Some of them may require you to do a little work, but even that can open your eyes to circumstances different from your home.

Here are some ideas:

Go on a Mission or Humanitarian Trip

Depending on what you are doing, the chances are you will stay at a central location and take all meals there. You will also most likely have transportation to the “field” or “site” if you are not within easy walking distance.

Local churches and other houses of worship are good places to find out about these types of trips. You can also check with national and international charities, such as the Red Cross or others.

Join a Working Farm

Some foreign countries, such as Mexico, have these. You work on the farm a few hours a day or only on weekends, which gives you plenty of free time to sightsee. Your host family provides meals and lodging when you’re on the farm and in the city, lodging may have been arranged for, or you might be able to find reasonable accommodations on your own.

You may have to stay a certain amount of time, say a month, and you may have to travel with members of the same sex, but still, even with these limitations, you should enjoy yourself.

Teach English

Teach English as a second or alternate language in a foreign country or offer to teach summer school at a school outside your home state.

Summer school classes usually only last a few hours a day, leaving you free time in the afternoon and at night to sightsee. For ESL classes, you may be able to set your own schedule, especially if you are teaching only a few people. You may need a teaching certificate or college degree in order to do this.

If you go through an educational organization to do this, your room and meals will be provided, or you will at least be given information on where to stay and eat for reasonable prices.

Build Hiking Trails

If you like to hike and camp, and don’t mind getting a little dirty, consider helping maintain or even build a new hiking trail. Accommodations will most likely be camping ones – possibly even relatively primitive tent camping – but generally you won’t work all day. Some of these assignments are located in the U.S. Virgin Islands, so you can actually choose a tropical locale to do this at.

If you do decide to do something like this, make sure your passport is in order if you will be leaving the country, and check with your local health department to see if you need any vaccines. Also, check the U.S. Government travel website to see if any countries have recently been added to the list of those where travel is prohibited or advised against.

These types of trips are a great way to broaden your horizon, experience a new culture, help others, and save money. Having international experience is very appealing on college applications and resumes.

Couchsurfing is a great way to see places from the inside.

How Couchsurfing Works

The premise is simple – sign up for the site, set up a Facebook style profile, say where you want to go and find someone in the city prepared to offer you a couch for a few days. That’s not all you might get, either. Many hosts are willing to show you around, give you tips on where to eat and places to visit and generally make sure that you have a great time without spending a lot. It’s a wonderful way to see a place from the inside – the way the locals see it. You can avoid tourist traps and have experiences that you might otherwise have missed.

Rating The Experience

Is it safe? Statistics suggest that most people have a fantastic time with no negative reports. On the Couchsurfing site you can rate each experience. Even if you don’t want to stay with a complete stranger, you can use the site to meet people in your destination who will meet you for coffee or a drink and point you in the right direction. You can also have just as much fun playing host to new friends visiting your town – and when the holiday’s over, there might even be business opportunities.

Other resources

• The Hospitality Club
• Global Freeloaders
• Video Introduction To Couchsurfing
• Couchsurfing on Twitter
• HostATourist
• Stay4Free
• Warmshowers – for bike tourists

This is part two in a three-part series on using Priceline and Hotwire to get killer travel deals. See part one: The Secret To Getting Best Travel Prices on Priceline and Hotwire.

So you’ve gotten a good deal on cars, now it’s time to use Priceline get to the REALLY good deals: hotels. However, Priceline is not for the faint of heart. To get a really good deal, you have to do your homework.

Bidding on Priceline can pay off royally – getting 50-75% per night off lowest hotel prices – but it comes at a cost. You don’t get to pick the hotel, and if you screw up, you are stuck. Priceline’s cancellation policy is ironclad – they don’t give any (except in EXTREME circumstances). Are you willing to do the work and take the risk? Let’s go!

But before we get into the science of “beating” Priceline, let’s talk about the reality of hotels rooms and how they get into Priceline and Hotwire.

How Hotels Use Priceline and Hotwire
Hotels load rates into a booking system only accessible by Priceline and Hotwire. When you look for a hotel and or/place a bid:

• Priceline looks to see if there is a hotel with a rate loaded able to accept your bid, if so they book that hotel room for you
• Hotwire offers you one hotel (the lowest priced hotel at each star level in each zone)

During their usual busy periods, hotels normally won’t feed rooms into Priceline/Hotwire until the very last moment (hoping to sell the rooms without hard discount for this period). If eventually their reservation rate does not meet their expectations, they put rooms on the site.

For the off-season, hotels start feeding the sites with good discounts early, to get clientele from other hotels (clients are scarce). They will discount eventually even more in the last days if they have not sold their discounted rooms.

Of course you should also take into account specials events: conventions, etc… or on the other side, bad economic news, which impacts hotels and hospitality/tourism business very quickly.

