Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
lunteered for over six months, I did everything from cooking for large groups of people, to cleaning lodges,
to promotional work, and only occasionally did I get my hands dirty in the garden or tend to the expansive
nature trails.”
If you don't want to join WWOOFing but still want to work on a farm, the best way around membership
is to simply show up in an area you want to work in, find a hostel, and ask about nearby farms that take
volunteers. Since most WWOOFers are travelers, hostels in regions popular with WWOOFing keep track of
which farms take volunteers. Ask them where you should go. This method was used by Nora Dunn success-
fully in New Zealand, when she didn't want to pay the membership fee but still wanted to work on a farm.
Once you sign up for the program in the country you want, you will receive a booklet of all the author-
ized WWOOFing farms in that country with information about the farms and ways to contact them. All you
have to do is contact the farms that interest you, discuss with the host, and make arrangements for your ar-
rival and duration of stay. There is no formal contract involved and you are free to leave anytime you want.
You will simply be required to work for around five hours per day for five days a week (you get weekends
off!). The whole process is relatively straightforward.
Name Your Own Hotel Price
There are a number of websites that give you last-minute deals on rooms or let you name your own price,
saving you up to 60 percent off the normal rate. These websites include LateRooms (laterooms.com),
Last Minute (lastminute.com), Hotel Tonight (hoteltonight.com), Priceline (priceline.com), and Hotwire
(hotwire.com).
I find Priceline and Hotwire to be the best, as they have the largest inventories and the lowest prices. My
searches on the other websites don't yield as many results. A search on Priceline for New York City came
up with 398 results while on LateRooms it was 164 and Last Minute came back with 177 results.
Hotwire and Priceline have two booking sections: one that lets you bid on hotel rooms like an auction
and another for discounted hotels. In the auction side of the websites, you choose your city, the location
within the city you want to stay in (you can choose), the class of service you want (one-star, two-star, three-
star, etc.), and the price you want to bid.
For example, say you want a three-star hotel in Chicago for $100 USD. You place your bid, and if
Priceline finds a match, they book you into a hotel of that class, and after the money is received they will tell
you the name (you can't find out beforehand—it's a blind auction). If the site doesn't find a match, it will let
you search again with a different bid, up to three times. After that, you'll have to search again in different
areas or try again in twenty-four hours.
Hotwire uses a different but similar system. Instead of letting you bid on a hotel, its “Hotwire Hot Deals”
gives you a price for a hotel in a location of the city you desire. So instead of seeing “Hilton New York City”
you would see under Hotwire Hot Deals “5 star hotel in Midtown East Manhattan for $150.” You don't
know where in Midtown East the hotel is or what the name is. Hotwire will tell you a list of some hotels in
that class they have, but in general, it's a crapshoot. You don't know exactly what you are going to get until
you book.
Despite the risks associated with booking an unknown hotel, I've never had a problem such as getting
stuck with a bedbug-ridden flea trap, and I quite like the fact that you can get hotels up to 60 percent off
their listed price.
If you are going to bid, I also recommend the website Better Bidding (betterbidding.com). Better Bid-
ding has a forum in which people post their most recent successful bids and the current hotel deals each site
