicle exchanges that, combined with free camping (see Part 5), can make a road trip very nearly cost-free on the accommodation side. Each platform has its own membership structure and rules, so compare them against your specific travel plans before committing.
For those who own a boat, yacht, or other vessel, Boat Exchange facilitates vessel swaps for sailing enthusiasts. It follows the same logic as home swapping: you make your vessel available to other sailors in exchange for access to theirs in waters you want to explore. If you own a boat and have ever wanted to sail somewhere different, this is worth investigating.
This is one of the most interesting categories because the exchange is direct: you're offering something of genuine value to a host, and receiving accommodation in return. It's also the category we've personally used most extensively, so you'll find more of our own experience here than elsewhere in the guide.
Since 2017, we've completed over 100 sits across five continents. London, Paris, Singapore, Vancouver, San Francisco, Lausanne, Bangkok, and dozens of other places we'd never have been able to spend weeks in at our usual travel budget. We've saved more than $300,000 USD in accommodation costs since we started. That figure doesn't include the food savings from having a proper kitchen or the transport savings from being in genuinely central neighbourhoods.
We should be honest: we didn't get it right from the start. Our second sit was in a remote English farmhouse that turned out to be considerably less pleasant than the listing had suggested. The bed was a lumpy pull-out sofa, the chimney was blocked and filled the house with smoke, and it was a three-hour round trip on an infrequent bus to reach a supermarket. We accepted it because they offered it to us, before we'd worked out what we actually wanted or how to screen a listing properly.
That experience taught us everything we needed to know. These days we know exactly what kind of sits we want, how to find them, and how to assess a listing before we commit to anything. We regularly turn down invitations because our calendar is already full of sits we're genuinely excited about.
The main platform we use is TrustedHousesitters, which has an enormous number of active listings and covers every continent. For those planning time in Australia specifically, Aussie House Sitters is well worth joining separately. On our very first application through Aussie House Sitters, our profile and process did exactly what they were designed to do: we filtered for a great sit and landed a gorgeous home in central Brisbane. That first result is a good illustration of what the right preparation makes possible, even for newer sitters.
Platforms including Worldpackers, HelpStay, and Workaway connect travellers with social projects, NGOs, ecovillages, hostels, and communities in exchange for accommodation and usually meals. The work typically amounts to around four hours a day and might be anything from social media management to teaching, building, or gardening. Research any placement carefully before committing, as the quality of the experience varies considerably between hosts.
WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) connects travellers with organic farms worldwide in exchange for help with farming tasks, accommodation, and meals. HelpX lists similar opportunities on farms, lifestyle blocks, ranches, and rural homestays. Typically around four hours of work per day for a place to stay and food. We met dedicated WWOOFers in Guatemala in 1999 who were getting a far richer experience than those of us paying for formal language tuition.
The Caretaker Gazette is a paid newsletter listing longer-term caretaking opportunities worldwide: properties that need someone to live in and maintain them, often in beautiful or remote locations. These tend to be more settled arrangements than typical volunteering, suitable for people wanting a home base for months rather than weeks. The Gazette has been running since 1983 and has a solid reputation within the caretaking community.
Performing manual work on community projects, farms, or construction in exchange for free accommodation produces an unusually authentic experience of a place and its people. Building a school, tending a garden, maintaining a rural property. These arrangements are listed through Worldpackers, HelpX, and similar platforms alongside their other volunteering opportunities.
Many smaller hostels will exchange a bed for a few hours of work each day: reception, cleaning, maintenance, painting, photography, or social media management, depending on what they need and what you can offer. In expensive cities, this is a genuinely useful way to extend a stay without the costs spiralling. It works best when there's a real match between your abilities and the hostel's actual needs.
Offering language skills in exchange for accommodation is one of the most accessible routes for native or fluent English speakers. Placements vary from shared dormitories to family homestays with full board, and the cultural immersion tends to be deep and lasting. When we stopped for a month in Antigua, Guatemala to learn Spanish in 1999, we met European volunteers in language-exchange programs who were getting a cultural immersion we couldn't match at any price. Workaway and HelpX both list teaching opportunities alongside their other placements.
Providing childcare and light household help in exchange for accommodation, meals, and sometimes a small living allowance suits people looking for an extended stay in one place. The family integration can produce a genuinely rich experience of the culture. Friends of ours who've done this have come home with lasting connections and a depth of local knowledge that most tourist visits simply don't produce.
