So, as I grew up I was shocked to learn that my parents were wrong – you really can get free stuff with no catches! I remember, in college, being offered a free T-shirt just for signing an application for a credit card.  A very good college friend of mine who was working as a movie theater manager once handed my girlfriend and I complimentary movie tickets for absolutely free.

Then a few years later, we stayed at a Howard Johnson’s Hotel, had a miserable time, complained and ended up with a free hotel stay.  Oh yes, some things in life really are free.

Get a Free Hotel Stay With Very Little Effort

The way the story goes, we asked the hotel for a crib and then upon arriving at the hotel, discovered that there wasn’t one reserved for us. We were furious, of course, and we were awake all night trying to make sure the baby didn’t roll her way right off the edge of the bed. We slept in shifts, trying to keep her between us. The next morning, with bloodshot eyes and a huge coffee in hand, I cornered the hotel manager and yelled at him for ten straight minutes. The next day I hopped online and fired off one of the most carefully crafted letters condemning Howard Johnson’s and vowing not only never to stay there again, but also to inform everyone I knew how horrible the hotel chain was. To my surprise, in less than two weeks after sending my letter, we received an envelope from Howard Johnson’s corporate headquarters with an apology and a voucher for a free hotel stay.

Every major hotel chain has a customer service section where you can submit comments about your recent stay. I would never advise anyone to become a habitual complainer – in fact, I’ve heard of folks getting banned from staying at a hotel chain because they complained dozens of times in a row. However, be aware of every nuance of your stay, and if anything is significantly wrong with your room or your stay, complain to the hotel staff (ask for and note their names), and if it’s not resolved, submit your politely written complaint, and you’re almost guaranteed to receive a free hotel stay for your efforts.

Earlier, James offered some great methods to find the best hotel deals. Of course, another perfect way to get a free hotel stay is by choosing a favorite chain and sticking with them to earn loyalty “points.” These work just like frequent flier miles, and they add up quickly. Every now and then, just for electing to stay at the same hotel chain, you’ll build up enough points to stay a night at the hotel for free. One of my favorite rewards programs is GoldPointsPlus.

If you use the system often enough, you get an “Elite” status, which means more points per stay, and more free rooms more often. It’s true – just stay loyal to a hotel chain, and eventually you get a free hotel room with no catch. Now that’s sweet.

You Can Get Lots of Free Stuff With No Catches – But Free Groceries?

Think about it – what’s the one area where families usually spend the most money every week? That’s right – groceries. Now, what if you could start eating out for free, or getting groceries without paying a dime? Sound too good to be true? While you probably can’t get all your groceries for free, what you can do is cut down significantly on your grocery bill by getting some of the more expensive items for free. A few of the best sites for this includes the constantly updated free sample page at the Kroger store website.

And of course, you can’t talk cheap without talking about Wal-Mart, which also has it’s own free sample section on the Wal-Mart website.

Yes, I know – for some reason the free samples are often of “women’s products,” but hey – women need free stuff too, right? And don’t forget to use all of those awesome grocery coupon websites I wrote about earlier to save even more on the groceries you do have to buy.

Eat out for free

Oh, and remember what I said earlier about eating out for free? Okay, it’s really true – you can get a free entree or appetizer at most restaurants on your birthday if you sign up for either a newsletter or for a free loyalty “club” membership, such as the deal from Red Lobster where you get a free “gift” (it’s a free appetizer) on your birthday for joining the “Seafood Lovers Club.”

Just search the web for your favorite restaurants and sign up for their “club” memberships (almost always free), and on your birthday you could eat breakfast, lunch and supper for absolutely free!

Becoming a Free-aholic – It Really Is An Addiction

One of the worst things about getting started down the “free stuff” road is that once you realize you can get stuff for free, it’s easy to become obsessed with looking for “free stuff” opportunities. Trust me, they are everywhere. Unfortunately, the web is also overrun with “freebie” scams and adware/malware filled websites that offer free stuff. MakeUseOf offers a long list of great options for bargains and coupons, like Aibek’s review of Freshbargains,  or the MUO reviews of RetailMeNot and WoW-Coupons. But if you’re looking for not only cheap stuff, but free stuff with no catches, then you’ll need a good selection of valid freebie sites. One of the only directories I check out often is TheFreeSite.

While the site itself isn’t the prettiest design in the world, it really does the trick. There are categories from “Fun Freebies,” to “Family Freebies,” to “Seasonal Freebies,” and everything in between. The offers throughout the site are legitimate and real. Now if you like the idea of getting items for free from folks in your local community who simply don’t want their stuff anymore (there are surprisingly many people like that), then two of the hottest sites you’ll want to check out are GumTree, a popular U.K. based free classifieds site with a huge “freebies” section.

And there’s also the ever-popular FreeCycle.org, where millions of folks across the world are just trading stuff for free every single day.

