How to Trade for Free Accommodation in France

How to trade pages on Hobohideout.com for free accommodation in France?

Hello Derek,

It sounds as if you are well on your way down the glory road of traveling. I say this now, it is a real admirable quality that you are willing to work when traveling, as most people are not. I have the impression that you will be traveling for a real long time.

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That is a funny question you ask about why there are not many Hobohideout entries in France. For the sake of a quick chuckle, I am almost prone to say that it is because the site is in English and the French are French. Though I don’t really think that this explains it.

The patterns of the Hobohideout entries is really interesting: as soon as one hotel in a city makes a page many others follow. I was just talking to the site’s creator, Andy Graham, on the phone yesterday, and he told me about this little podunk Thai Island that has like 18 hotels with pages on Hideout.

The only logical explanation that I can give about why there are so few entries in the major cities of France is that the hotels are either so packed full of visitors that they have no real need to increase their web presence (doubtful, as all businesses want more promotion), they don’t know about hideout, or they don’t surf the internet in English (or speak English).

This seems like the perfect scenario for you to go through and put up a bunch of pages. I always take it as a stroke of good news when I come into a town that has never heard of Hideout before, because then my options are laid wide open.

You just have to get the ball rolling. I remember in the summer of 2008, I put a couple hostels in Budapest up on Hideout, then I returned in 2009 and could not find a place to sleep because many of the other hostels followed suit in the time I was away.

The Traveling Webmasters trade for free accommodation is sort of designed for traveling in out of the way places or in countries that do not have a high proficiency of English capabilities. Then you act as sort of a translator, and provide the hotel with something that would otherwise cost them lots of money: a well written English language website made by a native speaker.

Though, ironically, I have ended up putting up many pages for hotel owners who were native English speakers themselves (I suppose they just did not want to do it – or they thought that I was a silly sort of tramp trying to work my way around the world haha).

It sounds like France is an open pasture for trading web pages for free accommodation. Let me know how you make out.

I think it is real awesome that you are willing to work your way around the world.

If you have any more questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

Walk Slow,

Wade

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Original Question about trading hobohideout.com pages for free accommodation in France.

Hi Wade,

Great site. Love it! I admire your sense of adventure and willingness to do whatever it takes to get where you want to.

I think I understand where you are coming from, and I have much to learn from you. I’ve recently started my journey in Europe by staying with a host family at a camel farm, exchanging work throughout the day for room and board, and a chance to experience the culture here in southern France, and to learn the language too.

Question for you: would you know why there are so few entries in hobohideout.com’s France section? And for the major cities in France, like Paris or Toulousse, why don’t they have even a single entry, given how many hotels/hostels there are in such cities?

The reason I ask is because I would love to try out trading making webpages for a place to stay, but I’m really curious as to why this hasn’t been done by others in the major French cities.

I would really appreciate it if you can help me with this one.

Regards,
Derek