Monday, December 02, 2013

Travel for Free

The Website Budget Travel (www.budgettravel.com) features an article on ways to travel the world for free. Most of them will not be new to you if you are a reader of this blog, and most of them are not totally free. Still, it is a good compendium on how to save money while seeing the world.

Probably the closest to free travel is what they call travel hacking, using airline and other points to reduce your costs. A friend of mine did this recently for a trip to the Grand Canyon from Montreal, and paid only for a rental car, food, entrances and other incidentals. The flights and hotels were on points. The Website www.thepointsguy.com is a good source for these sorts of deals, as is the site www.flyertalk.com for airline deals. Keep in mind though, that in many cases you have to spend real dollars to accumulate points or miles.

Trading your labour for a place to stay is another popular way of saving on travel. HelpX.net and WorkAway.info are Websites with information on these kinds of opportunities. For rustic adventures, check out the various sites associated with Willing Workers on Organic Farms. Housesitting is another version of this, as is home exchange.

If you are looking to relocate for nine months or longer, teaching English is a possible option, especially in expensive countries such as Japan and Saudi Arabia. The site www.daveseslcafe.com has good listings of teaching opportunities around the world.

Perhaps the best way to actually travel for free is through work, with an airline, cruise line or as a tour guide, travel agent or travel writer. The travel writing field is extremely competitive, but there are still people who manage to make a living doing it. I wish I were one of them, but even when I was a weekly travel columnist for a major newspaper I had to supplement my earnings with a lot of financial and corporate writing.

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