As budget travel is so very much on the agenda this year, you may be interested in my experiences with the travel networking site, Hospitality Club. It’s a website designed to bring travellers and hosts together to exchange hospitality, whether it be travel information, a drink or meal or free accomodation. Once you sign up, you can contact another member in the place you’re planning to visit and likewise you can reciprocate with help or accomodation when other members contact you. There are other travel networks offering a similar service such as Couchsurfing and Servas.

Cycling in the Turia Gardens

I joined Hospitality club when I was planning a trip to Valencia with my family and wanted to meet up with someone local to help us connect with the city and get an insider’s view. We already had our hotel booked, so a friendly face rather than accomodation was on my agenda. I contacted Angel because he was in bit older than the average student type, his photo looked friendly and he sounded genuinely keen to help visitors enjoy his city. We exchanged a few e-mails on good places to visit and then arranged to meet up on the first Saturday of our stay. We had breakfast together and then took up Angel’s suggestion of renting bikes for the family and going for a cycle ride in the Turia Gardens.

The day was a great success and with a local we didn’t have to worry about our dodgy Spanish or reading a map – we just followed Angel and had a great time cycling through the gardens to the beach where we relaxed for an hour or two before coming back to the hotel. On another evening we met up again and Angel recommended a typically Spanish restaurant down the backstreets where we had an excellent meal together. Angel was keen to improve his English and we had fun chatting to him about life in Valencia, although it didn’t do much to improve my Spanish.

Eating out with Angel, our Hospitality Club host in Valencia

Obviously, free accommodation is a big attraction of Hospitality Club, but as you can see from our experience, it’s also a great way of connecting with a place and experiencing it through local eyes. Even if you stay with a host, you should expect to engage with them in this way and not treat it like a free B & B.

Since then, I’ve hosted guests a couple of times and found it an interesting extension to our family’s social life, comparing notes on travel destinations and favourite places my guests have been. When I get an e-mail from another member, I use my initial impressions to judge whether I would like to host them or not. If the e-mail shows that they have similar interests, are genuinely keen to visit Bristol & engage with my family, then the answer’s likely to be yes. If it’s from someone who wants to bring all their friends and use my home as a base for partying, then I’ll suddenly find myself unavailable.

The next thing I do is to check their profile for age and interests, and then any testimonials from other people who have hosted them or been their guest. You have to read between the lines a bit on these, as no-one likes to give a damning report. For instance, if someone writes ‘as long as you clearly agree arrival times you’ll be OK’ you know you’ll be dealing with a guest who is chronically unreliable.

Eating out with our guests from Hospitality Club

This week we hosted a charming international couple who were taking some time out from work and study in London to see something of the West Country. As well as putting them up for a couple of nights, we lent them guidebooks and gave them our recommendations. From us they went on to stay with another Hospitality Club host in Cardiff and had a week’s holiday without too much expense.

As a woman traveller, one also has to consider security implications and take some sensible precautions. If I was travelling as a woman alone, I’d only request to stay with other women or couples and similarly if I was hosting, I’d probably only accept couples or female guests. I’d also make an effort to exchange a few e-mails before meeting a guest or host, to get a feel for what they were like. But I wouldn’t let these common sense concerns stop me using a travel network like Hospitality Club.

Even setting the cost-saving implications aside, I’d definitely recommend it as an enriching way to travel.