In the last 3 years since we started Spotted by Locals, I’ve been outside my hometown Amsterdam for about 14 months altogether. We (Sanne and myself) meet all our writers (“Spotters”) in Europe in person, so fortunately that requires a lot of traveling!
When we did our first 3 month tour to 20 large Europe cities in 2008, we stayed in hotels in the first cities we visited. Pretty soon, staying in anonymous hotels with other tourists and business people got quite boring. Although we were meeting a lot of locals, and got to know the coolest inside spots in cities, we did not really feel we were optimally experiencing the cities we visited like a local.
Then somebody told us about the possibility of renting apartments from locals. The service we use most often is Homelidays.com – a website that gives you the opportunity to stay in apartments owned by locals. Homelidays is not a pretty and user-friendly website, but they sure have a lot of cool apartments!
We lived in a very tiny 25 m2 apartment in the heart of Paris, with a 25 cm2 “desk” (see picture) and the smallest one-person elevator we’ve ever seen, an apartment in the main shopping street in Bratislava for 5 days, an apartment in with a 200 year old staircase bigger than all the apartments in the building combined, cooked ourselves many Italian meals with food from the market in Milan, and had many more memorable locla “living” experiences.
When we did our 2008 trip, the market for apartment rentals was not as booming as it is now. Websites that started after 2008 like AirBnB and MyFriendsHotel.com seem to be doing very well.
In Lisbon, we recommend the reliable people from TravelingToLisbon.com, and in Berlin (and Amsterdam) we recommend our Be My Guest friends.
When we now visit a city for longer than a few days, we always stay in an apartment. It often gives you the chance to experience a real local neighborhood, meet more locals and feel more like a local by staying in an apartment that is normally used by locals.
What is your experience with staying in locals’ apartments? Please let me know in the comments!
Yeah Bart, I bet you’re right! Staying in a hotel is quite boring even if you met new people. That’s also one of the reason I choose to stay in an apartment. What I can say for individuals who are planning to visit other countries yet they don’t have a home to stay just like in New York City, I can say that they could look for apartments for sales and rentals which surely would cater their needs at an affordable price.
Posted by Penthouse Apartment | June 10, 2012, 3:41 pm