Updated April 2022
It’s no secret that travel can be expensive, and accommodations are the second most costly item after airfare. Here are 2 of my favorite resources I’ve discovered for keeping down your costs when it comes to where you lay your head each night while increasing your adventure potential and stretching your travel dollar!
My go-to website for finding incredible experiences, unique accommodations, meeting the locals and taking part in amazing travel is www.Workaway.info. This site is incredible! Here’s the concept – you trade your skills, elbow grease, knowledge or other talents in exchange for a bed and meals. Sound simple? It is! The work you do can be anything from harvesting grapes in a vineyard in Bordeaux, helping children learn English in their Croatian home, assisting with social media for a catering business in Singapore, working on a permaculture farm in Costa Rica, renovating a home in Seattle or being a yoga instructor in the Canary Islands!
Search the Workaway database and use keywords like “wine” or “horses” or “surfing” to find your perfect match. Here’s one example: you can work at a dive shop in Bali for 5 hours a day/ 5 days a week and in exchange, you’ll receive a bed in a dorm with 3 other Workawayers and 2 meals each day…and you’ll get to do all the diving you can handle or end up with your Master Dive certificate at the end of your stay. Or how about this? You could live with a family on a farm in Norway, helping a few hours each day with household chores and taking care of the chickens, goats and a donkey named Fred in exchange for a tiny stone cottage of your own on the farm and 3 organic meals each day.
There are all types of accommodations – bunks in a dorm, private cabins, spare bedrooms, even RVs and tents. Some folks offer two meals a day, some offer three. Hosts may ask for a minimum stay of 2 weeks or 1 month, and others are ok with 3 or 4 days…the possibilities are endless. When you’re not working you are free to explore the area – your hosts often will take you around, drop you off in town for the day or even lend you a kayak or a bicycle…or even their own car! They’ll also give you the insider dope on where the best places are for coffee, pizza, great hikes, gin & tonics and more.
So far, I’ve had three amazing adventures using Workaway. My first was doing trail maintenance on Skopelos, a tiny Greek island floating in the turquoise waters of the Aegean Sea. After I committed to a week working with Heather, I googled the island to see what there was to do there – and was thrilled to find out this was where the movie “Mamma Mia!” was filmed; in fact, the church where the wedding takes place in the movie is up a rocky cliff on Skopelos. After working one afternoon my host drove me around the island showing me the different locations where the movie was filmed and waited in the car while I hiked up to the church. (Hey now – don’t judge me – I love that silly movie and oddly enough, ended up on the other island where the second movie was filmed – which was NOT in Greece! If you’re a MM fan, read about it here)
In exchange for 5 hours of tough work each day clearing brush, weeds and overgrowth from an ancient Grecian cobblestone path, I was given breakfast and dinner and a bedroom in the owner’s ancient stone home in the village. Now to be perfectly honest here – this Workaway didn’t “work” out so well – the house was dirty, the bed was a small loveseat that couldn’t pull out to a bed because of all the construction clutter in “my” room and the bathroom was – well, I’d have to say – horrible. So I ended up leaving after 3 nights rather than my original commitment of 1 week. But I didn’t give up hope, figuring this was a one-off and not the norm. There are reviews you can read from previous Workawayers to get a sense of what you can expect and this listing didn’t have bad reviews. I honestly think this was just bad timing for the host with the unexpected roof leak construction going on and so I just packed up and moved along.
My next Workaway was at an orphanage in Nepal. I had the great pleasure of working with 11 adorable, smart, hard-working kids for two weeks. I picked beans, weeded the garden, read books to the kids, helped with homework, walked the young kids to school each morning with 4 girls jostling each other for the great “privilege” of holding my hand, cleaned the kitchen twice a day, peeled perhaps 1000 pounds of potatoes for the twice-daily dal baht… and as a bonus I learned how to make the packets of hay and rice for the elephant next door and was allowed to feed her one night! If you’d like to read about this exceptional experience, click here for the blog post and lots of pix of my adorable Nepali crew!
Although hosts in countries like Nepal and Africa often charge Workawayers to help defray the cost of feeding and housing them, the price is nominal. I paid 500 rupee (approximately $4.25US/day) for three huge meals of just-picked organic veggies, freshly butchered local chicken (butchered by the older boys at the orphanage and the feathers plucked by the 9 and 10-year-old girls), lots of rice, steaming hot masala tea – and had my own private bedroom and bathroom across the street. Super simple and rustic accommodations to be sure, but just fine for me!
My 3rd Workaway was in January 2020 at a vineyard in Wanaka, New Zealand. “My Frenchman” and I stayed in this beautiful town for a week and in exchange for 22 hours for our week-long stay we were given a small apartment with a fully equipped kitchen and private bathroom and money each day to purchase groceries or use at local restaurants. Some hosts cook meals for their Workawayers, but the owner, Jackie, was more comfortable giving us cash to do our own thing, Jackie showed us how to prune the grapevines (she called it “trimming the laterals”) to allow the sunlight to ripen the teeny tiny grapelettes to grow up to be Pinot Noir.
