staydu

Boasting over 17,000 members, Staydu offers a unique and economical way of discovering new locations by staying with local hosts. By simply entering the place you’re planning on travelling to, the website takes you through to page featuring a range of different hosts offering the chance to experience a cultural exchange.

Each host shows a photo, a short tagline and one, or more, coloured spots underneath. These are used to indicate the type of accommodation that the host is offering, whether its stay and help, stay and pay or stay for free. After clicking on a host’s profile you will be take through to a more detailed page, showing a short bio, expectations from your stay, languages and user verified reviews. The user reviews are an important feature as these can be extremely useful in helping decide who to stay with based on past guests’ experiences.

One of the main problems I had when using Staydu was the time it took to load results. Even for just entering the city you are looking for, the website could take up to a minute to load and often came back as having no results for your search. There also seemed to be a problem with loading the map to show exactly where hosts were located, making it difficult to plan where to go.

I also thought that their ‘Travel Magazine’ section was very thin on content, with just two posts between March 2016 and October 2018. This seemed a shame, as travel websites often feature a number of blog posts to help inform users of where to travel and advice on when you get there. Having more articles would certainly make the website more complete.

All in all, a good concept, but desperately in need of some servicing if it is to work efficiently.

David Jones

I am a professional travel writer and travel enthusiast who traveled the world twice, so I am sharing my firsthand knowledge about everything related to travel and spending time abroad.