While traveling provides life-changing lessons, unforgettable experiences and urges to travel more, it doesn’t come for free. It involves a standard travel budget from you. Sometimes you may delay a planned travel because of the cost involved in it. As you’re about to read, traveling by using sharing economy. Let’s explore what is it? And how can you use sharing economy to help you traveling on a budget?
Whether you know it or not, sharing economy is the need of mankind. Whether you are a citizen of developed country or a developing country sharing economy is need of every individual.
Sharing economy is shifting the aspect of travel, benefiting provider and traveler on budget.
Provider: It has become a source of income to those without job.
Traveler: It provides traveler a happiness of affording high budget trips within budget. Smartphone equipped travelers are renting apartments and rooms via services like Oyo, hailing share rides from Ola or Ube; or getting a car on rent from Zoomcar.
Clearly, I think it’s very important right now. As a traveler always want to travel on budget. By use of the sharing economy you can continue to travel on budget. Let me share those tips which will help you to get all the benefits of sharing economy.
1. Collaborative consumption platform
It is a platform where one or more persons enjoy economic benefits by engaging in joint activities. With service providers such as Ola, Uber, Rapido, Quickride, Meru, OYO and others, people can now work with comfort of the home. People use their own vehicle, places to generate an extra source of income. People can also sell their unwanted items on portals such as OLX and eBay. This enables the travel to grab the opportunity and purchase according to his travel requirements.
2. Designing for trust in the community
Trust is a key factor for sustainability of the sharing economy platform. When trust is established between sharing economy platform and user, it becomes the part of society.
At the time of introduction of OLA in the country, people trusted less and opposed more. But, after some struggle, OLA succeeded in establishing trust between the OLA platform and users. With introduction of cab service providers, booking a cab has become easier for travelers.
The role of trust will only gain more attention as the sharing economy grows and expands beyond the popular home and ride sharing services.
3. Sharing Service: Benefit from accommodation
Accommodation involves high portion of your travel budget. Consider becoming a guest in someone’s apartment or home. Being a traveler, it could be cheaper than hotels for you.
You can rent your own home to travelers. It can be a great source of income. This money you can save for your travel plans.
There are several trends in practice which can help in getting free accommodation or at low cost. For example – House sitting, House swapping, Apartment or home rentals, Campervan rentals, or Couch surfing, etc.
4. Sharing Service: Activities and tours
Activities and tours include all those activities that traveler do while on vacation. Tours encompasses all of the sightseeing activities, attractions, historical places, monuments, shows and day trips.
You can look for services provided by local person at a reasonable cost. You can take on rent any camping equipment, vehicle, tips from local tour guide, etc.
5. Sharing Service: Transportation
Don’t have a bike or cycle for a ride on foreign land? Now, you can rent one.
Transportation offers huge opportunity in the sharing world for both owners and users. When I was traveling to Goa, i saved a big portion of my travel budget as I had borrowed vehicle from a local resident for 5 days.
Sharing economy makes you feel like you are owner of the thing for the limited time. You enjoy the service at your will and comfort and save money too.
6. Sharing economy for corporate travelers
Employees often feel the pressure from company to minimize the corporate travels. In an effort to save company money, many have started using sharing economy services such as Ola share, Shuttle services, etc.
Sharing economy service providers are beginning to modify their platforms to meet corporate traveler’s need. With the growing effort by service providers, it’s clear that this trend is here to stay.
7. Spend, Save and maintain the lifestyle
Did you know? You can complete your trip with same lifestyle and using same resources on sharing economy platform.
Sometimes saving money asks you to cut down on other things. Making adjustment with choices to save money is not a fun thing to do. With the growing resources on sharing economy platform, you can save a lot. You can enjoy the same cab ride at shared cost.
At refresh, using sharing economy resources to travel can be the best way to start saving by smart traveling. Be an early bird while planning to use sharing economy resources during your travel. Availability of resources on sharing economy platform is subject to bookings flow. Don’t let travel budget be a stress on you. Make the choice to take control by choosing shared resources and experience the travel in luxurious ways.
