How to travel for free? There are many ways to organise free travel and companies that will help you travel for free. Travel doesn’t have to be expensive and it is possible to travel for free, or partially free. This post is on how to travel the world for free, in various ways! We all know the old mantra, travel is cheaper than staying at home, and it’s true, but who doesn’t want to minimise travel expenses to get maximum mileage from their dollar? We’ve been doing just that for years, supporting our travels on very little cash. These days there are many ways to travel the world for free or at least ultra-cheap. We give you several ideas and opportunities on how to travel the world for free in this post. Some you’ll know about, some you won’t. Let’s take a look at tips, tricks, companies and hacks, working your way around the world, and more, for free, cheap, or super budget.
There are many ways to travel the world for free or at low cost. Working for your bed and board is one option.
Free here means, cash-free, of course, you’re likely going to have to exchange something for your free travel and that usually means time, expertise, or work. You also need travel insurance, never skip that.
You can travel the world for free by getting smart. It’s not easy, or everyone would do it, but if you know these tips or are prepared to work or exchange time for free travel, it can be done. The companies below give us opportunities to travel for free or super cheap. They may not make your whole travel experience free, but parts of it can be free. Employ tricks like Couchsurfing, volunteering, crewing, cleaning, farm work, hosting, and you can make a large part of your world travel free, or very cheap.
We made a little video to give you some ideas on how to travel for free. Watch it, then have a look at the ideas below.
Free Travel Video
Just save this post to Pinterest for your future reference. Please double check all information for yourself, particularly visa regulations. We try to keep this page up to date but things change constantly.
Work For Your Bed and Board, Maybe Even Get Paid. Work Your Way Around the World
If you have useful skills, a craft, tech skills or even just willing hands, you could be working your way around the world, for free.
There are many ways to work your way around the world, some old, some new. Helpex and Workaway are established companies that have been around a long time and are trusted by many. The Working Traveller website stands out as being a genius idea but has cumbersome sign-ups. Some, most, have sign up fees.
Various websites exist to allow you to work as you travel. Check out Workaway, Helpx, CultureGoGo and Working Traveller. The links are on our resources page.
The Working Traveller website maps hundreds if not thousands of employment opportunities around the world. Good workers will gain a good reputation on the site and will build up an online resumé to impress future employers. These future employers can either be through the site or in the real world.
This model could help you get a better job when your travels come to an end. Obviously you need to check working visa requirements for yourself.
I’m hoping my own kids will use this to get valuable work experience and, guess what, we, a family, even got a one-week placement at a hotel in Romania many years ago. Admittedly, we know the owner of this site, just for full transparency.
Where to look: Workingtraveller., similar such as Workaway, also Culturegogo and Helpx. Other sites may exist.
Travel the World For Free With Couchsurfing
Joining Couchsurfers gives you access to a global network of people, happy to open their homes to you for a night or two, just because they’re nice and like to chat.
What goes around comes around, of course, members maybe do better if they also have a couch or spare room to offer and can build up a strong profile, but it works on good reviews of hosts and Couchsurfers.
Couchsurfers could cook dinner of help around the house or garden to say thanks. We take in Couchsurfers whenever we can. I feel like we have enough money to allow young backpackers to take a shower or wash their clothes at our place.
We’ve met some wonderful people this way and sharing makes the world a nicer place. I love this platform and they don’t pay me 1 cent to say that. Where to look: Couchsurfing.com
Travel for Free by House Sitting and Have a Home, for Free
When homeowners go away, they sometimes like to have somebody move in to look after their dog, cat, goldfish and garden, or maybe just be there to keep an eye on everything and be a deterrent for thieves.
These gigs are sweet if free accommodation is at the top of your list of travel priorities.
Finding a house sit can take a lot of effort, the market is highly competitive and professional house sitters with a string of references get first dibs.
Improve your chances of scoring a house sit by producing a slick video introducing yourselves to prospective homeowners and loading it onto the house sitting website.
Where to look: housecarers, also mindmyhouse.com, housesitworld.com.au, happyhousesitters.com.au, trusted housesitters or aussiehousesitters.com.au. We’ve also scored house sits through word of mouth.
Travel for Free by House Swapping
Agencies exist to bring homeowners together for mutual benefit through house swapping. You normally have to pay a fee for annual membership of the house swapping site, but after that expense, you could stay in somebody else’s home, for an agreed period, for free.
This obviously works best if your home is in a desirable vacation spot or big city and you will normally have to book your stay well in advance. It’s unusual to find last-minute house swapping opportunities.
Where to look: Home Exchange (this is the site we will be using for our Romania house), homexchangevacation.com, People Like Us also homebase-hols.com
Travel for Free by WWOOFing
If working outdoors, on the land, is your thing, the World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms offer opportunities for volunteers to help out in exchange for room and board.
