When the global economy takes a downturn, learn a few tricks to stretch your travel budget.

If your Dollar or Euro doesn’t seem like it goes as far, should you just forget traveling? We don’t think so. Travel gives you a boost. You just have to travel a little smarter. You might cut a few corners so you can eat and sleep cheaper, but you can still have a great trip. How can you travel more frugally?

To stretch your travel budget in Europe, stay in a bed-and-breakfast. It will probably cost you less than even the cheapest hotel in town. You’ll get a friendly host who can probably tell you where to eat great food for less, and the only downside is you might be a ten minute walk from the center of town.

If you can’t find a convenient bed-and-breakfast, stay in a hotel with fewer stars. This will be your cheaper option in the U.S. If you check them out before you take the room, you can get a real bargain…. they may have a lowly one or two stars only because they don’t have a restaurant, or an elevator. Some small family run places can be as cozy and friendly as a bed-and-breakfast.

If you’re going to stay in a city for a week or more, consider a short-term apartment rental. They have small kitchens, so you can shop at local stores and eat in, saving on restaurant meals. They are often no more than a moderate priced hotel room. In the U.S. you can prepare meals in your room if you get a motel with a kitchenette.

Negotiate with hotels. Room rates generally follow the ecomony. If economies around the world are sinking… so are room rates. No matter if it’s a bed and breakfast, a cheap hotel or one with more stars, don’t accept the first price they quote you.

Ask if there are any discounts or if it will be cheaper if you stay more nights. This works especially well if you are at their door, and they are not full for the night. They want to fill that room, and they might as well entice you with a good deal.

Don’t succumb to a nightcap from the minibar. Snacks and drinks are always more expensive from the minibar. If you think you might have the midnight munchies, stop at a convenience store or a local shop and pick up a few items.

If you’re really counting your pennies, doing your laundry in the hotel sink is a great way to stretch your travel budget. Hotel laundry services can be expensive. Some motels in the U.S. have coin operated washers and driers on the premises. Who wants to spend time in a laundromat when you could be sightseeing?

If your hotel doesn’t include breakfast in the price of the room, you will probably save money venturing out to a local corner cafe rather than paying the price for the hotel breakfast buffet.

If you watch the way you eat and drink, and you’re smart about where you sleep, you can stretch your travel budget, so you don’t have to stay too close to home.

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One way to travel within your budget is to consider a vacation home exchange.

Have you heard about it? Home exchanges have been around for decades, but they’ve really gotten easier to arrange with the internet. They’ve become popular with families, seniors and boomers.

You basically arrange to trade your house for someone else’s house from another city, state, or country during your vacation. You get to spend a week or two in… say London… while that London family gets a beach vacation in, oh, San Diego. With hotel rates in popular areas so high, swapping houses can be a great way to save money, plus you will have a kitchen, multiple bedrooms, and you’ll probably get to know the neighbors and see some things that you wouldn’t have seen from a hotel room. It can not only help your travel budget; home trades can be rewarding from a cultural standpoint as well.

Several organizations maintain lists of interested exchangers. You pay a small fee and get to look at their lists as well as listing your own house. Then you can directly contact the people you might want to exchange with and set up the details.

There are also many helpful web pages to advise you what to check on, things to settle in advance, etc. Are you going to have to feed the cats? You won’t want that if you’re allergic to cats! If you decide on a cute French farmhouse, does that come with having to feed the chickens and ducks? Do you get the use of the car? Is there a limit to how far you can drive it? Is this going to be an exchange just between adults? Families will be more willing to exchange with families… so choose your home exchange site according to their list.

We don’t advocate any sites. A few sites you can check are Know Your Trade, Home Exchange, and Home Base Holidays. Find exchange clubs on the internet, read the reviews by users, and decide which one might work best for you. Some specialize, so check to see if they are more interested in families or seniors or whatever.

Home exchanges are not for everyone. If you think you will be overly worried about someone stealing something or not taking care of your house just the way you would, maybe you should forgo the house swap and stay in a hotel. If you’re the type of traveler who wants to move around every night and not stay in one place for a couple of weeks… forget it.

If you decide to list your home for a swap, you need to be honest about what your home is like…, and you need to hope the exchangers on the other end are honest about theirs. If both of you just say “near the beach”, both of you need to find out if “near” means 5 blocks or 5 miles so there are no misconceptions. You should exchange many e-mails, maybe a few phone calls.

If you do this right, you will probably feel like you’re friends before you start this house trading adventure. Yes, friends, we didn’t want to leave you with negative thoughts about vacation house trades…. just wanted to warn you.

If you browse through the house swapping sites, you will see testimonials that most people who have tried it LOVE it. House exchangers on both sides of the deal usually think THEY’VE gotten the better end of the exchange.

Give it some consideration. If you want to save money and still have a great holiday, a home exchange might be for you.

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What about a camping family vacation this year? If you’re American and you leave it to the kids to decide on your family vacation, chances are you’ll be heading to Disneyland or Disney World. There’s nothing wrong with that… those magical lands on both coasts of the U.S. are great fun for kids of all ages.

And there are plenty of things to do nearby to both, but what about something different….maybe getting back to basics and a camping family vacation? Ah-oh. Camping? Where do you go? What do you do?

If you’ve never camped before, you might want to start close to home… so you can bail out if you have to! You can save the beautiful park far from home for another time, once you know you’re all going to like the camping experience. Almost everyone lives within an hour or two of some public forest or park, no matter what part of the world you live in. It’s a great place to give a camping family vacation a try.

Think about practicing at home. A week or two before you load up the car, set up the tent in your backyard (or even the living room if your tent doesn’t require stakes). If you’ve set up the tent once or twice, you won’t be as apt to fumble and get frustrated once you get to the camp ground. Let the kids sleep in their sleeping bags and get used to the idea… though they may be even more receptive to it than you are.