It was easy work, and I listened to podcasts while working in the sun each morning for 4 hours, leaving the rest of the day for exploring the area and doing wine-tastings all around the neighborhood!Another incredible resource for work exchange opportunities is The Caretaker Gazette, a newsletter that gets emailed to subscribers every other month, with updates and new opportunities sent to your inbox once or twice a week.
Here you’ll find postings seeking caretakers for deluxe Caribbean estates, Australian cattle ranches needing workers, remote Alaskan jobs off the grid, and help wanted at a Costa Rican bed and breakfast. This was how I found myself living in a 15th-century villa in Tuscany last summer!
For two glorious months, I watered the multitudes of flowers and potted plants, picked up bits and pieces of trash on the estate and assisted at a few gorgeous weddings and special events (“assisting” meaning I pointed to the hallway where the bathrooms were when asked by guests and nodded and smiled!) In exchange for that “hard work”I received a Cinderella-like suite at the top of the spiral staircase in the villa.
These simple accommodations included a twin bed, cooktop, dorm-size fridge, microwave and kitchen sink, a few pots and pans and a “moka” to make my morning coffee, as well as my own bathroom with bidet. Some days I took a quick bus ride to Pisa to sit under the Leaning Tower and people-watch (the very same tower that Galileo is alleged to have dropped two balls to prove his theory of gravity), 
or I’d go the other direction to Lucca to stroll along the top of the medieval wall encircling the ancient town. Some days, I took a comfortable quick train ride to Florence for lunch and a stroll around the piazza admiring the Duomo (which never ceased to amaze and impress me to the point of tears!) and eating a ginormous sandwich from the famous All’ Antico Vinaio on the Via de Neri, or I’d take a walk into the next town, San Guiliano Terme for fresh pizza. I had a bicycle to ride to the grocery store for supplies. And there were times I spent simply reading a book in the garden next to the blossoms of the hydrangeas and sipping local wine…this was how I spent my days. And all for just 2 or 3 hours of work each day, with a full day and night off each week to explore further. Using that extra night, I visited the Cinque Terre to hike from village to village, ate award-winning ice cream in medieval San Gimignano and took multiple trains to see 
Andrea Bocelli perform in the Verona Arena, a 1st-century Roman amphitheatre!
What an amazing experience it was to actually live in Italy for two whole months. Think about that for a minute – living in a villa, watering flowers and picking up bits of trash for a couple hours – in exchange for a place to sleep every night at NO COST to you, and giving you the chance to spend time in one place learning the culture, practicing the language, and actually being a local!
Just last summer, I found a housesitting gig in the Caretaker Gazette – in July, I spent a week in Port Townsend in Washington State taking care of a fluffy cat and exploring the coast. There are tons of cool options in this little homegrown publication!
At the moment, I’m corresponding with a woman that placed an ad in the Gazette needing help at her luxury resort in Kenya – with a bit of luck I’ll be there next summer for three months, and I’m messaging a man on Workaway that needs a housesitter for his home on a quiet beach in Ecuador this summer in case the Kenya gig doesn’t pan out!
To enjoy these opportunities and find so many more that will change your life, subscribe to Workaway ($42/year for an individual account or $54 for a couple at www.workaway.info) and/or to The Caretaker Gazette ($29.95 for 1-year online access or different pricing for mailed newsletters).
There are other websites that offer work exchange as well, including WWOOFing (Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms) and HelpX, but I haven’t explored opportunities with them…yet! ☺
Want to follow and travel along with me? Join my adventures at Facebook or on Instagram…
See you there! 😉
“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Cindy, thanks for your well-written and handsome blog! I second your endorsement of Workaway. My wife and I have had great experiences at a caravan park in SE Australia, a remote property in New Zealand, a sheep farm in the Karoo of South Africa, another sheep farm on the West Island of the Falklands, an ecolodge north of Quito in Ecuador, and a small finca in Southern Spain. As retirees, we spend time researching which assignments will be a good fit (some are clearly better for 25-year-olds), but almost every experience has been very positive.
Well thank you for your kind words! I adore Workaway!! Glad you’ve found some epic and exotic locales to experience like locals.
Thank you for your kind words and for signing up to receive new blog posts! I’m a huge fan of Workaway and sounds like you are too! You’ve worked in some amazing places- glad you see you’re enjoying working and living like a local!
We like to travel, mostly to see new birds, and we’ve found Workaway allows us to interact with locals in a different way than if we were just tourists. We find out a lot more about local concerns and issues, and local lifestyles–as you’ve learned too, obviously. BTW, we’re owners of a VW camper van, too, and have traveled and camped extensively in the US and Canada. Safe travels!
[…] and was a caretaker in a Tuscan villa for 2 months. (What??? Read about my Workway adventures here!) Hostels and Workaway are some effective – and fun! – ways to cut your accommodation […]