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House sitting as a way to travel for free

The apartment is in the Alfama district of Lisbon — third floor, no lift, tile floors that stay cool even in August. There are two cats, a wall of paperbacks, and a view of the Tagus that would cost you €200 a night in a hotel two streets over. You are staying for three weeks, paying nothing, because the owners are visiting family in Porto and needed someone reliable to be here.

This is what house sitting actually looks like. Not a hack, not a loophole — a straightforward arrangement between people who need their home looked after and travellers who want a real place to stay rather than a succession of hotel rooms. The accommodation is free. The experience of living somewhere, rather than just passing through, is the point.

What follows is a practical guide to how house sitting works, which platforms are worth paying for, what kinds of sits exist, and how to build a profile that actually gets responses.

How house sitting works — the basics

House sitting is an exchange, not a transaction. Homeowners — called “home owners” or “hosts” on most platforms — list their property on a dedicated website when they need to travel. They are looking for a trustworthy adult (or couple, or family) to occupy the home, collect the post, water the plants, and most often care for pets. In return, the sitter stays for free.

No money changes hands between sitter and host. You pay only the platform membership fee, which buys you access to listings. Everything else — the accommodation, any utilities included in the sit, sometimes a car — costs nothing beyond your own travel to get there.

Most sits are between one and four weeks. Some are shorter (a long weekend while the owners go to a wedding), some considerably longer (three months while a couple overwinters in Thailand). The logistics are agreed directly between host and sitter: arrival times, feeding schedules, house rules, emergency contacts.

The sits themselves vary widely. A rural farmhouse in the Dordogne with two dogs and a vegetable garden is a very different proposition from a city apartment in Chiang Mai with a single indoor cat. Both are free accommodation. Only one involves waking up at 6am to let anything outside.

The main platforms and what they cost

Several platforms dominate this space. The membership fees are annual, paid by sitters, and they vary in what they offer.

TrustedHousesitters is the largest and most competitive. It is also the platform most likely to have sits in places you actually want to go — rural Tuscany, central Lisbon, the Algarve coast, Bali’s Ubud, the highlands of New Zealand. The trade-off is that popular listings attract dozens of applicants within hours.

MindMyHouse is worth considering as a starting point: the lower fee means lower stakes while you build your first profile and references. Many experienced sitters maintain accounts on two or three platforms simultaneously.

Building a profile that gets responses

A blank profile with no reviews and a one-sentence bio will be ignored in favour of profiles that look like real people. This is the first hurdle for anyone starting out.

Your profile needs a clear, warm photo of you (and your partner or family, if applicable) — not a sunset, not a landscape, you. Write a bio that explains who you are, why you travel, and specifically what you are good at with animals. If you have cared for dogs before, say so. If you grew up with cats, mention it. If you have gardening experience, that matters in rural sits.

The references problem is real. You have no sits on your record, so hosts are taking a risk. Three ways around this: ask previous landlords or employers to write a character reference within the platform; do your first sit for someone in your own city to build an initial review quickly; or use platforms like MindMyHouse where competition is lower and a strong profile still stands out.

Applications should be specific. Reference the pet’s name. Comment on something from the listing — the garden, the neighbourhood, the type of dog. Generic copy-paste applications are obvious and ignored. A short paragraph that shows you read the listing carefully will outperform a long essay every time.

Video calls before confirming a sit are standard on TrustedHousesitters and expected by serious hosts. Treat it like a mutual interview — you are also deciding whether this is a home you want to stay in.

Where to find the best sits — and what destinations to target

Sit availability clusters around places where homeowners travel frequently and where English-speaking sitters are expected. Practically, this means:

Europe generates a high volume of sits year-round. Southern France, Portugal, Spain, and Tuscany are particularly well-represented, especially during summer when owners travel. If you are planning slow travel in Portugal, combining a house sit in, say, the Alentejo or the Algarve with your wider itinerary is genuinely viable — there are sits listed in both regions consistently through spring and autumn.

Southeast Asia has a smaller but growing pool, concentrated in Bali (Ubud, Canggu, and Seminyak), Chiang Mai, and some parts of Thailand’s Chiang Rai province. These tend to be expat-owned homes rather than local family properties. Availability is patchiest here, but the sits that do appear — a villa with a pool in Canggu for three weeks in November — are memorable. The digital nomad community in Chiang Mai has normalised extended stays in rented homes, which has gradually expanded the house sitting market there too.

Australia and New Zealand are strong markets, particularly for longer sits. Rural Queensland, the South Island of New Zealand, and coastal NSW generate sits that are harder to fill because of the travel distance — which means less competition for sitters willing to go.

