A helper is someone who is prepared to work in exchange for accommodation and food in a part of the world that they wish to visit. They normally work for between 3-6 hours per day to pay for these things and then have the rest of the time to themselves to use as they see fit. Work can be anything the helper and their host can agree on, from digging ditches to tending animals to programming computers to delivering food aid. The sky’s the limit! Anyone who can get a host to agree to have them can be a helper. With a simply mind-boggling array of things in the world that need doing there are not really any restrictions on size, strength, age or intelligence etc. – there’s something for pretty much everyone, which is why it has universal appeal.

A host is someone or some organisation that is willing to either have a helper stay with them or to pay for their accommodation in exchange for work of some kind. A host can be an individual, a family, a company, a charity, a government organisation, a special interest group or whatever. If they can persuade helpers to come to them and can offer the things they want, then they can be a host.

See ‘What is a helper and who can be one’ above. Obviously if you are a minor then you would require your parents’ permission to be a helper.

With the Standard membership you can create your profile as a helper or a host and you can search for helpers or for hosts. With the Premier membership you can do so much more. You can contact hosts or helpers, you get access to a secure messaging system and the ability to manage your messages, you can add and manage favourite users and you can see who has you as a favourite, you can leave user feedback to help fellow site users to make sounds decisions about who to have as a host or a helper, you can view the feedback left for you by other users and you can see who has viewed your profiles. You get an awful lot of essential tools for not a lot of money. To upgrade to a premier membership please follow this link.

That depends on the country that you are visiting. Some countries will let you in on a tourist visa to be a helper and some won’t. Some helpers will simply have a tourist visa and not tell the authorities of the purposes of their visit, but we cannot condone that behaviour. You should carefully research the visa requirements of any country that you intend to visit as part of your pre-travel preparations. A website such as project visa http://projectvisa.com/ or embassy world http://www.embassyworld.com/Visa_Search/Visa_Search.html would be a good place to start.

Help and host has a feedback system a bit like eBay’s where users can comment on their experiences. Obviously it will take time for someone to build a feedback reputation, so if the user you’re interested in having as a helper or host doesn’t have any feedback then don’t be too worried. Just correspond with them by email and phone to build up a reasonable picture of them.

Follow this link to recover it.

Firstly please check your spam folder. If it’s not there then you will need to request it to be resent. Before requesting it again, please add the domain helpandhost.net to your whitelist. Also please check that you have the address spelt correctly in your profile. Once you’ve done this you can request that the email is resent by following this link.

You will need to upgrade your account to a premier account to contact other users. Please follow this link to upgrade.

If you have lost your password and cannot log into your account and have also changed email addresses and so are unable to request a password reminder you can contact us and provide details of your previous email address and your security question and security question response along with your new email address. With this information we can reset your account utilising the new email address.