Where to look: Visit wwoof.org. to find contact details of the WWOOF office in your destination country. You needed to register and pay a small fee before accessing lists of member farms.
Fly for Free
Budget airlines have been known to offer flights for $0. OK, you will usually still have to pay taxes, but it’s a sweet deal.
The trick here is to receive notification of upcoming airline sales and be ready to pounce on a bargain the moment the sale goes live. These offers sell out fast.
Where to look: Sign up with the budget airlines relevant to your area of travel, Air Asia have amazing sales, but you could also try ryanair.com, easyjet.com or flymonarch.com, virginaustralia.com (watch for happy hour rates) and jetstar.com. Email notifications of sales and special offers put you in a good position to score the best deals.
Ski for Free
Seasonal jobs in ski resorts give you easy access to the slopes on your days off. Apply early, places fill up fast.
Where to look: Adventure Work or NZSki.com
Teach English Abroad to Help You Travel For Free
You don’t have to go the whole hog and get a TEFL qualification, sometimes you can just be a live-in conversational language improver.
If you are TEFL certified (a course to become an English Second Language instructor, no teaching experience needed), you can receive a salary proportional to the cost of living in your placement country.
The Middle East and Far East pays particularly well according to friends of ours who do this. Sometimes free accommodation comes with the job.
Alternatively, fluent English speakers can receive free room and board during a period of conversational volunteering. Diverbo (see below) accepted English-speaking volunteers for their sites in Germany and Spain and provided some volunteers with full room, board, and transport.
If you’ve got your sea-legs, opportunities exist to crew on yachts or cruise ships. What an amazing way to see the world for free! You’ll have to work hard but plenty of job opportunities exist for chefs, entertainers, cleaners, and more.
Where to look: For cruise ship opportunities, go direct to the cruise line’s website, try carnival.com or royalcaribbean.com. To find crew posts on yachts try Crewseekers International, there was a joining fee, or crewseekers.net. Find a Crew is another site to try. Sailing skills are not always required. Skippers sometimes just need company, an extra pair of hands, someone to take turns on watch, and so on. Alternatively, head down to the port, find the yachties and ask around.
Travel For Free by Hitchhiking
In some parts of the world hitchhiking is common, normal and considered safe. For example in Romania locals in rural areas regularly hitch a ride and offer the driver a little petrol money.
Stay safe, use your common sense and trust your gut instinct. I regularly picked up hitchhikers back in Australia, often because I was worried for their safety.
Where to look: Check out Hitchwiki to find general rules of hitchhiking in each country.
Free Travel With Vehicle Returns and Relocations
Certain vehicle rental companies need cars, motor homes and camper vans moving to particular depots. This can be seasonal with specific destinations having a higher demand for vehicles at certain times of year.
This is rather like how relocation cruises work. Alternatively, the vehicle will have to be returned after a previous customer’s lease. You can often score these vehicles along with a fuel allowance from companies like those we mention below.
The catch is usually your time allowance. Unfortunately, you will have limited drive time to get your new home to its destination.
Where to look: transfercar and imoova are 2 examples of vehicle relocation companies.
Food As You Travel for Free
Finding free food as you travel the world isn’t so hard. Look into freganism, gleaning, public food trees and the Food is Free movement, below.
Dumpster diving and Freeganism are two of the buzz words here. I’ve seen city workers in suits picking up sandwiches, usually well wrapped, from the supermarket bins here in London.
So much food is wasted because it’s 5 minutes past its sell-by date and it’s a terrible shame.
Another alternative is gleaning. See the Falling Fruit website, below for information on trees in public places currently producing food.
The Food is Free movement is also taking off around the world. As people return to gardening and growing their own food they are gladly sharing their abundance with neighbours. It’s good for the planet and good for us.
Where to look: Read more about Freeganism at Jamie’s site, Great Big Scary World, or check out this website for free food opportunities in your area. For the Falling Fruit world map, look at the Falling Fruit website. Is free travel starting to sound possible?
Camp For Free
Free camping is possible in some countries and locations, it’s illegal in others. If you have a self-contained camping set-up, ie. you can deal with your own waste and not pollute the environment, you’re more likely to find a spot.
If you’d like to camp but cheaper than the big sites, try HipCamp. For free camping information look at Wikicamp.
Travel For Free as a Travel Blogger
Travel bloggers can and do travel for free, sometimes. Most of the ideas you’ll find for free travel involve exchanging work for travel, so it’s never totally free, there is a trade of services. Travel bloggers and influencers do the same.
I am a travel blogger but we rarely take “free” or sponsored stays. Some bloggers and influencers do a lot of “free” travel.
If you want to find out more just visit our blogging section. But remember, it only looks free to outsiders, we work very hard at what we do.
