Stay in India for free via blogger Web site

By Tony Tharakan

NEW DELHI, Sept 28 (Reuters Life!) - Hotel rooms in India tend to be expensive and hard to find, but a new Web site is helping visitors find a bed, with a warm conversation thrown in, all for free.

While most hosts on www.extrabed.in offer a spare bed and an Internet connection, some offer sightseeing tours, endless cups of coffee or even a game of Scrabble to add that personal touch.

The Web site was born after its founder, Kiruba Shankar, randomly contacted bloggers in Mumbai to see if anyone would put him up. He found several.

"The blogger I stayed with had a small house and he could only offer me a mat to sleep on," said Shankar, 34, who had tired of staying in hotels during his travels.

"But we had a lot of fun and ended up playing videogames all night. I preferred sleeping on the ground at this guy's place rather than stay in irritatingly clean and inhuman hotels."

Shankar floated the Web site in January and immediately found takers for the free hospitality network service. The site is similar to www.couchsurfing.com, which also offers travelers the use of a spare bed or couch for free and which has more than 300,000 members globally, with thousands more signing up weekly.

Indian hotel industry officials say a booming economy has led to a severe shortage of hotel rooms across all price brackets and an exponential rise in tariffs as well.

ExtraBed is only for bloggers, and hence users wary of giving strangers access to their homes can read the potential visitors' blogs to understand them.