FreeCycle.org has really developed a worldwide cult following, and if you join up you’ll quickly see why. There’s nothing so cool as being part of a community where folks want to give you something for absolutely free just to keep it out of the world’s landfills. After a while, you’ll find yourself giving stuff that you don’t want away for free too!

Do you have any favorite freebie websites? What are your tricks for getting free stuff? Share your opinions in the comment section below.

Image credit: Adrian Purser

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Wootalyzer – Alerts You Woot! Super Sales and Other Sites (6)
• Watch Online Products for Price Drops with ShoppingNotes (9)
• Top 10 Sites For Online Coupons & Promotional Codes (44)
• The Top 10 Grocery Coupon Websites for Cheapskates (61)
• Shop Like a PRO: 7 Tools to Crack eBay (15)

The premise of how DealBase works is simple. Just search for a destination and you’ll be presented with a set of hotels which are currently running promotions. From there, you’ll be able to find the deals that make the most sense to you, and you’ll even get to compare that rate with the regular rate so you know exactly how much you’re saving. You can also of course apply filters to narrow and refine your search.

DealBase currently only works with destinations in the US, Mexico and the Caribbean, but it does a pretty good job in that area. It crawls over 3,500 different sources to track down deals for you and delivers them in a consistent format which is organized but hotels, tags, or destinations so it’s easy to find. According to their website, they currently serve up over 15,000 deals with an average savings of each deal working out to around USD$271, so it does seem pretty comprehensive.

So you know how simple it is to use, here’s a quick walkthrough of finding a deal in DealBase.

1. First, search for your destination (eg. New York City, or Los Angeles).

2. Next, you’ll be given a list of best hotel deals you can choose from, sort or filter down the deals further.

3. Now let’s say I’m interested in booking this hotel for my parents since I want to take advantage of the ’senior rates’, I can see right away that I would be saving USD$127 per night, and get a 54% savings on my booking, which I can perform there and then.  If I want to check current rates in the hotel, it’s just merely one click away via the official hotel website, so everything’s pretty much transparent.

4. One more useful feature would be the tagging function. This deal for example, was tagged ’seniors’.  All I need to do is click on the tag, and it will display ALL senior discount rates on the site, so you know where else you can take advantage of your status. This function works for other classifications as well of course, for example club memberships. Who knows? You might even change your holiday destination if you get a really good deal elsewhere!

DealBase’s policy is to be the best at displaying deals, and being completely unbiased about that.  Choosing a hotel however, goes beyond just getting the best deal. Hotels are hardly commodities, and especially in the case of higher end hotels, you are paying for the experience more than anything else. Having ratings or at least tie-ups with rating sites would take DealBase to the next level, where currently you have to go off the site to do additional research about the hotel so you know you’re getting your money’s worth.

Shortcomings aside, DealBase is extremely simple to use, transparent and very functional site for finding best hotel deals from the convenience of your computer. Definitely worth a try.

Also check out Varun’s article on 5 sites to find the perfect hotel.

What other travel tools do you use to find the best hotel? Tell us in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• 6 Useful Last-Minute Booking Sites For Your Next Trip (4)
• 5 Review Sites To Help You Find The Perfect Hotel (18)
• Watch Online Products for Price Drops with ShoppingNotes (9)
• TripSay Brings Travel Recommendations From People Like You (6)
• Travel The World with Hello Backpacker (4)

With a bit of know-how, and the willingness to put in the leg work (or mouse work, if you will), you can find incredible deals on travel of all kinds – from airlines to hotels to rental cars. Companies realize they’re better off selling at a smaller profit than not filling the empty spaces. It’s better for an airline to fill every seat on a plane that’s going to fly anyway, even if some of the tickets sell at a smaller return.

There are several last minute booking sites out there that know that, and use the companies’ desperation to your advantage. If you’re looking to book a flight, hotel, cruise, or any other type of travel in the near future, try starting with these last minute travel sites.

First, though, a disclaimer: these are all last-minute deals. If you’re set on a particular place on a particular date, these sites are risky. If you can afford to be a bit more flexible though, and run with the great deals that come up (a really fun way to travel), these sites are for you.

LastMinute

LastMinute promises you up to 70% discount on your travel. You can book flights, hotels, cars, or whole packages anywhere from three weeks to three hours in advance. If you want to, book the ticket, pack, and go.

LastMinute also offers sections for “this weekend,” “next weekend,” and “under $250″ for those looking for cheap vacations. There’s a ton of stuff on there, most of it within the United States and Caribbean. If you’re looking to get out of town as fast as possible, and don’t care much where you go, LastMinute.com’s a great place to start.

