Helpful Tips for WorkAway with Kids

As the popularity of our Travel Blog has skyrocketed over the past year, so the quantity of fan mail and follow-up questions arriving in our inbox has also increased. Among the most frequently asked questions we receive, prospective Globe Hoppers would love to know two things:

• Is it OK to do WorkAway with kids?
• Who are the best WorkAway hosts to visit on their tour of Europe?

Therefore, I have found it necessary to post this article, which should answer that question clearly and thoroughly, if not entirely satisfactorily for those hoping to avoid conducting their own share of research.

The short answer is yes, you can do WarkAway with your children, and it can be an incredibly educational and eye-opening experience.

What is WorkAway?

If you know anything about our blog and our family history, then you will probably recall that our family spent 11 months traveling Europe (Germany-Austria-France-Catalunya), before settling in the Spanish Pyrenees. The itinerary of this trip revolved around coordinating work-exchange volunteer gigs through the website WorkAway.

We signed up on WorkAway in early 2016, after looking at few different online platforms. Help-X is another similar website, but WorkAway seems to be more widely used in Europe. I think it’s still about €30 for one year, and covers all countries around the world. There’s also WWOOF, but their website was not as functional in my experience, and your paid membership is only for one country at a time, so it can get expensive, unless you plan to work only in one country.

Arrangements vary, but the standard arrangement is that an individual traveler/volunteer can work about 5 hours a day / 5 days a week in exchange for room and board with any of thousands of hosts in just about any country in the world. Some volunteers travel as couples, or even families like ourselves.

Hosts sign up for free and set up a profile describing themselves, their location, and the type of work they need help with. Individuals can peruse the host list for free and drool over the limitless possibilities, but without their paid membership, they have no access to any contact information. As members, they set up profiles for themselves, with a short description of who they are and what sort of skills and experience they have.

What can we recommend?

The thing about WorkAway is that situations can change pretty quickly. Most of our hosts were small family farms or households looking for temporary help, so I can’t recommend any specific hosts. I don’t know if they’re still looking. Also, we had some pretty specific criteria, based on our family size and our own personal interests, and these narrowed our options tremendously.

So the best thing to do is to figure out where you want to go — a region that you’d like to explore and spend some time in — and what type of work you’re interested in, either because you have a skill to offer (e.g., maybe you’re an electrician or a web designer) or because you’re interested in learning a new skill (e.g., beekeeping or falconry).

Then you can search the WorkAway host list by country, and then narrow it down to a more specific region. You can also search for keywords like family, organic, vegetarian, goat cheese, or whatever you’re into. And as you find hosts who pique your interest, you can message them, introduce yourself, and determine if and when they might need your help. Sometimes a quick exchange of messages is enough to set up a plan, in other cases, people might want to have a video-chat to establish a better connection between volunteer and host.

I always took care of making the arrangements with our prospective hosts, and the messages were fine, although maybe 50-60% of hosts didn’t reply. Perhaps they weren’t interested in hosting a family, or they just didn’t have any work at the time. So put together a list, have a timetable in mind, and contact lots of hosts. Persistence will pay off, and the universe will provide. Do your due diligence and remember, this could be the adventure of a lifetime, and if you’re not willing to spend an hour or two looking up hosts, maybe you should just keep your day job.

From our own experience, and from sharing stories with other Work-Awayers, I’m sure that most of the hosts out there are very friendly, open minded and interesting people. But there are a few who just want to exploit the free labor. Of course, it’s a bit of a risk for both the host and the volunteer to live together for a few weeks or a month (we usually spent one month with each host), and sometimes it takes a couple days to get comfortable. But we only had one unpleasant experience (which you can read about HERE and HERE). All the others were either good or great.

Likewise with the volunteers, most are very interesting and adventurous, but a lot of them are just looking for free room and board while they see the world. But if you are reliable and willing to work hard, you should have no problem finding a place where you will be comfortable and appreciated. And ultimately, it’s a wonderful way to discover new parts of the world and see far more than what the ordinary tourist will find. 

Bon journee!

For more informative and entertaining stories about our WorkAway experience, be sure to check out the following articles:

• WWOOFing with Children
• Q & A: Post WorkAway interview
• Spanish Immersion 
• New Education: A year without a principal