Sleeping on the road
Subletting
When we arrived in Turkey, we were shocked by the price of rooms. The first night, the best we could do was to take dorm beds for US$20 each! That's the price when our country lives on credit and our currency loses half its value... I'd never imagined that Turkey was an expensive place, so we had a bit of sticker shock, especially after deplaning from India.We looked into renting a private room and stumbled upon sublet.com. The site is dismally organized. You have to drill multiple levels into the site to get to the location you want. There is a function to sort listings by price, but it doesn't work as some prices are given by the week and others by the month, so that $500 per week shows up cheaper than $1000 per month! Once you find something you like, it costs $20 to contact a property owner. Despite these flaws, sublet.com was the solution for us as we found a gorgeous studio that we rented for $300 for 17 days. Less than half the price of the dorm! Sublet.com lists properties from around the world. In a number of regions where we looked, the service is worthless to me as the so-called "sublets" are nothing but overpriced holiday rentals.
Lately, I started looking into subletting in the States, and I'm getting the impression that the best place to look is Craig's list. Sublet.com is way too disorganized and full of commercial spammers offering rooms by the week. On Craig's list you can cruise down the list of US cities, open them in new windows and click on sublet/temporary to get a sense for a market.
Homestays
Starting to explore this idea for long-term stays in countries like Japan.You'll find many homestay organizations on Google. Homestayweb has listings in many countries. It's ten dollars for a month's access to all listings. It looks like a homestay costs about US$200 per week.
Housesitting
This is a whole other topic I know nothing about.Links
Chapters from the Lonely Planet. I find it very very hard to research places to stay on Google. I love that Lonely Planet started to sell downloads of individual chapter from guidebooks. For a couple of bucks you can get exactly the information you were looking for.If you even need to sleep in an airport, you need to check this fabulous site, "sleeping in airports". It gives you directions to the best spot to spend the night in any airport. I have used it and it has saved me a lot of stress.