TravelZoo

TravelZoo definitely wins my award for the ugliest site to look at that’s actually useful. It has many of the same features as LastMinute, and also offers an incredibly useful email subscription list. Sign on to the list, and TravelZoo will send you their Top 20 of the Week, pulling together the Top 20 last minute travel bargains of the week from around the Internet. It’s a popular list, with editions for the US and around the world, and offers great deals of all shapes and sizes.

Airfare Watchdog

I like Airfare Watchdog because it does things a bit differently: all you’ve got to do is plug in the airport you want to fly in to or out of, and you’ll see the cheapest other halves – either the airport you’ll fly out of or into.

For instance, I plugged in leaving from New York’s Kennedy Airport, and got a list of the cheapest last minute flights leaving from that airport, as well as how far in advance you can book them. There are sections for domestic and international flights, and a huge list is compiled.

Fun fact: I can fly from JFK to Akron, OH, round trip for $144. Not a bad deal. There’s also a list of “Fares of the Day” that will help you find the cheapest flights you can possibly find, anywhere in the world.

SideStep Deals

SideStep is primarily a booking site like Orbitz or Priceline, but it has a large and useful “Deals” section. It works something like a Google for cheap travel, in that SideStep doesn’t have the deals itself, but instead points you to the best deals around the Web.

There are flight deals, cruise deals, hotel deals, themed vacations (skiing, golf, etc.) and a number of other ways to save money. As always, most of the deals are for last-minute vacations, but it’s a huge repository of links to deals around the Web, sorted well and presented easily for you.

It’ll require some more browsing, because you usually can’t buy directly from SideStep, but it’s certainly a good place to start, as it includes a huge number of other sites trying to find you deals.

Vacations to Go

If you want to go on a cruise, check out Vacations to Go. They get the deals from cruise lines that no one else gets, based on the notion that cruise companies want to sell every last spot, even at huge bargains. It requires a sign-up, but it opens the doors to huge deals that no one else can see.

Since Vacations to go is a bit more exclusive, there’s likely to be less competition for great deals, but it’s also not the limitless resource some of the others are. Also, check the site often: cruises are rarely available more than a week in the 90-Day Ticker, but you can book further in advance with the “Find a Bargain” feature.

Luxury Link

Luxury Link is a high-risk, high-reward way to travel. It’s essentially an eBay for vacations, in that you can bid on the vacation you’d like to attend, and the highest bidder gets the vacation. In addition, there are vacations you can “Buy Now,” and skip the auction process.

The real deals are going to be found through the auctions, which feature everything from cruises to flights to hotels, in destinations all over the world. This is great if you know generally what you want to do, and can play the auctioning game for a while before you go. Their prices are higher, but so is the quality of the destinations.

If you want to go to a particular place, do a particular thing, and at a particular time, don’t use these sites. If you’re a “travel by the seat of your pants” kind of person, looking for a fun, economic way to travel, try one or many of these different websites, and see where they take you.

When you’re looking to travel, where do you go? How do you book vacations?

Photo: terriseesthings

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• 5 Review Sites To Help You Find The Perfect Hotel (18)
• Cool Online Resources to Plan Your Next Vacation (11)
• A Quick Road Trip Planning Guide For Techno Geeks (3)
• TripSay Brings Travel Recommendations From People Like You (6)
• Travel The World with Hello Backpacker (4)

Share your videos and you can even make some money!

TravelPost

TravelPost gives you unbiased hotel reviews and ratings as they are written by actual visitors. What’s more TravelPost has some information about the traveler as well (like budget and purpose of travel) so that you can compare your needs and the reviewer’s requirements and decide accordingly if the review is from your perspective.

The coverage is pretty good and the site also offers other functionalities like travel news, searching for deals and other such things.

TVtrip and Trivop

TVtrip and Trivop are your videoguides to hotels. If you’ve ever booked a hotel online, only to get there and find out that the images very cleverly showed only the best parts of the hotel, then check out the videoguides (although videos can be misleading as well). This also eliminates a lot of misinterpretation
caused by either lack of expression on the reviewer’s part or misinterpretation on your part in case of text reviews.

The basic workings are similar, locate the place you are traveling to on the Google Maps Mashup or use the search functionality, a list of potential hotels will appear, click on one to view further details :

Tripr

Tripr is a videoguide with a difference. Tripr shows you ‘real’ video reviews, made from a consumer’s point of view, because customers can make a video of the place they stayed at and upload it to Tripr. The concept thus gives a first hand customer perspective on the facilities. What’s more, if you upload a video to Tripr, you can get paid!

When your video results in a booking you will receive a commission for your video! There are some guidelines as to how the video should be shot and what all it should include.

TripAdvisor

Although an all-in-one-place to get advice on your trip, if it’s only hotels you are looking for then you won’t be disappointed at TripAdvisor. It lists the hotels in the city you are looking for. You can then read reviews for the hotels. You can even find lots of information about the destination, restaurants, things to do etc with TripAdvisor.

