As you embark on a long journey, you wonder about how long your resources, namely money, will last. Work exchange has been a method by which travellers can prolong their travels by offering an enthusiastic attitude and a little bit of elbow grease in exchange for free accommodation and sometimes food.

There are multiple sites which make work exchange agreements easier to find:

www.helpx.net
www.workaway.info
wwoofinternational.org

Or there is always the old fashion way, keep in touch with the staff of the hostels you have stayed in previously, or link up with friends of friends who have done some form of work exchange in the past, and soon your work exchange network begins to grow.

I found that I was often asked by hostels if I would be interested in staying longer and doing some work exchange. With a bubbly and quite social personality, I often get along great with various types of people. This outgoing trait is highly sought after in hostel work exchange agreements. I guess it makes good business having fun and likeable staff creating a great vibe.

I stayed at Hush Hostel Moda during my visit to Istanbul, Turkey back in 2013. It came as a recommendation from a friend who had previously travelled through Turkey. Big note: Always try to find work at a hostel that you actually enjoyed staying in. If you didn’t enjoy staying there, you’re probably not going to enjoy working there. I kept in touch with some of the staff that worked there. And when I returned the following year, one of them had been promoted to be the manager. That made getting the job pretty easy, and most of the “interview” was done over the internet.

Hostel work exchange can be exhausting at times, living and working at the same place, you can often feel that you’re at work all the time. Often working reception overnight, which is not great for our circadian rhythms but provides a great opportunity to learn the local language (if the hostel has a large local guest market). Or waking up early to prepare breakfast for 50 guests, then making endless amounts of beds during the day and cleaning. Hostels almost seem like a 24/7 childcare centre, and you have 50 grown children to feed and clean up after. If you are thinking of ever having children, this is definitely a good training program.

Hush Hostel Moda has an eclectic group of people who chose to stay there. It is located on the anatolian side of Istanbul, a river away from the tourist attractions in Sultanahmet. Guests range across all age groups, all nationalities including local Turks, and from exchange students on Erasmus to adventurous honeymooners. It isn’t what you would call a party hostel. Those are infamous for people between the ages of 18-30, ample amounts of late-night drinking and a feeling self-entitlement to their hedonism with complete disregard to others. I only had to walk in on a one-night stand escapade (in a dormitory!), and clean up vomit 1 night out of the whole 2 months I worked, although it was projectile all over the walls and everywhere around the toilet but inside. But this isn’t too bad given how much worse it would have been at one of those infamous party hostels. Second big note: Just because you enjoyed your stay at a hostel whilst you were a customer, and notably drunk, doesn’t mean that you will enjoy working there sober.

Working at a hostel also gives you an interesting perspective into the human behaviour. Humans are exceedingly odd creatures, with fairly strange behaviours once you get to meet a large range of them in a relatively short period of time. Some are entertaining and not harmful in the least, like one customer who literally dances from point A to point B, I suspect he thought dancing brought more joy than simply walking, whilst others are borderline mentally unwell, like another customer who was found awake talking to themselves at 4am or another who pauses in time between movements, similar to the squirrel. Some people are the furthest from prude, wearing nothing but jocks in common areas, or walking around with raging erections. Obviously, some of these personalities are not welcomed in a shared accommodation environment, and thus there is a “black-list” for these types of people.

Something that you begin to appreciate is that minimum wage can mean very different things in different countries. Hostels often offer extra work, beyond the minimum amount (usually around 20 hours per week) in exchange for accommodation. This work is paid, but you can be paid anywhere from 50Euros for a night shift in Norway to 15Euros for a night shift in Turkey. Your pay rate is often lower because it’s “off-the-books” or “cash-in-hand”. This definitely made me appreciate the minimum wage of AUD$18.70 per hour that we’re so blessed to have back home. Seeing as you live where you work, you often find it easy to just work more and get some extra cash, to pay for a guilt-free once-in-a-lifetime experience later (such as a hot-air balloon ride over Cappadocia!).

All in all, hostel work exchange is a great way to save some cash whilst travelling, granted if you have the time and patience. Otherwise, you can always try couchsurfing or moving into a local artist squat.