Want to crash on the couch?

I spent most of last week in San Diego, California, for a real estate seminar. The seminar was at the Marriot in Del Mar, which runs about $300 per night. So I didn't want to stay there. I checked the other hotels close by, and they were all in the $150-300 range. I figured it would be no problem to find someone through friends or social networking sites that would let me sleep on their couch for a few nights. But surprisingly, no one I contacted was up for a stranger in their home, except for this one guy on LDS Linkup who said, "I would love to help but I just got transferred to Fallujah, Iraq." Dah!

So I ended up booking a hotel on Hotwire. I got it for about $60 per night, and it was only about 15 minutes away from Del Mar, so I was pretty happy with it. But then I showed up Monday night to the hotel, and they had no record of my reservation, AND they were sold out! I showed the printout to the lady on duty, but that didn't help, so we called up Hotwire, and they said, "Hmm... they have no record of it, well sorry, there's nothing we can do. Why don't you try calling hotels.com?" Losers! Hotwire is LAME! So I called hotels.com, I called other hotels in the area, and finally about 1 AM I ended up at a Holiday Inn about 5 miles down the road, for $120.

Then today I was on cnn.com and I noticed an article entitled Need a place to crash? Try a stranger's couch. Since I had just spent some time fruitlessly trying to find a couch to crash on, I clicked on the link. The article was about several networks of low budget travelers who crash on each other's couches! If only I'd known a few days before. The article profiles a guy who's been traveling for 1000 straight days sleeping on other people's couches!

I went ahead and created an account on couchsurfing.com and hospitalityclub.org, both of which look pretty legit. Of course there are possibly safety issues, etc., but it looks like a great way to save money while traveling. I've got another seminar coming up soon, so I'll have to try it out and see what happens.