Do you know of some other sites that offer similar functionalities? Have you used one in the past? Share your experiences and thoughts in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Cool Online Resources to Plan Your Next Vacation (11)
• A Quick Road Trip Planning Guide For Techno Geeks (3)
• 6 Useful Last-Minute Booking Sites For Your Next Trip (4)
• Travel The World with Hello Backpacker (4)
• Share Your Trips With EveryTrail (8)

(1) Couch Surfing / Hospitality Club – These two are completely independent communities, however the idea behind both projects is very similar, thus they share spot #1. Check out video below for a quick intro.

Couch Surfing

Sign up for Couch Surfing if you would like to meet and interact with people around the world. The motivation of this community is to share whatever you have with others – your expertise, a bit of company, dinner, a cup of tea or your couch or guest bed. As a member you can set up a profile in which you write about yourself and describe what you have to offer. People interested in meeting you or surfing your couch can contact you through your profile. Within the community you can join groups for special interests, for example to hear about meetings or get togethers in your area. Once you met someone through the site you can leave a reference on their profile and become their friend. I have been a member of Couch Surfing for almost two years, hosted several dozen people, gave them a tour through my city, had meals and went out with them. I was hosted by two people and I can tell you, it’s such an incredible feeling to be welcome and treated like family by a stranger far away from home. The only negative experiences I made were with people who didn’t show up or canceled last minute. Other than that everyone was at least nice, but most people I met were awesome.

Hospitality Club

Now that you know about Couch Surfing, there is not much left to say about Hospitality Club. It’s the same, but different. Many avid Couch Surfers are also members of Hospitality Club and vice versa. I like to keep it simple and decided for the site that looked cooler and seemed more easy to use. For example Hospitality Club urges guests to share their personal information including passport number with their hosts and encourages hosts to check the passport of arriving guests. While this is a good precaution, it somehow turned me off. I’m not a control freak, I like to be a bit naive and trust in common sense and humanity. Couch Surfing just seemed more like I would fit in there.

(2) FreeCycle

The Freecycle Network™ is a nonprofit movement, dedicated to the free exchange of anything people want to part with. Furniture, electronic devices, toys, clothes, anything. It’s subdivided into individual local groups, located across the globe. These groups are basically Yahoo Groups that are utilizing the eMail list feature. You may post OFFERED as well as WANTED items to the public list and anyone who is interested or can help out will contact you directly. The groups are moderated by local volunteers. To sign up search for your community or browse all existing groups. If you find that there is no group in your area, you can start one and add it to the Freecycle Network™. Currently the network consists of 4,233 groups with a total of 4,444,000 members.

(3) FON

FON is the world’s largest WiFi community. FON members, also known as Foneros, share their WiFi connection with others for free. In return, when they leave their home base, they can use the WiFi connection provided by other Foneros for free. If you do not wish to share your WiFi for free, you could even make a little money. However, this would exclude you from using FON Spots for free.

With FON Maps you can check whether or not a FON Spot is available in your area. The image below shows a random selection from a residential area in Germany’s capital Berlin. Every yellow face represents one available access point.



(4) GeoCaching

GeoCaching is the modern form of treasure hunting using the internet, geographical data and a GPS device (although you could manage to do it without the gadget). You can hide a treasure (cache) yourself, then log onto the site and share the location. Or you can look for caches hidden in your area and begin searching for them.

(5) BookCrossing

BookCrossing has been around for a long time. It’s an adventure for people who love to read and share. Share your favorite book with a lucky stranger. Sign up with BookCrossing, receive an ID and printout explaining what BookCrossing is, paste it in your book and then set it free – anywhere. You can leave the book on a bench in a park or lay it on someone’s care in the parking lot or drop it in a mailbox. If you’re lucky the recipient will log into the BookCrossing website, report the book with the ID they found inside and leave a comment about how they liked it.

(6) PostCrossing

PostCrossing may sound like BookCrossing, but the two have little more than a similar name in common. PostCrossing is about receiving postcards from around the world. Signing up requires sharing your postal address. The next step is to request an address and mail this person a postcard. To verify that your postcard was sent and received, the recipient will submit the ID you noted onto your card to the site. Next you’re in the queue to receiving a postcard from a random stranger somewhere on this planet. I’ve tried it, it really works!

Isn’t it amazing what possibilities the internet has opened up and how we can connect through it? What are your thoughts on these communities and which pages did I miss? Please share!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• 6 Unique Web Communities That You Won’t Forget (54)
• Wakoopa – Find Out What Software You (And Others) Use Most (10)
• Use Hunch to Answer Your Questions & Make Decisions (4)
• UrbanDictionary – Words Defined by Average People (16)
• PMOG : The Social Browsing War Begins! (7)