Plan simple meals and make the food fun. Complicated meals will only make more work for you, and the kids will be whining — wanting to know when dinner will be ready. On the other hand, the kids will love roasting marshmallows or better yet making that traditional campfire treat… s’mores!

Barbecue burgers, roast hot dogs, or make “hobo stew” in aluminum wraps over the campfire… a couple of beers or a bottle of wine will make those good for parents too.

Maybe bring two coolers and keep one for snacks and soft drinks so the kids can grab something when then need it. It’ll keep them from getting hungry and cranky between meals.

Get the kids involved right from the start. Let them help set up the tent… roll out the sleeping bags. And let them help with the meals. Cooking around the campfire can be a great bonding experience.

Enjoy the “nature” part of that camping family vacation. Take walks together, see if you can identify wildflowers, trees, and birds. Swim in that lake, wade in that river. Some kids have never been in the water unless it was a bathtub or swimming pool. It’s fun to know there might be fish in there!

Use your imagination. If you make it enough of an adventure, your kids will be glad you all decided on that camping family vacation and they won’t miss Disneyland or Disney World at all — this year!

Travel with friends and family can be a tricky thing. You may have talked about your dream vacation with your friends… Think about what you’ll do if they say, “Yea, I’ve always wanted to do that! We should go together.”

Maybe you think, why not? You get together a couple of times a month for barbecues. You’ve caught a few ball games together, spent days together getting those house projects done. Why not enjoy a trip together?

A trip together can be a really good thing, but you have to make sure you think things through… You really need to have an idea about who likes what before you start traveling with friends and family. You want them to be your friends when you come home too!

Prior to planning a long dream trip with your sister and brother-in-law or your best friends… you might want to take a couple of weekend trips… see if your travel styles are compatible. You might discover a few personality quirks that never showed up on those afternoons together or disabilities that you never gave a thought to when you were just sitting around at dinner.

Here are a few things to think about.

If you’re the type who likes to walk and explore cities all day, but your brother-in-law has arthritis, you’re going to be having some rocky times unless you’ve planned time apart for individual activities or you’ve planned for some bus or car tours.

You want to grab a snack and keep on exploring, but your sister likes long leisurely lunches… one of you is going to be unhappy unless you plan for this. Maybe you can tell her this is your new diet plan. Just kidding, but you see what I mean.

You’ve enjoyed beer and wine together at your barbecues, but find out if your buddy wants to stop often for a beer or stop early in the day for a nice cocktail hour.

You can still take a trip together if you have different styles and physical limitations, you just have to plan for it. Maybe taking a cruise together would be better. Or a tour instead of independent travel.

Without a tour, you might have more time to enjoy each other, but when you’re planning your itinerary, decide together how fast the pace should be for the slowest member of your group. Don’t plan to cram activities in. Choose one or two that you can do together each day… allow time apart. You can go off on your own, and they can take a nap in their hotel room or sit in a sidewalk cafe and recover or shop or whatever grabs their fancy.

You can prowl that museum while they take that river sightseeing tour that would bore you do death. Traveling together doesn’t have to mean spending every waking hour together. In fact, your trip will probably be much more pleasant if you plan for time apart…. You will come home still speaking to each other and have great memories because of it!

Toilet stories…. now here’s a part of travel you might not like to think about. If you’re traveling in rich, “first world” countries, you probably don’t need to worry too much about it. But if you’re traveling internationally, you’re probably going to run into a surprise or two. Talk to people who have been traveling internationally for a while, and they’re bound to have one or two amusing toilet stories.

In the U.S. almost all toilets will be “pedestal style”. Some may be a bit run down, but they will mostly look the same.

In Europe, most of the time you will find pedestal style toilets too. There are some pretty interesting flush mechanisms, so you may have to figure that out.

If you get out into the countryside or into less developed countries, it’s just possible that you’ll run into some W Cs that are more like porcelain footprints with a hole. Seasoned travelers often say “Western style” and “Eastern Style”, but you can run into either anywhere in the world. You won’t always have that “throne”, so just make up your mind that you can deal with it.

It always pays to have some tissues or toilet paper in your pocket. Even if you find a toilet that has a dispenser, it could be empty. In more rural areas and more undeveloped counties, TP might clog up the plumbing. In places like that, you’ll see wastebaskets with dirty paper… put yours there too.

Finding a public toilet can be harder abroad than it is in the U.S. If you’re out wandering the street, look for train stations or department stores. If there is a U.S. style fast-food restaurant, you can find a toilet inside. Big hotels will have one tucked away in the lobby somewhere, and they are reliable for having TP. You can find one in restaurants too. If you’re not a customer, ask politely, most of the time they will let you use their W Cs. Never leave a museum or restaurant without going - even if you don’t need to. Who knows when you’ll find the next facility.

Many big European cities have coin operated “toilet booths” on street corners. Public toilets often are pay toilets. Carry small change to pay for them. Some will be coin operated on the door, others will have attendants sitting by the door. Even if they don’t insist on you paying when you go in, it’s polite to leave a small tip… it’s usually only the equivalent of about 25 U.S. cents. Don’t expect them to have change… they might, or they might just keep the change if you don’t have anything small enough. It’s another way for them to make a little money… so plan ahead — don’t give away all of your “little money”. It’ll come in handy.

Get used to occasionally having women cleaners in the Men’s rooms and sometimes men attendants in the Woman’s room. Lots of toilet stories come from these encounters, but they’re used to it, so you might as well just get comfortable with it too.

When you get beyond Europe, you’ll run into more and more of those “Eastern Style” porcelain holes-in-the-ground. Some will even be just that — holes in the ground. OK… if you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go. Just deal with it, and you’ll come home with some toilet stories of your own.