We paid to crew on a yacht across the Caribbean and it's one of our genuine travel regrets that we didn't know you can do exactly the same thing as a volunteer crew member at no cost.
Volunteer crew get access to island destinations genuinely difficult and expensive to reach any other way, particularly across the Pacific and Caribbean. Platforms including Find a Crew, Crew Bay, Sail Offshore Passage Opportunities (Sailopo), and Crew Seekers connect volunteer crew with captains.
Specialists in fields such as travel, history, photography, wellness, astronomy, arts and crafts, and languages can sometimes negotiate free passage on cruise ships in exchange for a set number of talks per sea day.
Port days are usually free to explore. You need to be a genuine expert in something passengers would find genuinely interesting. Peel Talent, Sixth Star, and Compass Speakers are among the agencies that place speakers on cruise ships.
The platforms in this section operate on reciprocity rather than direct exchange. You're participating in a broader community of mutual hospitality, with the understanding that those who benefit will, in turn, contribute.
The most widely known of these platforms, connecting travellers with local hosts who offer a couch, a spare room, or a comfortable floor. Some hosts provide a place to sleep and leave you to it; others will take you to their favourite local spots, cook for you, and remain friends for years.
Worth noting: Couchsurfing moved to a paid membership model some years ago, which changed the community somewhat. Research the current state of the platform at couchsurfing.com before signing up.
Warmshowers operates on the same principle of reciprocal hospitality, but exclusively for touring cyclists. Hosts offer accommodation to cyclists passing through their area, with the expectation that those who receive hospitality will, in time, offer it in return. We've used it on multiple occasions on rides across North America, Australia, and Europe, and a number of those hosts have become genuine long-term friends. The community is generous, the hosts tend to be interesting people, and the welcome at the end of a long day in the saddle is something we've been truly grateful for many times over.
A free, volunteer-run hospitality exchange platform connecting travellers with hosts in more than 200 countries. It operates on the same gift-economy principle as Couchsurfing and is democratically run by its members. Find it at bewelcome.org.
Started as a platform connecting hitchhikers with drivers and has since expanded to include accommodation exchanges for travellers seeking affordable options. Worth knowing as part of the broader hospitality-exchange ecosystem. Find it at trustroots.org.
A women-only platform providing safe accommodation and genuine connection for solo female travellers, built around sisterhood and mutual support. Find them on Facebook and at hostasister.com.
A warm-hearted niche platform for hikers and cyclists, offering garden camping spots in people's private gardens. Non-commercial, modest annual membership, and runs on the same gift-economy principle as Warmshowers. Hosts decide how much interaction they'd like. We plan to use it on our next cycling tour in France. Find it at welcometomygarden.org.
A note on reciprocity: all of these networks depend entirely on the generosity of their hosts. The expectation in most of them is that those who receive hospitality will contribute in return, whether by hosting others when they're in a position to do so, or by supporting the community in other ways. Please don't participate as a pure taker.
A handful of approaches that don't fit neatly into the categories above, but which are worth knowing about.
Free camping means sleeping in a location that isn't an official campsite. The legality varies considerably by country and region, so research before you pitch anywhere.
In Scandinavia, the right to roam makes wild camping broadly available and widely practised. In parts of Australia and North America, dispersed camping on public land is accepted under leave-no-trace principles. Wikipedia has a useful country-by-country summary of freedom to roam laws, but it always pays to do your own local research too.
We've free-camped extensively on bicycle tours through Scandinavia and Australia: forests, beaches, incredible viewpoints, and the occasional supermarket car park when nothing better was available. The freedom of sleeping somewhere genuinely remote and beautiful is hard to replicate.
For more information and tips on how to free camp or stealth camp, these articles are worth reading: Stealth Camping 101 Tips for Urban Camping With or Without a Stealth Camper; How To Wild Camp Anywhere For Free & Not Get Busted; Your Guide to Stealth Camping — What, Where and Why; and Stealth Camping Tips And Tricks — A How To Guide. For a full list of free camping apps and resources, visit our Accommodation Resources page.
Taking a road trip is one of our favourite ways to travel. We've spiced them up with free car camping a couple of times, most notably our road trips in Oman, Canada, and the USA. We may do the same thing when we get to Saudi. You can find more of our road trip adventures here.
