Behind-the-Scenes: AirBnb

Posted by Leo June 07, 2019

Behind-the-Scenes: AirBnb

I must admit, I’ve done a lot less writing on this trip than I expected. For one thing, my co-pilot is such a prolific and beautiful writer that I often feel like she can cover our family experience in more thorough and nuanced ways. So I’ve decided to take a few logistical posts about how we've put together this trip, that in no way compete.

So here’s my first pronouncement: I can’t imagine doing this trip as a family of five without AirBnb.

First off, we need five sleeping spots. Over the past eight months, when we haven’t been camping or flying, we’ve slept in every combination of beds you can imagine: single bunk beds for all, two king beds for five, three twins plus a queen, even two doubles for all five of us (not ideal). AirBnb allows us to filter available properties by the number of people we need to have beds for. Most hotel rooms don’t allow for five in a single room, so Booking.com and other hotel apps become pretty discouraging, unless you put in four people and hope for an extra cot as an option.

Number of sleeping slots aside, a big part of why we travel is to live like locals.

AirBnb not only connects us with a local host who can provide tips on where to eat and what to see, but most of the properties reflect the local character of the place. And most of they time they are in residential neighborhoods instead of urban downtowns or strip malls. A big part of the fun is looking for the hole-in-the-wall eateries nearby, discovering our dumpling house or gelateria. Sure, some of the places can be as sterile as any room in a major hotel chain, but most offer something more.

Like the balcony we had in Rome.

Or the swimming pool at our AirBnb in Sri Lanka.

Which also came with a private chef!

Fruit animals that Chef Chaminda taught us to make.

Which leads me to my next topic for this post about Why I Love AirBnb: kitchens.

Having the ability to make food for oneself when traveling for an extended period is empowering. We simply don’t want to eat three meals a day at hotels or restaurants. It’s also super helpful to our travel budget, even if we only eat breakfast for the day. Kitchens also allow us to retreat with our bounty from the farmer’s markets and discover which cherries, cheese or zucchinis are the best.

Vios dancing because he loves this baguette so much
(It also may have something to do with the pain au chocolat he previously finished off)

And often there’s a BBQ grill which is heaven to use while traveling.

And family board games are always enjoyed. And washing machines are a savior. And bikes. Bike are the best.

We loved having bikes in Hoi An to ride to the ancient town.

And dogs, especially for canine-obsessed Luna.

Luna with Milly on the North Island of New Zealand

This place outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico had mini-donkeys, alpacas and a horse!

What’s not great about AirBnb – for many places (I would almost say most), you cannot cancel the reservation once 48 hours have passed since booking without losing some of all of your money. Sometimes you are able to shift dates, but it certainly doesn’t offer the same flexibility as booking hotel rooms with free cancellation up to 24/48 hours before.

So we would book AirBnbs about two or three weeks ahead once we had an idea of when we would be arriving. We learned that often when booking AirBnbs less than a month out, the better places were already gone. But we were always able to find something in the neighborhood we wanted to be in and the trade-off is worth it for us. We save ourselves the agony of seeing all the cool AirBnb properties we’ve missed by just searching the properties that are available for our specific dates which is easy to do on the mobile app.

Speaking of the mobile app, we found it easier to browse the properties online when looking and mostly used the mobile app to communicate with hosts about arrival and checkout.

So there you have it. Ten months on the road as a family of five mostly using AirBnb. Here are a few of our favorite AirBnb stops from this trip.