What is a help exchange and how does it work?

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A help exchange describes a type of travel where you exchange your time and skills for accommodation. Accommodation is provided for free by the host in exchange. Additionally, hosts often provide helpers with perks such as meals, use of a vehicle, discounted rates to local activities and language classes.

As well as being referred to as a help exchange, you’ll also hear it called a work exchange, wwoofing (farms), work trade, world packers, work away, helpx, skill exchange, skill stay, work stay and help stay.

Why a help exchange

Taking a gapyear (time off between school and college) or a work sabbatical is one of the best things you can do. However, it takes a huge amount of courage, independence, planning, and financial savvy to make it happen.

One of the things you’ll wonder about is: how can I afford it? You’ll also wonder: is there a way to work and travel abroad for free?

(Is it possible to travel for free? by Journal of Nomads)

These are valid questions that must be accounted for before jetting off. You’re far more likely to have an enjoyable time if you have a plan, a little bit of savings and a creative determination.

Going prepared with knowledge about the ways you can travel for low-to-no-cost will also give you a huge advantage.

Know where to cut costs

It’s essential to find ways to minimize the two biggest costs you face on the road ahead: transportation and lodging.

Transportation

The best way to minimize how much you spend on transportation is by:

  • Selecting fewer locations
  • Staying longer periods of time in each place

This has the implicit benefit of helping you dig deeper into the local culture. Also, you’ll pick up some of the language and feel more at home in the country where you are visiting.

Lodging

Once you have arrived in your hand-picked destinations, the next concern is how to trim the costs of hostels and guesthouses.

One popular option is Couchsurfing, a platform that helps you find locals willing to let you crash on their couch for free. However with this, it’s difficult to stay more than a few days without feeling too much like a free-loader. It’s also hard to feel at home when you’re sleeping on the floor or in someone’s living room (in spite of their enormous generosity).

A great alternative is a help exchange. Think of it as the next evolution of Couchsurfing – you can crash on the couch but you will need to pull your weight about the place.

Help and stay for room and board

A help exchange is where travellers with sought-after skills or simply time and energy can help local businesses or organizations in exchange for a free place to stay.

What better way to see the world than to share what you know and do well. When you share yours skills or talents with a community or organization, it brings you closer to the local people and culture.

What kind of help exchange opportunities can I find?

The type of help that you can exchange is varied and often depends on where you are in the world. Exchanges that HelpStay provides are opportunities in the following areas:

Placements are everywhere from Azerbaijan and South Africa to Ghana and India. They include opportunities in Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the United States and Australia.

You can choose a range of “stays” from working on an organic farm in Benin, volunteering at a beach hostel in Costa Rica to working at a team building camp in Malaysia.

Can you still get off the beaten path?

Absolutely! In fact, a help exchange may lead you to a destination so off the beaten path, you never would have thought to go there in the first place.

The hosts

By setting up a help exchange, hosts know they’re filling a much-needed skill gap in their schools, lodges, hostels, or farms. Their organizations are actively seeking someone to provide the help needed. This makes the experience mutually beneficial.

You’re also avoiding expensive pay-to-volunteer programs where organizations may sign up just to receive the money, not needing or particularly wanting the actual volunteer.

Why choose a help exchange?

Besides cutting your wallet a break, there are other benefits of participating in a help exchange while traveling abroad. You’ll also enjoy a meaningful experience doing something and interacting with new people who are probably not also backpackers.

Help exchanges provide opportunities:

  • To learn or practice a foreign language
  • Adopt a new skill
  • Understand how collective communities like Kibbutzim operate
  • To teach something you already know how to do

These kind of short-term work opportunities can be showcased on a resume or used as interesting content for job interviews once you return home.

Who else has worked as a documentary filmmaker in Cameroon or operated a social media campaign in rural India? Stories of cross-cultural teamwork, completing tasks in a foreign environment, and learning on-the-go are impressive to employers and admissions staff at university or graduate school programs.

By focusing on a particular region or area of work, like environmental sustainability or journalism, you can actually bolster your competitiveness for a future career without spending a fortune or sacrificing travel altogether.

Thanks to the internet and a few well-organized travel startups like HelpStay, the world is at your fingertips.