3 Ways to Take a Gap Year and Spend Next to Nothing on Lodging

When my husband and I first started out traveling long term, we had almost no income. We had just finished our Peace Corps volunteer service and were building up a freelance business from scratch. We had to figure out how to stay afloat while exploring the world.

By getting creative with accommodations, we unlocked a new way to travel. And it worked! We didn’t pay for rent or hotels for a year.

And no, we didn’t sleep on the streets! We traveled to Canada, France, Switzerland, Jamaica, and Ecuador on a shoe string budget. And we found that keeping our living expenses low went hand in hand with having more meaningful, local experiences.

We continue to use a hodge-podge of different strategies to save money on travel. You don’t have to work online or be a “digital nomad” like we are to do what we’re doing. Almost all of the strategies we use can be easily replicated for gap year travel, in-country vacations, or overseas trips.

These are not things you’ll find in the budget travel guidebooks. (The “budget” hotel sections in travel books is usually too expensive for us, and we’re not interested in cheap/sketchy dorm-style hostels.) This is an unconventional way to travel. It not only saves money so we can travel more, but also gives a richer experience.

Here are a few examples of the accommodation strategies we’ve discovered over the past four years, traveling slowly or living abroad in twenty different countries.

Work Exchange

A work exchange is an opportunity for travelers to stay with a local host and give a few hours of help per day in exchange for free room and board. A strong emphasis is put on cross-cultural exchange and helping travelers get an authentic experience of the place they’re visiting.

Our first work exchange was at a Bed and Breakfast in a French chateau. We stayed for two weeks and didn’t spend a single cent. In exchange for a private room and all meals provided, we spent a few hours each day working in the yard, painting, cleaning, or giving tours to visitors.

The primary online networks for work exchanges include: Help Exchange, Workaway, and World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (a.k.a. WWOOFing). All of these have online listings of hosts willing to offer accommodations and sometimes meals, in exchange for a few hours of volunteer work.

Terms of the exchange and living arrangements vary by host. WWOOF exclusively lists organic farm stays and you pay a fee for each country listing you want access to. Help Exchange and Work Away include more diverse opportunities – from construction to nannying to receiving guests at a B&B. Both networks have a very reasonable fee that gives you access to all hosts around the world for a couple years.

Unofficial Work Exchanges

We still use the Help Exchange website from time to time. But we’ve also arranged our own exchanges for varying lengths and using different skill sets. For example…

In Denmark, we helped a young family paint their traditional, thatch-roofed home. We stayed in their guest room for 5 days, and they provided delicious farm-to-table meals. We were connected to that family through a college classmate who had moved to Copenhagen.

In Merida, Mexico, we helped an expat B&B owner learn to manage her website in exchange for two weeks of free accommodations. We found that opportunity by posting a proposal on a Facebook group.

By utilizing our own circle of friends and family as well as online networks, we’ve enjoyed creating our own mutually beneficially exchanges to support our travels. The possibilities are endless, it just takes a little more time, effort, and creativity!

Pet-Sitting

Another common strategy we use to save money on lodging is pet-sitting and house-sitting.

We prefer to be in Oregon’s beautiful Willamette Valley every summer because the weather is perfect and we’re close to family and friends. Through our personal network, we stay for weeks at a time in nice homes without paying a cent. When there’s a dog involved, we charge a daily fee.

Many of our digital nomad friends do house-sitting internationally. There are a number of online membership networks where you can see house-sit listings around the world. I like HouseCarers.com because it notifies me when new opportunities post in the destination and timeframe I’m looking for.

House-sits in popular destinations are competitive, so it’s important to create a top notch profile with strong references. I’ve included detailed instructions on how to win the best house-sit gigs in the bonus materials of the Unconventional Budget Accommodations book.

I hope more travelers will try these unconventional budget accommodation strategies because they not only make it possible to travel more affordably, they also give you a richer experience than staying in a traditional hotel or hostel. That way, you can dig deeper into each place and be transformed by authentic local experiences.

This is a guest post by Michelle Chang of IntentionalTravelers.com. For more details about the strategies mentioned in this post, check out her new book, An Intentional Travelers Guide to Unconventional Budget Accommodations, where she shares stories and tactics for creative ways to save money on transformational travel experiences.