If you’re still looking for “free” stays your influence maybe isn’t great enough to be of use to the business hosting you. By the time you’re earning good money through travel blogging, you’ll likely prefer to pay your own way or be paid well to visit these places.
Past a certain level travel bloggers can even be paid to travel and share a destination, hotel, or attraction with their audience.These are sometimes called sponsored trips or stays. If not, then the money they make from their travel blogs can easily cover travel expenses.
Can you travel for free?
In all honesty, none of these methods of travelling the world for free, are truly free. Whichever way you choose there must always be some sort of exchange of work, time, company, or swapping something you already own. However, many of these methods and companies will help you travel at a very budget level and have some incredible experiences along the way. This is a very smart way to travel and it’s often far more eco-friendly than mass tourism and fancy hotel stays. We hope you find your way to travel the world spending the minimum cash and don’t let anyone ever call you a freeloader. They’ll simply be jealous that you’re clever enough to figure life and travel out.
Alyson Long is a British medical scientist who jumped ship to chase dreams. A former Chief Biomedical Scientist at London's West Middlesex Hospital she started in website creation and travel writing in 2011.
Alyson is a full-time blogger and travel writer, a published author, and owns several websites. World Travel Family is the biggest.
A lifetime of wanderlust and over 6 years of full-time travel, plus a separate 12 month gap year, has given Alyson and the family some travel expert smarts to share with you on this world travel site.
Today Alyson still travels extensively to update this site and continue her mission to visit every country, but she's often at home on her farm in Australia.
Traveling isn’t free; it comes at a cost. When you receive food or accommodation or any facility, you give something in return. There is some cost involved, whether in terms of cash, work, time, or energy. Traveling can be affordable or done on a budget, but it is never truly free.
That’s not true. Even just looking at your domain name I can see an issue. You are a dot com, so that’s fine for global reach. You’re simply doing it wrong in terms of SEO. There are bloggers from all over the world in the Mediavine group and travel is incredibly popular again.
There’s a lot of work and saving up involved. In our case we sold a lot of stuff, saved for a year, and learned to live with very few posessions. After that I grew my business. Nobody gave us anything, you need to find a way.
Well, first of all you’d need to start a travel blog and make it successful. ie. it needs to rank highly in Google. You’d also need to accumulate a massive social media following on all platforms, these marketing people seem to prefer that over a successful website for some reason. You’d have to get good at doing all the things, then you reach out to people, give them examples of your previous work, show them your awesome engagement on Instagram etc. Convince them you’re the best person for the job. Go to our blogging section (top menu) and start learning.
Hello from Morocco. it’s very important to have bloger like this and well informed about travelbloger went above and beyond the expectations to show us how to get something very important and exactly the kinds of things we most interested in, and so much more that gave us a really memorable experience that i saw here in this bloger.
It works for singles, couples, and families. Unfortunately, during 2020, Couchsurfing introduced a membership fee so we are no longer able to offer people a free place to stay via this platform. We’re looking for a better alternative that doesn’t think of profits before people.
@shivangi rawat, I am @Nomaddigitalrupex from Delhi , here is your answer you can ask on the couch website to the host how many people they can allow its free , it is safe but before travel there make sure you need to talk to them week ago and search there information on social if they are safe and by the way of talking you will know if your host is alright cause host and you need safety
House sitters? We wouldn’t mind what gender, but we would need experience with pets and gardens as well as good references. We tend to go for singles or couples because the more people, the bigger the utility bill we end up paying and you can never guarantee accidents won’t happen around younger children. We love our cat too much to put him at risk. You’ll find that most people who want a house sitter rather than putting their animals in kennels are real pet lovers and want the best for their animals.
Well, we’ve been travelling as a family for the last 7 years. We tried House Sitting and hated it, far too boring. We don’t Couch Surf but we host couch surfers and I know families that have done it. Some families have success with WorkAway, WWoofing and similar, but honestly, you’d be better to just save up. One year cost us $30,000.
Thank you, Alyson for sharing all the useful information, i’m interested in volunteering as an english teacher in non-english speaking European Countries, But i don’t have enough money to do that, moreover i’m at my middle-age now.. will be very grateful to have your reply. Thank you so much 🙂
That’s an interesting idea Ani. I will do some research and see in voluntary teaching posts exist. Hopefully, I’ll be able to add a paragraph on that later today.
Superb post, we enjoyed each and everything as per written in your post. Thank you for this article because it’s really informative, I love reading your blog.
These are great travel tips! Whenever we travel, I always make sure that we stick with our budget and one of the best things I’ve learned is not to be so touristy. We try local and live like local.
I love these tips.
Traveling isn’t free; it comes at a cost. When you receive food or accommodation or any facility, you give something in return. There is some cost involved, whether in terms of cash, work, time, or energy. Traveling can be affordable or done on a budget, but it is never truly free.
