Travel

#Click and go: the best travel websites ever

Camping

Alamy

The concept is simple: people offer their gardens for you to camp in. You can search for suitable sites by event and they range from the basic – bring a primus – to the more glamorous, with access to a toilet and kitchen. It's free to join, as is listing your garden, and costs from 5pp per night to stay – though it may cost more near popular events.

Glamping is the latest camping craze. and this site, an offshoot of Holiday Pad, has the pick of the crop, from camps with four-posters next to Lake Garda to a safari-style retreat near Sydney and a collection of Airstream caravans in Cornwall. It currently features 110 in the UK and a scattering around the world, that are being added to all the time.

pitchup.com This website screams camping is fun! You can scour campsites close to festival spots or search for one best suited to your interests, whether that's hiking, families or naturism. Once you've found a site you can check availability and book online.

Discounts and deals

It's not just cut-price eyebrow threading and bargain military fitness sessions that can drop into your inbox. Holiday companies are getting in on the act of collective buying power through groupon.com and the like, which deliver a list of deals that have to be booked that day, or within the next few days, and which only become active when enough people sign up to them. Good for spa breaks, country-house hotels, activity weekends.

An alternative is voyage-prive.co.uk , which fires off weekly emails featuring loads of heavily discounted trips to really nice-looking hotels in the boutique/luxury vein – you then have five days to book before the opportunity is lost. Recent deals have included 68% savings on five nights at Koh Samui's Kanok Buri Resort and Spa, right on the beach, and 41% off a seven-night Tyrolean valley break, with half-board at the Hotel Sonnschein in the Kitzb hel Alps.

vouchercode.co.uk This site gathers together every discount voucher code on offer. So if you weren't aware that Hotels.com were offering 10% off bookings at a given time then Voucher Code is for you. It gives you a code, which then takes you direct to the provider's site – you enter the code at checkout. Sign up and you get a weekly email with the latest deals.

ilovecashback.com This takes the idea of cashback to a whole new level: search for a holiday on the site to find the best deal, get the voucher code, receive the discount at the provider's website, then ilovecashback also gives you a portion of the revenue from advertising the deal.

livingsocial.com To make the most of this site you need a lots of friends, but be motivated by inherently selfish reasons. Sign up to the site for your city and each day receive a discount for a local business. Buy it, and then share the info with your friends. If enough of them buy it too, your deal will be free.

Budget accommodation

Rent a New York loft with airbnb.com Public Domain

This site is particularly useful for trips to cities like New York, where it is really hard to find good cheap accommodation. Rather than splurging on a tiny designer room, or slumming it in a hostel, why not borrow a local's gorgeous loft apartment at a bargain rate, or stay in their spare room? Launched in 2008 and now covering 181 countries, airbnb lets you meet locals and experience a bit of real life.

Many other websites are getting in on the borrow-a-home concept. including istopover.com and crashpadder.com . The first generation of meet-the-locals websites – including couchsurfing.org . stay4free.com and hospitalityclub.org ,– still have a large online community and are good for meeting people in thousands of cities, either for a drink or to crash on their sofa or in a spare room for the night.

This home exchange service has been around so long that members used to correspond by telephone and snail mail, and it claims many second-generation members. You pay 50 to join for a year, but that gives you access to 30,000 rated and recommended listings, which you can view in no more than two clicks. Also try homeexchange.com and, of course, the Guardian's home exchange (guardianhomeexchange.co.uk ).