Choosing clean, safe accommodation at reasonable prices can not only save you money and allow you more room for adventure, it can afford you a richer travel experience by bringing you closer to the places you visit. Hotel stay has a cost that is often excessive for what you are getting – a suitably comfortable box only vaguely different from the one you left behind at home. Conventional choices in travel accommodation can also keep you from meeting any locals but the ones paid to smile at you.

Depending on your idea of comfort, or rather, on where your trade-off lies on the cost-benefit curve, there are a number of accommodation alternatives for the adventurous traveler. Here is a review of off the beaten track choices for travel stay.

Hospitality Exchange

• By going through a hospitality exchange, the flexible traveler has an opportunity to meet and get to know a local or host family. Ideally, the traveler staying with a host family will spend two nights as a guest in a private home. Lodging is free and during that time the host will be only too pleased to share a meal with you at their table, give you helpful hints about local attractions, and may even arrange for fun activities aside from simple sightseeing.

Signing up with a hospitality exchange organization gives the traveler access to enthusiastic hosts world-wide. Perhaps travelers themselves, or just folks who are open and interested in meeting visitors to their country, these hosts have chosen to be apart of the program, and further, have the choice of accepting or rejecting any request for stay (due to bad timing or simply because they have hosted too many already that year).

Some hosts are students who offer their company and guide service as a day host (without accommodation), and will show the traveler around, including the non-touristy local hang outs. Two of the largest organizations dedicated to connecting people in this way are Servas and The Hospitality Club, both of which can be found online.

Convents

• These cool, shadowy, centuries-old religious institutions, often accessible through cobblestone passages of older neighborhoods, convents are unique and enriching stay experience for the budget and culture-minded. Moreover, being a Catholic is not a pre-requisite for lodging. In Rome alone, over a hundred of these “houses of hospitality” open their doors to travelers year-round, and in all, your concierge is likely to be a soft-spoken, sober-tempered nun who will welcome you kindly, and still let you know that while religious affiliation is unimportant unmarried couples will not be allowed to share a room.

Convents have long offered accommodation to families, individuals, and groups, but their profiles have been raised in recent times with the spread of the internet. Information about convents, abbeys, and monasteries that maintain rooms for travelers can be found in some guidebooks, online (try Italyguide.com), and in the local tourist office.

In many cases, reservations should be made months in advance of travel (correspondence in Italian is often necessary, so find a good translator). Although largely unexplored by American travelers, Europeans know well what this enchanting stay is all about.