I love to travel. But I’ve always hated spending money on lodging. It makes sense to me that I might pay a few hundred dollars to fly somewhere. Flying involves a huge machine up in the air, not falling out of the sky, moving me quickly from one place to another. That’s worth some money! But once I get to my destination, I’m not looking to spend a lot of time in my hotel. So paying $100+ per night for a bed seems ridiculous. And in the U.S. that’s considered cheap!
After quitting my job to spend a year traveling around the world I took the opportunity to explore cheap lodging options. Without any income coming in, I was strongly incented to minimize my spending. Hostels, airbnb, couch surfing, house swapping: fortunately for me, there is a growing interest in lodging alternatives to hotels. Unfortunately information on these options is still limited to google searches if you don’t know the specific website you want to use. Thus was born this website as a place to find information about lodging alternatives for those who want to travel cheaply. Then I decided to expand it beyond lodging, because there are a wealth of new sharing economy services that are useful for travel: transportation, food tourism, local guides, and other resources.