Latin America and Southern Africa are smaller markets but expanding. Buenos Aires, Cape Town, and the Medellín area of Colombia all appear with regularity.

Timing matters. Sits in Provence peak in July and August when French owners escape their own countryside. Sits in the UK cluster in July and December. Searching three to five months ahead gives the best selection; last-minute sits do appear but are harder to plan around.

What you are actually committing to

House sitting is not free accommodation with no strings. You are responsible for a real home — sometimes for animals whose health and routines matter to owners — and that responsibility is not trivial.

Most sits involve pets. Dogs need walking, often twice a day, rain or not. Cats need feeding and litter. Some sits include livestock, horses, or medical needs for older animals. Before accepting any sit, read the listing in full and ask direct questions: How old is the dog? Does it have any health conditions? What happens if it gets sick — what is the vet’s number and who covers emergency costs? (Most platforms recommend a written agreement; some hosts cover vet bills, others expect sitters to use a card and be reimbursed.)

The house itself needs to be left in the condition you found it. This is not a hotel. You are a guest in someone’s home, using their kitchen, their WiFi, their towels. Treat it accordingly.

The time commitment is real. You cannot disappear for a three-day side trip if there is a dog that needs feeding. If you want flexibility to travel during a sit, either choose cat-only or plant-only sits, or be honest with hosts about your plans before confirming.

The honest logistics: costs, contracts, and common problems

Your actual costs as a sitter:
– Platform membership: $20–$170 per year depending on the platform
– Travel to the sit location (flights, trains, buses — this is your main expense)
– Your own food
– Any activities, transport, or entrance fees during your stay

The platform fees are the only fixed cost. Everything else is what you would spend travelling anyway.

What can go wrong: Sits do get cancelled — owners have emergencies, plans change. Most platforms have policies requiring notice, but this happens, and you may have already booked a flight. Keep cancellation-flexible travel bookings where possible, especially for your first few sits.

Hosts cancelling at short notice is less common than sitters worrying about it, but it is worth having a backup plan for accommodation if a sit in, say, rural Umbria falls through the week before departure. City sits are easier to cover; rural ones leave you more exposed.

Contracts: TrustedHousesitters provides a sit agreement template. Use it. It protects both parties and clarifies expectations around arrival, departure, vet costs, and house rules in writing.

According to Lonely Planet’s guide to house sitting, sitters with five or more completed sits on their profile receive significantly more responses to applications — which means the first two or three sits require the most effort to secure, and it becomes steadily easier after that.

What you get that hotels cannot offer

The obvious benefit is the cost. A three-week sit in a Lisbon apartment, a month in a Provençal farmhouse, six weeks in a villa outside Chiang Mai — these represent savings of several thousand dollars at current accommodation rates. For anyone planning extended travel, house sitting meaningfully extends how long they can stay on the road.

But the less obvious benefit is what the accommodation itself provides. You have a kitchen, which means you shop at the neighbourhood market, cook with local ingredients, and eat at home some evenings. You have a washing machine. You have a neighbourhood — a boulangerie that knows you by the end of the week, a park where the dog pulls you at 7am, a supermarket where you start recognising faces.

This is not the same as a hotel, where you are always a visitor. In a house sit, you are temporarily a resident. That distinction changes the texture of a place considerably.

BBC Travel’s feature on long-term house sitting notes that many sitters find the arrangement fundamentally reframes their relationship with the places they visit — less movement, more depth. That tracks with the slow travel philosophy: less distance covered, more actually absorbed.

For anyone interested in genuinely staying somewhere rather than just visiting it, the accommodation model matters. House sitting happens to be one of the more honest ways to do it — you exchange real responsibility for real access.

The Bottom Line

• Platform costs are low; competition is real. TrustedHousesitters ($169/year) has the most listings but the most applicants. Starting on MindMyHouse ($20/year) lets you build references before competing in the bigger pool.
• Your first sit is the hardest to get. Build your profile carefully, apply specifically (reference the pet’s name, the location, something from the listing), and consider doing a local sit first to earn your first review.
• Know what you are committing to. Dogs need walking. Houses need leaving clean. Flexibility to travel during a sit depends entirely on the type of sit — build this into your planning, not your assumptions.
• The best sit destinations for most English-speaking travellers are southern Europe, Southeast Asia (especially Bali and Chiang Mai), and Australasia. Apply three to five months ahead for popular locations; last-minute sits exist but are harder to plan around.
• The financial case is straightforward. Membership plus flights to your sit location is your total accommodation cost. In most European or Southeast Asian cities, that represents a significant saving over three weeks compared to any other form of legitimate accommodation.

Keep reading: How to save money for a long term trip