To get the best from your travel experience you have have to travel close to the ground. If you stay in the Hilton you don't know what country you are staying in. I have always recommendedn hitching and homestay programs like WWOOF get you into peoples homes and experience the real cultural.
These new websites are some of the best travel things I have discovered. Travellers sharing their spare beds with foreign visitors. A good example of peer to peer networking.
Link up with other teachers and travellers and stay for free
The Practice It is better, but also not as good as hotels
1. It can take a lot of planning to search through the profiles and make contact with people, but hotels are easy you just turn up
2. It can be free, but then you can spend a lot of money if the host likes expensive things
3. You can waste a lot of time staying with people, among other things hotels have good locations, hosts can be way in the suburbs.
4. It's difficult to find compatible hosts - most people seems to be into food, which I am not. Also most peoples profiles are not detailed enough to see if you are compatible or not..
5. When it works it can be great
First 4 are OK ,
hospitalityclub.org claims to be the best the largest online hospitality exchange organization!
In my experience the best cos 1. you can see details of peoples profiles easily 2. it has a good comments system so you can see how people are rated
couchsurfing.com not bad, nice map fn
http://www.meeturplanet.com
seems OK, many people, but most not enough detail
http://affordabletravelclub.net/ for over 40s
place2stay.net only 7 places in Japan
homestayweb limited countries
globalfreeloaders.com clunky not
many people 6 month member waste of time
stay4free.comneed java
travelhoo.com joined clunky have to specify city
http://www.hospex.net/ no search available yet
http://www.welcometraveller.org joined to test
There is always SERVAS, but I never joined. I didn't realise you don't need to own a house to join www.servas.org
workcamps like VFP and WWOOFing on organic farms WWOOF.org
Some Articles
http://www.4ppl.com/directory/Travel/Lodging/Hospitality-Clubs/
good list
good guardian list
home exchange article http://www.thelivingweb.net/free_travel_exchange_home.html
Other networking research -
I tried to hook up with people through internet networking sites, but I didn't find great site. One thing is site trick of copying themselves you can't tell which is which. Seems difficult to connect with people. I guess I'll just have to meet people randomly.
Some friendship networks
friendster.com 3000 people in Japan didn't find people in kyushu
myspace.com difficult to search.
they don't give details of peoples personalities when you do a search
spacester.com
http://japan.tribe.net joined no people found
http://www.netfriendships.com
http://www.ryze.com
https://www.orkut.com/Login.aspx by google
http://www.multiply.com joined joined no people found
http://www.meetup.com/about/ japan not big
http://www.desilinker.com
http://360.yahoo.com/ -- not very seachable by name
http://www.skype.com/ free telephone
MSN Spaces,
full listing on yahooo
http://dir.yahoo.com/Society_and_Culture/Cultures_and_Groups/Cyberculture/Virtual_Communities/
http://trust.mindswap.org/nets.html full details of providers
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