How do Priceline/Hotwire Make Their Money?
Priceline makes its money on booking fees and amount of an overbid (and it is believed in some hotel agreements a commission on the sale as well). Hotwire makes their margin on booking fees and also on a markup to the rate the hotel has loaded into the system.

How this affects you:
It affects your bid timing. You can start bidding as soon as 11 months in advance of your stay, but it’s unlikely you’ll get a good deal as if you bid in the weeks close to the date.

How do you get familiar with how soon to bid, and how low the hotels are willing to discount? That’s where research comes in.

What the Pros Know: Research Bidding Histories
There’s light research and there’s heavy research. For light research, just to get a feel for the current rates, you can plug in your location and dates into Hotwire.com, orbitz.com, or expedia. You can also check prices using the excellent meta-search engine kayak.com. If you want to stop there, you can go to Priceline and try bidding at 50% off the prices you found in your research.

HOTWIRE TIP: If you want to stay at a specific hotel you know is used by HOTWIRE, do your search using the hotel address. If it’s available, chances are it will be the first one on your list.

But if you plan on booking more than just a one-off hotel room (or love the thrill of getting some price that’s so crazy low almost no one would believe it), it would behoove you to get serious about your research. There are some fantastic sites devoted to bidding on Priceline like betterbidding.com and biddingfortravel.com. On the forums there you’ll find detailed hotel bidding histories, including hotel, zone, rejected and accepted bids. Flyertalk.com also has some great forums on Priceline and Hotwire.

Note: since Priceline’s hotel inventory, pricing and zone structure can fluctuate widely (even on a daily basis), the forums are most useful for major cities with multiple recent bids.

Bid Like A Priceline Pro
Ok, now that you’ve done your research and have some bids in mind, you can start your savvy bidding. Here are some tips:

Tip: Ignore “Recent Winning Bids”: it’s just Priceline trying to hoodwink you – only believe what you’ve seen in the bidding forums

Ignore Priceline’s “Helpful” Bidding Hints
Sometimes during the bidding process, Priceline will offer to let you rebid without changing any parameters if you raise your bid $XX. Experienced Priceline customers know this means that at least 98% of the time, you’re very close to a winning bid – so you should add on a (free rebid zone) and start raising your bid in dollar or two dollar increments, or start a new bid in 24 hours that’s a few dollars higher. Basically, the helpful hint amount is likely the “fair profit margin” that Priceline would like to receive from you.

Tip: Start Bidding As Early as Possible to Get In the Lowballs
Start bidding as soon as your plans are firm. You can bid up to 11 months in advance, but you may get better deals bidding one to four weeks before your stay for the best deals, because hotels often hold back discounted rooms until close to the date. But don’t wait too long.

Tip: Bid On Higher Star Hotels First
Start out bidding for high star rating hotels. If you start your bid with 2 stars, Priceline checks for 2, 3, 4 and 5 star hotels for the price you entered. If your offer gets declined, you cannot rebid by changing to a 3, 4, or 5 star hotel (even if you want to bid a higher price). But, if you start with a 4 stars, you can rebid for a 3 star. Remember, when you rebid, you do not have to raise your price. If your $50 offer wasn’t accepted for a 4 star, that doesn’t mean you can’t bid $40 for a 3 star…

Tip: Book One Night Only
Even if you are planning on staying for a few nights, still book just one night. If your bid gets accepted, Priceline lets you add on additional nights at the same price. So once your bid is accepted, research the hotel online, and if you like it, reserve more nights, and if not, reserve a different hotel for the other nights.

DING DING DING Tip: Rebid Without Changing Stars or Zones
Normally to place a rebid, you either have to add another zone (area of town), lower your quality requirements, or change dates of your stay. Simply raising the amount of your bid doesn’t let you do a free rebid. Hotels on Priceline are rated by the star quality system, from 1 to 5 stars.

But here’s the key: not all zones have hotels in every category! The pros have figured out a way to use this to your advantage: add a zone to your rebid that you know does NOT contain a hotel with the star level you want – a “dummy zone.”

If there are many locations to choose from you can really work this to your advantage.

Let’s say you want to stay in a minumum 3-star hotel in location A. There are three zones in your target area, A, B and C. Here’s what you do:

• Find a dummy zone. You could spend time clicking back and forth in Priceline, looking for which zones don’t have a 3-star hotel so you can use it for a dummy zone, but someone has already figured out a tool to do this: re-bidding.com (it’s in beta). Run your query in Priceline first, and click the name your own price link. Plug the URL from that page into re-bidding.com and it will figure out the dummy zones for you per star rating.
• Start your re-bid and add this dummy zone to your offer. Let’s say it’s zone C.
• You then put in that you are willing to stay in area C (which doesn’t have a 3 star hotel or higher) but you still leave checked that you want to stay in a 3 star hotel and raise your price slightly. If you win, your hotel will for sure be in area A because area B doesn’t have the hotel level that you requested!

