When I first began to organize (should I say organise? How British am I yet?) my travel plans in Europe, I was already a couple of weeks into my study abroad program. I thought, “How hard could this be?” All I needed was to find a flight and a place to stay; soon I imagined myself zooming around Europe with my friends in tow. And then I remembered a couple of minute details: I’m on a budget of my own money, there are fourteen civil airports in London and a number of other airports in the London area, and the countries that we want to visit for a couple of days may have… sketchy accommodations.
I’m sure we have all heard some story about some friend somewherexz who has shown up to a hostel and almost wet his or her pants from the look of the communal bathroom alone, the lack of sanitary linens, or the amount of noise radiating from surrounding co-ed halls at all hours of the night. As reliable as “Hostel World,” (a website connecting people to thousands of hostels around the planet) may be, my friends decided to take a chance with another website, Airbnb.
Airbnb was founded just five years ago. It displays a large market of apartments, shared rooms, and private rooms, and you can easily book one of these places from your computer or even your mobile phone (there’s an app for that!). The website is easy to navigate and reassuringly states, “Whether an apartment for a night, a castle for a week, or a villa for a month, Airbnb connects people to unique travel experiences, at any price point.” A castle for a week? How could you not be sold?
But with only being available for half a decade, you could imagine that my friends had our reservations. We thought, let’s just try this for Amsterdam. An apartment all to ourselves: how bad could it be?
Well, the booking went smoothly, and we picked an apartment that we saw had many good recommendations. Whether or not these four-star promises were written directly by the apartment’s owner, Roderik, we had no idea. But Roderik was amicable, explaining to us through a couple of emails back and forth that we would have to take a couple forms of transportation to reach his flat.
A tube ride, plane ride, train ride, 6 metro stops, and a 5-minute walk later, we were at this apartment no problem. Unfortunately for us, it was nearly midnight. We were exhausted yet we had to grope around in the moonlight, trying to find this apartment key, which was supposedly placed ostensibly under a flowerpot. Let me tell you, that overturned-flowerless-flowerpot did not want to be found for a good half hour. And, when we finally walked up the stairs after being told that we were on the third floor (wrong!), we almost woke up the whole building trying to find our room (although my friends argued that we had some pretty cute neighbors… maybe help us find a place to sleep and then wake us up in the morning to hang out?).
Five doors later, we opened ours and found a gorgeous flat on the corner of the building with large bay windows, a refrigerator and stovetop perfect for storing and frying our grilled cheeses, a flat screen TV with games and on demand movies, a shower with hot steamy water (let’s pretend it didn’t take an hour for us to figure out how to shut it off and on….) and a lovable couch and fluffed up bed. We sighed with relief and spent a wonderful three days in that apartment, still on great contact with Roderik, the mysterious Will Ferrell look-alike in all of the pictures on the wall.
My point is: don’t shy away from Airbnb. Sure, I have not yet stayed in all of the apartments in the 33,000 locations which Airbnb spans, but as long as you pick a reasonably priced accommodation in an easily accessible location, read the restrictions and guidelines, ensure that there are many reviews to read rather than just a couple, and keep in contact with the owner, you will be in good hands. And yes, I am now zooming around Europe with my friends in tow, loving every minute of being able to come back to a quiet apartment with our own clean linens and stocked fridge.