Yes, I say that in the post. Cheers.
The information on the english tutoring was useful.
However, you must mention that travel bloggers of certain countries should drop the idea all together, because the word “travel” has no traction
I have been trying to lift this dead travel blog of pakistan for the past 7 years now
That’s not true. Even just looking at your domain name I can see an issue. You are a dot com, so that’s fine for global reach. You’re simply doing it wrong in terms of SEO. There are bloggers from all over the world in the Mediavine group and travel is incredibly popular again.
I would love to travel around exploring diffrent culture heritage and their food and people please give me an opportunity to become a traveller.
There’s a lot of work and saving up involved. In our case we sold a lot of stuff, saved for a year, and learned to live with very few posessions. After that I grew my business. Nobody gave us anything, you need to find a way.
I am interested please contact. Interested to travel, work, stay overseas.
I don’t have money to travel and I would like to go to overseas.How will I go without paying.i will be happy work there with my family.
Musa
To whom it may concern.
I don’t have money to travel and I would like to go to overseas.How will I go without paying.i will be happy work there.
I can do House sitting, be waitress, helper in the house , babysitting,(become a nanny)working at farm.
Please help me.
Regards
M.
You need to look at some of the resources listed on this page, join these programs.
Please i don’t have money, how will i travel before payment,I want to work there
Hello how can I travel for free as a travel blogger to advertise their country their tourism attraction hotels restaurants and more
Well, first of all you’d need to start a travel blog and make it successful. ie. it needs to rank highly in Google. You’d also need to accumulate a massive social media following on all platforms, these marketing people seem to prefer that over a successful website for some reason. You’d have to get good at doing all the things, then you reach out to people, give them examples of your previous work, show them your awesome engagement on Instagram etc. Convince them you’re the best person for the job. Go to our blogging section (top menu) and start learning.
Hello what do I need to travel with my family
Really all you need is a credit card and a passport.
Thank you so much for the awesome advise
Hello from Morocco. it’s very important to have bloger like this and well informed about travelbloger went above and beyond the expectations to show us how to get something very important and exactly the kinds of things we most interested in, and so much more that gave us a really memorable experience that i saw here in this bloger.
Thank you so much for this amazing things.
Just a great blog , Thanks for the information.
hey i want to know about couchsurfing. How can people will trust us as a new member. and give thier house. or can we go as a couple too??
See My Blog
It works for singles, couples, and families. Unfortunately, during 2020, Couchsurfing introduced a membership fee so we are no longer able to offer people a free place to stay via this platform. We’re looking for a better alternative that doesn’t think of profits before people.
@shivangi rawat, I am @Nomaddigitalrupex from Delhi , here is your answer you can ask on the couch website to the host how many people they can allow its free , it is safe but before travel there make sure you need to talk to them week ago and search there information on social if they are safe and by the way of talking you will know if your host is alright cause host and you need safety
Hello, i have a question about sitter job, are people accepting boys these days? because i think the most of them prefer a girl to do this job
House sitters? We wouldn’t mind what gender, but we would need experience with pets and gardens as well as good references. We tend to go for singles or couples because the more people, the bigger the utility bill we end up paying and you can never guarantee accidents won’t happen around younger children. We love our cat too much to put him at risk. You’ll find that most people who want a house sitter rather than putting their animals in kennels are real pet lovers and want the best for their animals.
Theres so many opportunities out there! Couchsurfing sounds fun!
Amazing trip ! Thanks for the post.
Anyone got advice for doing with as a family. My wife and our 2 kids want to travel for around 12mths.
Well, we’ve been travelling as a family for the last 7 years. We tried House Sitting and hated it, far too boring. We don’t Couch Surf but we host couch surfers and I know families that have done it. Some families have success with WorkAway, WWoofing and similar, but honestly, you’d be better to just save up. One year cost us $30,000.
@Alyson for World Travel Family,I want this job
Thank you, Alyson for sharing all the useful information, i’m interested in volunteering as an english teacher in non-english speaking European Countries, But i don’t have enough money to do that, moreover i’m at my middle-age now.. will be very grateful to have your reply. Thank you so much 🙂
That’s an interesting idea Ani. I will do some research and see in voluntary teaching posts exist. Hopefully, I’ll be able to add a paragraph on that later today.
I am a student I want to go to school and the same time I want good work to do,
Hello,how are you? You said it’s for free ,how do I join or contact u.
useful info and yes hitchhiking is common and it’s very adventurous too .
Superb post, we enjoyed each and everything as per written in your post. Thank you for this article because it’s really informative, I love reading your blog.
These are great travel tips! Whenever we travel, I always make sure that we stick with our budget and one of the best things I’ve learned is not to be so touristy. We try local and live like local.
I love these tips.
We never set a budget, ever! LOL. I have a post on that somewhere. All the best.