Feel free to add your own recommendations!

I know a lot of people reading here work in or around the travel industry, so I thought it might be helpful to share this video of an interesting panel discussion by three travel PR powerhouses on the subject of travel blogging:

There’s No such Thing As a Free Trip – #BWE09 from Tom Martin on Vimeo.

It’s an hour long, but if you’re interested in how your property or agency can work more effectively with bloggers, it’s worth the time. (I think Fairmont Hotels’ Mike Taylor has particularly helpful advice on how to assess travel blogs.) Likewise, if you’re a blogger who wants to work smarter with the tourism industry, this one’s for you.

My big take-away? It’s still–and always was–about the trust relationship: between the travel industry and a writer, and a writer and her readers.

Transparency equals credibility equals readership and results. ’Twas ever thus.

I’d be interested to know what you glean from the discussion…

Actually, I can do better: travel writer Laura Byrne Paquet has just written what amounts to The Compleat Guide to Home Exchange for SlowEurope and it contains everything I’d tell you over coffee–including links to my own Top 10 tips for a successful home exchange and a comprehensive round-up of all the home exchange agencies out there.

Check it out and if you STILL have questions, get in touch. But you buy the coffee…!

You already know it’s easy and convenient to use your ATM card to get local currency when you’re on the road, but have you ever added up those “convenience fees” to see how much of a dent it’s making in your travel budget? On a recent three-week trip to France, I racked up almost $50 in ATM fees–money I’d rather have spent on French wine, thanks all the same.

For Canadians, it doesn’t have to be that way: Citizens Bank of Canada, an online subsidiary of Vancity, the country’s largest credit union, has a terrific product for budget-conscious travellers. Sign up for their unique Global Chequing Account and you won’t get dinged for international withdrawals. In fact, you won’t pay fees for anything, including ordering cheques, paying bills, or using your debit card. And best of all? No minimum balance required. It’s a no-strings-attached good deal–even if you only travel now and then.

So that’s a great deal for Canadians heading outside the country–but do these sorts of accounts exist elsewhere? Is there something similar for people heading to Canada? If you live outside Canada and know of a similar account at your local bank, please share it here?

Update August 6, 2009: Citizens Bank has just announced that they’re getting out of the personal banking business. Bummer. I’ll keep you posted about whether VanCity–or any other Canadian bank–picks up this great product…

Like today, for instance. Today, I’m in Hamilton, Ontario, having flown through the night to get here in time to speak at an education conference. I actually arrived at three in the morning–more than a little frazzled after a weekend that included auditioning for the 2010 Winter Games Ceremonies, and watching my youngest graduate high school.

A bit of coddling was clearly in order, so I dug into my files and retrieved the card for Rutherford House B&B, where I’d stayed three years earlier and whose kick-ass breakfasts were reason enough to return. It’s a 10-minute walk to the convention centre, in a neighbourhood of gracious old red-brick estates.

Janis Topp, chief cook and bottle washer, didn’t hesitate for an instant when I asked if I could arrive in the middle of the night. She set up the iron and ironing board for me in advance and arranged for a late breakfast. David, her husband, offered to drive me to the conference centre so I’d have extra time to get myself together in the morning. (And I don’t doubt that should I have needed it, they would have let me use their washing machine too.)

For less than the cost of a room at the conference hotel, I got a pillowtop king bed; a cozy, quiet, light-filled room with access to a private sitting room if I wanted a change of scene; free wifi and parking; an in-suite fridge; coffee, water, and as many Hershey’s Nuggets as I could stuff into my face–which isn’t as many as you might think given the full-meal-deal breakfast that makes it easier to say no to Bad Food Choices for the rest of the day.

Consider a B&B the next time business takes you on the road in Canada. It’s the next best thing to coming home to mom…

Do you have a favourite B&B to recommend in Canada? Please share it here!

To find out where to connect with local musicians while you’re in town, just plug in your travel date or location and the site will quickly return a list of on-going sessions.

(But since it won’t say how recently the information was updated, you’d be wise to double-check the details with a quick phone call.) 

Depending on where your Canadian travels take you, you might, for example, join the Monday-night jam at O’Leary’s Pub in Saint John, New Brunswick, or the one on Saturday afternoons at The Friar’s Pub in Calgary, Alberta. 

There are plenty of sessions to choose from, and while they tend to thin out as you move east to west—Maritime Canada and Quebec are famous for deep musical roots—there are pockets of Celtic keeners right across Ontario and the Prairies through to the West Coast.

And even if  you don’t play yourself, you’ll find session musicians welcome an appreciative audience—no ticket required. The one that happens in my backyard–the semi-monthly Snug session on Bowen Island–is more like a cozy kitchen party than a formal performance.

Just buy a pint or a cup o’ tea and settle in somewhere comfy for a couple of hours of homespun (but never hokey) entertainment.

Dear Julie:

We are Tony DiCaprio and Anne Marie Babkine, a Canadian family from Montreal currently living in the south of France. We’ve followed your blog (on and off) but hadn’t visited in a few weeks. We just dropped by and noticed all this activity in the past several weeks regarding home exchanging, your contest and your speaking on CBC Radio.

Thank you for covering home exchanging so thoroughly. Getting more people familiar with this travel alternative benefits all the exchange clubs and exchangers (like ourselves).

We are passionate about home exchanging–so much so that in 2005 we started our own home exchange Website, 1stHomeExchange.com and EchangeVacances.com (French only).

If you haven’t exhausted the home exchange topic [note from Julie: I don't think it's possible], I’d like to let you know about our latest article that may be of interest to you and your readers:

66 Practical Home Exchange Tips:  A Complete Guide to Finding, Arranging, and Enjoying a Perfect Home Exchange Holiday

We’ve been working on this for a while and finally finished it. It covers the tips you included in your own article, Top 10 tips for a successful home exchange, plus much more.

(Incidentally, we loved your “Communicate, communicate, communicate” tip title. It complemented our own “Contact, contact, contact” tip that we were using with our own members and visitors. I’m using it in the article – hope that’s OK with you?  [Note from Julie: Sure is!])

It’s unfortunate we missed your blog over the last couple of weeks–we would have loved to participate and also provide a free premium membership for your contest. (OK, our membership fee is only CAD $75–not quite the cost of Intervac’s and HomeLink’s–but with over 16,000 homes in 130 countries it still makes for a pretty good prize!).

[Note from Julie: I think so too--and so I'm going to open this contest up one more time...

Another chance to win a home exchange membership

Everyone who entered the previous contests will have another shot at winning a one-year home exchange memberhip with 1stHomeExchange, and anyone who missed out on those first contests will have until April 15 to enter. And if you retweet this contest on Twitter or blog about it with a link back, I'll give you a second entry!

Best of all, this is a border-free contest--anyone in the world can enter this time.

Just leave a comment below telling me why you want to do a home exchange...]

(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 792 cities in 72 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.

 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…

Couchsurfing

If I’m reading this volunteer-run site right, it appears there are currently (March, 2009) more than 33,000 Canadian couches just waiting for you to crash on them. (And if you’re looking for a couch in Africa, there are some there too.) Thanks to Pam Mandel at NerdsEyeView for flagging this site for me. 

How it works: Same as the others models–register your couch, or your intention to couchsurf, then go cruise the site for connections.

Good to know: Unlike the other sites, Couchsurfing apparently has a system for verifying its hosts. Basically, it works on the friends-of-friends model–I can vouch for Sue and Sue can vouch for Bob and Bob can vouch for Ranjit and Ranjit can vouch for you–so you must be a good person. They call it “a trust circle.”

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

-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.

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.

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?