To get set up, we hire a 4x4, wagon, or van rather than a sedan, throw in our mattresses, sleeping bags, and supplies, and head off to beautiful places to sleep comfortably under the stars, in places we can't find, or maybe can't afford, a hotel.
Often we pay for campgrounds. But some national forests and public lands allow dispersed vehicle camping for free, as long as you follow Leave No Trace principles and respect local regulations. Some places are just so remote that no one is going to find you parked up anyway. Supermarket car parks, roadhouses, and highway service centres are also possibilities in some places.
If you're going to do this you need to be prepared. Choose a well-maintained vehicle with enough room in the back to stretch out properly. Check the local rules carefully: in some parts of Australia, parking in the wrong spot can cost you over $1,000 in fines. And think through access to bathroom facilities before you decide where to stay.
With the freedom to reach breathtaking locations and stay for free, car camping has become one of our go-to ways to explore. There are a lot of great resources and apps detailing free camp locations for vehicles. Check them out in the Book Campsites section of our Accommodation Travel Resources page.
In some parts of the world, temples, monasteries, ashrams, and churches offer accommodation to travellers for a small donation or sometimes entirely free. The conditions vary considerably: some places welcome guests of any background; others prefer guests who share their tradition. Dress codes, curfews, and codes of conduct often apply and should be respected genuinely. On a cycling trip across the United States, we were about to camp in a churchyard when a parishioner found us, took us home instead, and fed us extraordinarily well. That kind of unexpected generosity is one of the things that makes travel on a modest budget genuinely wonderful.
Overnight trains, ferries, and long-distance buses cover distance while you sleep, saving a night's accommodation in the process. We've had some genuinely pleasant overnight rail journeys that left us fresh in a new city the following morning, and others that left us sleep-deprived for days. If you're going to use transit as a substitute for a hotel night, choose your route, your operator, and your seat class carefully. A sleeper compartment on a well-run train is a very different proposition to an upright seat on a crowded bus with the lights on.
Airports with overnight layovers can occasionally serve as an unplanned free stay, particularly when the alternative is an expensive nearby hotel for just a few hours. Some airports are considerably better than others for this purpose: comfortable seating, showers, and 24-hour facilities make a real difference. Lounge access through a premium ticket, travel credit card, or day pass can make an overnight layover quite comfortable. We've had pleasant overnight stays in airports in Doha, Singapore, and Jeddah, and a rough one in Ottawa that we still talk about. For a comprehensive guide to sleeping in airports worldwide, Sleepinginairports.net has detailed reviews of hundreds of airports, rated by fellow travellers.
Choosing What's Right for You
With this many options in front of you, the question isn't which approach is best in the abstract. It's which approach suits your situation, your travel style, your values, and what you're genuinely willing to offer in return.
The four factors we weigh every time we're deciding where to stay are the comfort level we need, the location relative to what we want to do and see, the degree of privacy that matters to us, and how much the accommodation itself might add to our experience of the place.
Against those factors, we weigh the potential cost saving. Sometimes paying for a well-located hotel is simply the right decision, and we make it without guilt. We don't seek free accommodation for its own sake. But over the years, the creative approaches in this guide have saved us an enormous amount of money and given us travel experiences we couldn't have had any other way.
Some years we've paid nothing for accommodation for eight months out of twelve. That's the kind of shift these strategies can produce when they're used consistently and thoughtfully.
We'd encourage you to start with the option that feels most natural, get comfortable with it, and then consider expanding as the benefits become clear. Several of the approaches that seemed unusual or slightly daunting at first have since become central to how we travel.
Travel Better, for Less
Staying for free, or close to it, has had a profound effect on our travel lives. We've spent weeks in cities we could only have afforded to visit for a few rushed days otherwise. We've made lasting friendships through the hospitality exchanges and home-sharing arrangements. We've seen parts of the world that a normal hotel budget simply wouldn't have put on the itinerary.
More than the money, these strategies have consistently produced richer, more connected, more genuinely local experiences than paid accommodation. There's something about the nature of an honest exchange that creates a different quality of relationship with a place and with the people in it.
We hope something in these pages has sparked an idea that changes how you travel.
Be kind, be generous, and give as much as you take.
Sharyn & Tim