BIG FAT NOTE: Zones (and the hotels included in them) are subject to change daily, so always double-check to make sure the dummy zone you’re using does not contain any hotels in your star quality range — even if you’ve bid in this city before.

BIG FAT NOTE TWO: If you are ever checking for a no-four star zone, make sure the zone you are checking doesn’t have a little palm tree next to it. The palm tree indicates that there are resorts in that area. You may check the spot and see there are no three star hotels, but when you go to bid and include that new location, they may end up sticking you at a resort.

Site Resources:
Thanks SO MUCH to betterbidding.com and biddingfortravel.com, which provided much help in writing this article. There are lots of helpful folks on these sites! Some other travel blog sites you might want to check out:

Better Bidding

Bidding For Travel

FlyerTalk

View From The Wing

Upgrade Travel Better

PeterGreenberg.com

The Cranky Flier

Coming up next in part three: Why Hotels Hate Priceline Guests & Other Dirty Little Secrets.

While many hitchhikers have perfectly wonderful experiences and meet lots of oddball characters, hitching is now generally frowned upon. Whereas guidebooks used to at least provide the best places to hitch, most of them now totally advise against it.

Let’s Go publications, which had a hitchhiker’s thumb as its logo for decades, dropped it in its most recent edition. Editor Tom Mercer said: “Though Let’s Go readers might still choose to hitchhike in certain circumstances, we felt that the logo was no longer emblematic of budget travel.” Today’s budget travelers are most often backpackers. The writers at artoftravel.com said, “…the vast majority of travel backpackers rely on public transportation and never hitch rides.”

So how do budget travelers get around?

Ridesharing is the New Hitchhiking
When I was in college, rideshare boards matched up carless students with drivers looking for some company on a long trip. The internet now brings this casual carpooling to the masses. The number of rides offered in the US are usually only a fraction of those offered in Europe – possibly due to the extreme price of gas, or that Europeans aren’t as xenophobic as Americans.

• Ridecheck (for US and Canada) – Ridecheck started out as a rideshare service for college students, but it’s morphed into the carpool arena, being offered as an alternative for commuters during NYC transit strikes.
• Digithitch Rideboard: the site is free, ride offers are posted and you e-mail the person. They have pages for rides offered in the US and rides in Europe.
• Drive2Day (europe)
• BugEurope BugRide

Hitchhiking the old fashioned way…
So you still want to wing it? Throw plans to the wind and chance being stuck outside to die of exposure in Alaska if no ride appears? If you do want to hitch the old fashioned way, follow these tips from the experts:

• Show where you’re going. Have a bold destination sign, one visible from two-three seconds drive-time away. This shows where you’re going (so drivers can figure out if they can help you) but also that you’re literate and you’re on a planned trip. Try to be creative. Some examples I saw online included something as simple as “please,” “We’re fun!” (from a couple), and my favorite, “I don’t smell.”

• Don’t look like a serial killer. Even though most serial killers hold down jobs and look normal, there’s still the stereotype of the rumpled crazy-looking dude who maims good Samaritans. “Dress like the people you want to pick you up, “ says LifeHacker.com.

• Consider your location. In countries where crime rates are low and standard of living is high, hitchhiking is probably pretty safe. New Zealand is oft mentioned as the “hitcher’s paradise.”

• Make eye contact with drivers. Respectable eyes for male drivers and “puppy eyes” for female drivers. And SMILE!

• Be prepared to wait. Average “wait time” is 45 minutes, even near an urban area. Don’t be afraid to turn down a ride if it doesn’t feel right. Trust your gut.

• Go alone or go with a friend. Some argue single drivers won’t pick two people up, and some say it’s safer to be with a friend in the car.

• Pack light, and keep your bag in your hands in the car. If things get ugly, you can hop out quickly.

Although common wisdom would have you believe that there is a high rape/maiming/murder rate for hitchhikers, in fact the #1 danger in hitchhiking (or backpack travel in general) is being in a vehicle accident. So before you accept a ride, do a visual cursory check of the car’s condition, and check out the driver to make sure they’re a sober.

Hitchhiking Sites to Ogle
Digihitch.com: the modern hitchhiker’s hub. Everything you need to know about hitchhiking, rail and road travel, with 10,000 members and growing. I almost don’t need to post other sites – this one has stories, resources, blogs, and some interesting road polls.

Let Me Stay For A Day: the website, book and blog about Ramon Stoppelenburg. Stoppelenburg traveled the world for two years with no money, hitchhiking and staying with generous souls who invited him into their homes through his website. Read an excerpt of his time in Scotland here.

Artoftravel.com has some great hitchhiking tips as part an online book by John Gregory, on seeing the world on $25 a day or less. Great common sense advice from a man who has visited 35 countries and still retains his sense of humor and all his phalanges.

Gonomad.com: another wonderful comprehensive alternative travel site. I was especially interested in the women’s travel resources and stories.