By James Stone

Book your round the World Flights and Travel Insurance here!

Travelling around the world can be an expensive business, even if you're content to live on a shoe-string, sleeping in dodgy youth hostels and hitch-hiking for lifts wherever you go. In the first instance, you've got to fork out hundreds of pounds for a flight to your far-flung destination of choice. After that it's all about staying there for as long as you can until your money runs out.

Preparation for the trip a lifetime therefore includes a lot of working, scrimping and saving. A friend of mine loved travelling so much that he even took up a position at a London investment bank, lived with his mum for a year, and then took his Christmas bonus with him on a year-long holiday around the world. It's a fantastic idea, but you've got to be sure that a year of long suit-wearing hours is right for you - especially when you can't blow all your hard-earned cash at the weekend.

But there's an alternative. Provided that you can beg, borrow or steal the initial plane fare, a fantastic holiday experience could be funded through simply working while you're out there. Working holidays have become increasingly popular in recent years, and it's easy to see why. First, there is the variety of work available. You can do anything from serving drinks behind a bar on the beaches of Costa Rica, to conservation project work in Vietnam. Teaching is also a popular, and often well-paid, option. If you tout yourself as a well-educated Englishman/woman, there's bound to be any number of prospective employers looking to grab your skills.

A friend of mine recently came back from India, where she had spent her time teaching infants in a village school and planting trees by roadsides. In the meantime, she said that she hung around the house of the school's headmaster and experienced a side of Indian life that would never have been accessible any other way. And this is the point, I suppose, of a working holiday. Because you're not actually on holiday, you get a much more realistic idea of what its like to live there.

There are, of course, downsides associated with working while you travel. The first obvious problem is that you can't actually travel a great deal when you're working, as you typically have to turn up on Monday morning in order to get paid. While working at a newspaper in Tokyo, I found it difficult to actually see any of the rest of Japan during my time there. In addition, I was typically so tired after a day's work that actually going out anywhere was pretty difficult, particularly when I knew that I had to be back in the office early the next morning.

But these are problems with any job. The trick is to consider the realistic alternatives: you could be slogging your guts out in a boring office in the dreary UK, or serving cocktails on a beach. The choice is yours.

Find thousands of hospitality jobs across the world.