That seems to be the advice of a travel writer at the New York Times, who today offers some sage advice for travelers trying to save a buck.

In a word, pray:

When Kathleen Mazzocco was researching places for an affordable family vacation in Italy back in 2002, booking a room in a convent was “like shooting in the dark,” she recently recalled.

The guidebook to religious lodgings that Ms. Mazzocco used had no photographs, and she wasn’t sure the information was up-to-date. After mailing money orders to convents in Rome and Florence, she received no response. “I was on pins and needles,” she said. “I had no idea if they had our reservations.”

But by the time Ms. Mazzocco, a public relations consultant from Lake Oswego, Ore., returned to Italy last year, making a reservation at a monastery was not so different from booking a regular hotel. She found the cliffside Monastero S. Croce, in Liguria, on the Internet, viewed photos of it on the monastery’s own Web site, sent an e-mail message asking about availability, heard back promptly, and, at the end of her stay, paid with a credit card. “They’d entered the modern age,” she said.

For centuries Europe’s convents and monasteries have quietly provided inexpensive lodging to itinerants and in-the-know travelers, but now they’re increasingly throwing open their iron-bound doors to overnight visitors. They’ve begun Web sites — many with English translations and detailed information about sampling monastic life for a night — and signed on with Internet booking services. Some have even added spa offerings. Occupancy has shot up at many places, and some of the more centrally located are often fully booked.

And while some of the people staying at such holy spots are among the 300,000 religious travelers fueling the booming $18 billion faith-tourism industry, others are simply ordinary vacationers seeking a more authentic alternative to an anonymous hotel.

“Twenty years ago, nobody was going to monasteries unless they were into religious tourism,” said Andrea Moretti, a travel consultant at the Italian Government Tourist Board, who estimates that between 1 and 5 percent of Italy’s 93 million annual visitors stay in religious lodgings, with Americans particularly attracted to them. “Now even if they’re not interested in religion, people consider a monastery because they like the pace and feeling.”

Not to mention the price. While peaceful interior courtyards and the chance to hear nuns singing Vespers are certainly part of the allure, religious lodgings are almost always cheaper than hotels — often considerably cheaper. And with the dollar remaining weak, more and more travelers are looking at convents and monasteries as a way to beat the euro. So what if they don’t have mini bars and room service?

“We spent less than half what we would have in a comparable hotel,” said Marilyn Henderson, a retired accountant from Lakewood, Wash., of the Opera della Divina Provvidenza, in Venice, where she and her husband stayed in July. The Hendersons paid 136 euros a night ($189 at $1.39 to the euro) for a double room with a private bath in the church-owned guesthouse, which has ceiling frescoes by Tintoretto and Tiepolo and is a 15-minute walk from San Marco. “It was easily equivalent to a three-star accommodation,” she said.

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Photo: The Monasterium Poortackere in Ghent, Belgium. Photo by Chris Warde-Jones for The New York Times