Free Accommodation while Traveling

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Travel Questions Forum

To Alex about traveling and living for free with Hobohideout.com:

Hello Alex,

I think that if the passion for traveling life has been nipping at your heels for the past four years you should give it a go. So I say strip down your life, work 70 hours a week for a little while to save some money, sell what you can, and try to chase down your wandering dreams. You can always go back to living whatever lifestyle you are living now whenever you want to - seriously. It is my impression that people are rarely ever really stuck in any particular way of life. If you have the urge to travel then run it out: buy a one-way ticket to some far off land and find out what happens. You can always go back at any time, so I think that there is nothing to loose and only memories, harsh life trials, and good times to gain.

So, man, I say if you find yourself staring into maps and daydreaming into globes for long durations each day, then you should harness this Wanderlust and give it the expression of life.

You ain't got anything to loose.

About traveling with computers:

I travel with a computer because I work a lot everyday on them (often 5 to 8 hours! haha) trying to make up the money to keep traveling. This is just a new way that I have found to make up travel funds, and is probably the hardest and most time consuming that I have yet encountered. I cannot say that I recommend this internet crap to anyone . . . I use to do real work with my hands in real life while traveling, and worked far less for far more money haha (and probably will have to again real soon because these ends are not meeting up as I would like them to haha).

But I say that if the computer and internet work figures into your plan to make up the bean money to travel, then you should probably carry a laptop with you. If you don't plan on using a computer to make money to travel (very, very difficult)  then I 100% agree with you that you should not carry one. But to trade Hobohideout pages for free accommodation, I think that it would be way way easier if you carried a laptop. Honestly speaking, I think that it may be hell fire to try to do all of the work that is necessary to make a good Hobohideout.com site from public computers in an internet cafe. To do the Hobohideout work well takes around 20 hours per hotel, and 20 hours in an internet cafe messing around with computers whose operating system is written in a language that you cannot read is a long time.

I am currently traveling and working with an Asus Eee PC, and it has kept up well. These little computers are less than nine inches long, are very light, and well made. They also only cost around $400. You can get them with a Windows XP operating system and they have an SD card (digital camera card) slot for you to save your files on (they only have 4 gigs of built in memory). These computers are made for traveling, and many travelers are using them. So if you want to travel with a computer and put up pages on Hobohideout.com, I recommend the Asus.

But I am sure that if you are diligent enough, you could put up Hobohideout pages on public computers in internet cafes. Just be warned that public computers are a little hard to come by in some regions of the world, such as in Europe, and can be expensive to use. Whereas, there are many places (cafes, restaurants, hostels, hotels) that offer free WIFI that you can only access with your own computer.

About making Hobohideout.com pages:

To start making hotel pages on Hobohideout.com you must first make an agreement with a hotel or hostel to make them a site as a trade for a free bed. Then go to Hobohideout.com and go to this page, http://www.hobohideout.com/interactive/owner/signup/select-country.php and follow the prompts and start loading up the hotel.

I have been contacting hotels in two ways:

1. I walk in and talk to them directly and show them the site on my computer (I have the pages saved in advance and I just open it up to show them). I think this is the best way to trade for a bed in countries that tend to have a low English speaking proficiency (Latin America, Africa, Asia).  During this time I show them the pages and tell them the wrap about Hobohideout.com:

I say that it is a massive database of hotels from all around the world that acts as a "one-stop" site for people to plan their travels from. I say that visitors to the site can just type in a city of the world and then take virtual tours of hotels and find one they want to stay in prior to arrival. Basically, I just explain the site and a little of how it works.

I say that Hobohideout.com is an easy to use site that is essentially made in a way to come up well in the search engines, and that if someone was to do a search for "XX place hotel" there is a good chance that a hobohideout page would come up very highly in the results (it is almost amazing how well hobohideout comes up in Google searches).

Tell them the Hobohideout.com stats. To find out this information, go to the bottom of any page on the site and click on the little square that is at the very bottom. This will take you to the site meter. The last time I checked it Hobohideout.com was getting over 5,000 unique visitors a day (150,00 a month). This is a ton of traffic and proves that people are really using the site. Hobohideout.com also has an Alexa rank within the top 200,000 pages on the entire internet (and it was just officially launched 4 months ago).

Just be honest and tell them that it is a free promotion for their hotel and that they only have to keep you in a spare room of their hotel until you finish making the site (around 7-10 days). Try to go for ten days because it takes a while to make these pages, and there is no point in you traveling cheaply if you are just looking into a computer screen all day.

2. The other way that I have arrange Hobohideout trades is by sending the hotels emails in advance. This is good because you can send the emails to a lot of different hotels in a given city and set things up before you arrive. This saves you from walking around like a dummy. But the usefulness of this tactic diminishes in non-English (or whatever other language that you can speak) proficient countries, and it also makes it much easier for the hotel to brush you aside and get rid of you. I think that it is best to walk in and talk to the hotel managers face to face and really show them what you can do.

This is a sample letter that I send to hotels feel free to use any part of it that you wish:

Hello  XXX Hotel,