Going Local Travel

During my recent stay in Miami I decided to take my travel networking offline. How? With the oldest trick in the book. It goes a little something like this… 1) Go to bar 2) Sit at the bar 3) Order a drink 4) Get out a notebook 5) Wait In my experience, sooner or later, [...]

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but I really can’t emphasis this point enough: Couchsurfing.com is fantastic for language learners. And not just for hosts/guests. It can be a godsend in your home town too and it needn’t involve a single couch. I have raved about Couchsurfing’s Buenos Aires forum before (see: Top three ways [...]

I’ve been up north in Salta for the past week, partly for work, partly to accompany visiting family. It was certainly a diverse trip in terms of accommodation, spanning everything from one night’s couchsurfing in a lovely family house in an outlying suburb to a night in an ultra sophisticated boutique hotel in the city [...]

Is Couchsurfing bad for local travel? Well, this is a new conundrum. Sort of. Couchsurfing has, of course, always had it’s critics. And so it should. There is no ‘perfect’ way to travel. Everything has pros and cons. And I’ve always been keen to tackle those belonging to couchsurfing. A very interesting blog over at the new Local Travel Movement site caught my eye today. Writer Ethan Gelber has picked up on some comments suggesting that couchsurfing sites do not fit in with the ‘local travel’ idea.

Taking Twitter into the real world: Video from CollegeHumor. Some weeks ago I went to a party, which I was invited to via someone on Twitter. It was a Tweetsgiving event (an organisation which, if you get beyond the cringey name, is doing great work raising finds for schools in Tanzania). I was invited by [...]

  Further to my extra travel blogging tips, I also found myself with an abundance of extra material for my location independent piece too – thanks to some great interviewees. Here they offer some more advice on "taking the leap"  to being a digital nomad and how it needn’t be so daunting. My favourite tip – [...]

Word is they’re short on traditional accommodation options for the South Africa World Cup. I wrote a piece today for the Guardian about alternative options, including using sites such as iStopover, Couchsurfing and home exchanging. While researching, I logged onto the South Africa group on Couchsurfing.com to get the current lowdown. Predictably, there are a lot [...]

I just booked a flight home to England for Christmas. As I’ve been away for a while, I will be following this advice for tourists visiting Britain to avoid a faux pas. Photo: Banksy’s policemen in Brighton via Flickr. Taken by Simon Booth.

What do murder rates tell us about a country? So asked the Guardian yesterday in a blog listing global homicide figures. I’d like to turn that round and ask: what does a murder rate tell us about tourist safety?

Guardian Travel’s Been there team asked if I had some tips on finding a local guide for a reader who was heading to central America. Here’s what I had to say. See the original article for further advice.   The first place I’d look to find a independent local guide is LeapLocal.org, an online database full of [...]