Home exchange tip: Write your own guidebook

The best guidebook is the one you write yourself

“For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written.” 

                                                 -Aldous Huxley

No kidding. During our home exchange to Paris last summer, our best tips didn’t come from Fodor’s or Rough Guide or Lonely Planet but from the pile of hand-picked and well-worn books, magazines, newspaper clippings and hand-written notes left for us by our exchange family. 

I vowed we’d do a similar favour for our Berlin exchange visitors this coming summer, and was delighted to run across a new offering from the good folks at Moleskine, creators of the sleek little Italian notebooks favoured for centuries by artists and other creative types.

Moleskine City Notebooks –the “guidebooks you write yourself”–are currently available for dozens of international destinations, including Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver in Canada. Each blank 3.5 x 5.5″ 228-page leather-bound notebook features the Moleskine hallmarks: an elastic wrap-around closure, an accordion pocket for receipts and such, and ribbon placemarkers. But you also get detailed city and transit maps, a street index, blank pages for notes and diary entries, indexed pages with space for shopping, dining and entertainment recommendations, and tear-out loose notes.

Includes a detailed city map

At just over $17 CDN (from Amazon.ca), this is the best guidebook investment a committed home exchanger will ever make.

Buy one for your home city and fill it in during the year, then leave it behind for your guests with a request that they add their favourite finds to it. And then buy another one for your destination city, fill it in during your exchange holiday, and leave it behind as a gift–to be added to by other guests over the years.

Related post: 10 tips for a successful home exchange.

 

Protect your ID–pack a USB!

At the sold-out Northern Voice 2009 social media conference in Vancouver this past weekend, Nora Young, host of CBC’s entertaining technology-and-culture show Spark, was a keynote speaker. On the drive home, I tuned into her program and gleaned this clever travel tidbit:

Before you hit the road, consider scanning all your essential printed documents–passport, visas, credit cards, train passes, vaccination records, and the rest–and then saving them all as PDFs  on a tiny, totable USB key. If the unfortunate day comes when you need to prove you are who you say you are, you’ll have all the important details close at hand.

Ain’t technology grand? 

 

Scoring extra elbow room, beating Priceline, and other tricks of the trade

On a recent not-quite-full flight to Mexico (sorry Canada, but my seasonal affective disorder was reaching epic proportions), I was reminded that the booking of airline seats should not be left to amateurs.

My girlfriend had chosen our seats when she booked the flight, and in an effort to keep us together, she’d sensibly booked an aisle-and-middle combination. The problem, of course, was that the window seat was later claimed by a guy bigger than both of us put together.

It was, as my husband likes to say, a teachable moment, and I explained to my friend the following (almost) never-fail trick for avoiding the sardine can experience on an airplane.

First: use the electronic check-in kiosks whenever possible–even if you’ve already been assigned seats by a travel agent or airline

During the electronic check-in process, you will asked to confirm your seat selection. You will be able to see the location of your pre-assigned seats, as well as any unclaimed seats.

Second: secure a seating arrangement that leaves a middle seat empty

It seems counter-intuitive for people traveling together to split themselves up, but that’s the magic of this system. When you book yourself and your companion into a window and aisle, that leaves a middle seat free–and no one likes to sit in a middle seat.

When the next person comes along to do their seat selection, they will avoid the middle seat and look for a window or aisle somewhere else–even if it means they have to break up their own traveling unit.

Third: be prepared to give up your better seat

Nine times out of 10, using this system I have found myself left with room to spread out. The middle seat is still vacant when the plane starts rolling down the runway. However, sometimes if the flight is full, someone will be forced to claim the dreaded centre seat–and then I simply ask them if they’d like my window or aisle seat so I can still sit next to my travelling companion. They always agree to the switch.

Try it–it really works!

And while you’re at it: beat the bank at Priceline.com

There’s another little travel trick you should know about too. You likely already know that you can save big money by bidding on hotel rooms at Priceline.com. But there’s a hitch: if your bid isn’t accepted the first time around, you have to wait for a period of time before you are allowed to try again. There is a way around it though: check out this helpful little post by friend and fellow Vancouver-based travel-writer Randall Shirley.

How about you–any travel-deal workarounds you’d like to share?

