Gadling

As our good friend Martha pointed out last month, renting an apartment while abroad is a great way to defer egregious hotel prices, experience some culture and cultivate a little bit of adventure in a normally mundane itinerary.

A great idea on paper, but many people are still hesitant to do the research and book an apartment. In my numerous conversations with people attempting to sell the idea to them, I think it distills down to comfort. Not relative comfort of the hotel, mind you, comfort in the booking and security of a hotel room. It's easy for one to amble up to hilton.com, plug in your destination and know that you'll have a minbus and driver waiting for you once you exit the arrivals gate at BCN.


Yes, I'm afraid you're going to have to work a little harder to find, book, locate and get to an apartment at your destination. But you have to concede that the benefits of this work create a more genuine, less expensive result. And while you do assume some risk in working with a private party, common sense and careful planning should guarantee you never have any problems. I've booked apartments in Morocco, Spain, Puerto Rico, China, Russia and the Czech Republic all in the last two years -- never, not once have I had a problem.

To get you kickstarted, here are my three favorite sites for apartment hunting:

vrbo.com
Vacation Rental by Owner is a library of vacation rentals across the globe. While they don't have a wealth of properties in third world countries, I've still been able to book a half dozen units through them. They also have the option to send the same message out to several properties, so if you find several candidate properties you can get business done quickly. The above apartment was booked on VRBO.

craigslist.org
Go to yourfavoritecity.craigslist.org and search under vacation rentals for classified listings of vacation rentals. Good for cities that aren't thoroughly covered by vrbo.com

homeaway.com
Home away is a similar animal to vrbo.com with many of the same links. Some people prefer their soft friendly graphics and niceness though.

Filed under: Hotels and Accommodations