 

Cheap sleeps: Check out these home-exchange alternatives

Judging by the huge number of hits on my January post about how to do a home swap, I gather the live-like-a-local trend is real and growing. So for those who aren’t keen on sleeping in cookie-cutter hotel rooms, who think variety is the spice of travel, or who simply need to travel on a shoestring, here are four more suggestions for how to score cheap sleeps in Canada and beyond. (Note: I haven’t used any of these services yet myself, but I’ve heard good buzz from other travellers…so far, no axe murderers it seems…)

Airbed & Breakfast

How it works: This is like bunking at a friend’s house: in return for a small fee, you get a bed for the night–and it might be nothing more than an air mattress–and breakfast in the morning. It can be unbelievably cheap: someone in Calgary was recently offering to host an overnight guest for a mere $10. According to the site, you can currently find a bed in 718 cities in 71 cities.

Good to know: Hosts post photos of their digs at the site, and both hosts and guests can post feedback after a stay. 

Help Exchange

How it works: This free service lets you swap labour for room and board at farms, ranches, lodges, hostels and even sailing boats. You might, for example, give a hand with the planting at an organic farm in Quebec, or help with the housekeeping at a B&B on one of BC’s Gulf Islands.

Good to know: Make no mistake, you’re signing up for a working holiday. But you probably won’t be expected to muck in for more than a few hours each day and you can stay for several months.

Roomorama

How it works: This is so called peer-to-peer rentals: locals in nine North American cities, including Toronto and Vancouver, offer more than 1,000 places to put your head. Rates vary from a few bucks to a couple hundred, depending on whether you’re buying the use of a room, an apartment or an entire house. 

Good to know: You’ll pay a small service charge (around $10 CDN) to the site, but you do get something for that: Roomorama won’t release the rental fee to the host after you’ve checked in. And you can “shout out” your wish-list on the site to request a room in a certain destination on certain days.

Update 2/16/09: Global Freeloaders

How it works: This one came on to my radar while I was clicking through various links on my pal Laura Byrne Paquet’s excellent live-like-a-local blog. It’s a completely free service that’s as easy as: 

1. Sign up.

2. Introduce yourself to, and request accommodation from, the other people registered on the site. (The site collects and forwards your e-mail–sort of like it works with Craigslist.) It’s an international site, so you can search by country and city for listings.

and

3. Sit back and wait for a reply. 

Good to know: This service relies on “a balance of give and take” according to the site–so if you’re not prepared to return the hospitality within six months of signing up, you’re strongly urged to reconsider. When posting, be as specific as possible about what you’re prepared to offer a guest: just a bed for a couple of nights? the grand neighbourhood tour? an open-fridge policy?The goal here is hospitality, not hurt feelings…

And hey, if you’ve had experiences with any of these sites, I’d sure appreciate it if you’d share your comments here…

 

Always pack your callings cards

Reading the TravelCUTS blog today (always find great budget-minded travel tips there) and was reminded by this morning’s post of the value of carrying calling cards whenever you hit the road.  

It’s an old-fashioned concept–a small card with just your name, and possibly an e-dress or blog URL–that you can you can tuck into the backpack of a new friend to make it easy to stay in touch when you’re home again.

I know a guy–a very polished Vancouver businessman–who carries only simple white cards with just his name embossed in black on one side. He uses them for business and pleasure, jotting down the appropriate phone number or address in ink depending on who he is handing his card to. It eliminates the need for different cards for different contexts–and it just looks classy.

When my daughter moved into residence at university a couple of years ago, I ordered some free cards on-line from VistaPrint with just her name, cell number and e-dress (three things that aren’t likely to change anytime soon), and she has since carried them to China, France and Switzerland.

The cost was a meagre $5 for shipping and the cards were on good stock, but you have to accept a tiny line of VistaPrint advertising on the back. I was so impressed with the print quality that I ordered some custom cards for myself–for a small fee, you can forego the advertising. Makes a nice gift for a new grad heading off on a gap year…

Update March 6, 2009: I’ve since learned about another company, Moo, that offers inexpensive custom-printed mini calling cards. My writer friend James Glave ordered some to promote his Bowen Island B&B, and I was really impressed with the quality–and the fun factor.