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Finding Lodging for Long Term Family Travel

Finding lodging and places to stay are some of my favorite parts of planning family travel.  I love searching through sites and dreaming about where we are going to stay.

Determine your travel style and budget

We generally travel month to month.  The reason is simple – it’s cheaper.  I may be able to get a month rental in some places for the same price as a week.  If I had more than 90 days in the Schengen, and a little more time, I’d probably month to month myself all over the place.

We also will sprinkle shorter stays with more expensive places in between the longer ones.  That way we can enjoy more places and still save with our longer stays.

Where to start

When I do my lodging research, I usually go in this order AirBnb, VRBO/HomeAway, Booking.com, then HomeToGo.  AirBnb is an easy place to start and usually I can find some really good places. I’ll like to play around with the days a little to see if staying longer saves me money (28 days is usually the cut off). If staying a month is not significantly cheaper, and it’s a place I really want to see, I’ll plan a short stay.  I have found wonderful places on all of these sites.

The problem with AirBnb and VRBO is that their fees can be really steep.  If the house has a good track record with really good consistent reviews then consider contacting the owners directly instead of booking through the site.  You will not have as much protection if something goes wrong but if it looks like a low risk property you may save a decent amount of money.  Because of the steep fees many travelers are going more towards Booking.com for long term stays.

The other problem I have with AirBnb is their long term rental cancellation policy.  It states that if you cancel you loose the first month’s rent (which means if you are just staying one month you loose your entire rent for cancellations). If you are booking far out you may want to ask the owner if you can come up with a different solution.  I find that lately most of our shorter stays are AirBnb and if we stay over a month we are more likely to VRBO with Booking.com for weekend hotel stays.

How to Narrow Down Your Choices

Once you have found a few places that are contenders – how to you separate the good from the OK?  and isn’t it kind of scary to fly half way around the world to stay at some random person’s place you just saw online?  – well, yes but … so far it’s worked for us.  We have not had any problems – yet.

I highly recommend actually reading the reviews.  Generally you can tell if a reviewer is a total butt or if there is a problem with the unit.  I like to go for units that have a decent amount of reviews (at least 10 usually) unless I’m in a more familiar area then I’m more comfortable with less.  I’d be OK with 2-3 reviews in my home town but in Marrakech I want at least 20 reviews.  If you are more nervous about what you’re booking then book through the site and pay the fee. It should give you a little more protection if something goes wrong.

How not to Get Scammed

Also make sure the payment method seems legit.  Never wire transfer.  I was looking at a great place in Costa Rica with a long term good tract record and good reviews but they asked for wiretransfer or paypal friends and family.  It may have been a wonderful legit place but it was not worth the risk.  We also always contact the owner ahead of time.  If your communications are giving you red flags then choose somewhere else.

Lately we’ve been using more Booking.com.  They do have some long term rentals but we use them more for our short stays.  I was using Kayak or Trivago to start my searches but Booking.com seemed to almost always be the cheapest so I just started going straight through them.  We have had good experiences but you must read the fine print carefully.   You can select plans that allow cancellations and you generally will pay at the hotel.  This can be good and bad.  We stayed at a lovely place in Jaco Beach for 1 night.  We were running low in cash at the time and our monthly rental was no where near an ATM.  The hotel wanted cash only for payment which left us with no extra money.  It was the weekend and none of the ATM’s in the city were working for us.  We always put our hotels on our cards so we were not prepared.  Booking.com did not list the payment as cash only. It just stated pay at the hotel.  So if you are booking something that is not chain related then have cash backup if possible.

Agoda.com is similar to Booking.com but I think you can pay ahead.  It’s recommended more for travel in Asia.  If you are going to Asia you may want to start there or at least add them to your list of places to check.

The last thing I do (especially if staying at a hotel) is to google the name of the hotel by itself.  You may get a better price booking direct and you can get reviews from other site.  I generally will book directly when using places like Marriott.

Checking for Internet

Always double check for internet information (if you need it).  To me if a review mentions the internet is bad and there is not a correcting response from the owner (like we just upgraded, or there was a problem now it’s fixed) then it’s not an unit we can rent.   We always email the owner and ask specifically about the internet.  Non- working internet is probably one of the biggest stressors we have.   Being worried about rather or not my husband can make phone calls and log in to work can turn an otherwise wonderful place in to just not fun. Never accept – “you can always go to the bar down the street.”  We have done this in emergencies but hanging out for hours on end in the local bar to work is just not as much fun as it sounds – and it interferes with the only one drink allowed during working hours limit in R’s employee handbook.

Nearby Activities

The other things I look at are parking, nearby kids activities, and the washer and dryer situation.   You don’t want to be stuck paying for a rental car and parking if you are in a downtown location.  Either forgo the car or choose a different place.  The more things for kids to do in the area, the happier everyone will be.  I look for playgrounds and pools.  If there is a nearby recreation center or park – great.  I don’t care how nice the place is, if the kids are stuck inside all day long – no one is going to be happy.  With a family of 5 going to the laundry mat to wash clothes is not an option.  It’s expensive and very time consuming.

Cancellation Policies

So you found your places.  I generally don’t like to prepay for my entire lodging several months ahead of time.  So I will usually pick my top 3 choices and then keep an eye on them.  I’ll book one if I start to see the others getting booked.  I pay attention to down payments and deposits.    I do not like AirBnB’s long term rental cancellation policy so I don’t like to book too far out with them.  I will also pick some units over others based just on the down payment.  If the down payment is a couple of hundred dollars then I can afford to book early.  If they want the entire month at booking, sometimes I go for it but generally I try to wait closer to travel time.  If you think about it, paying months ahead of time is like prepaying your mortgage and that’s just not something most people can do.

Lodging is probably the trickiest to narrow down but I also think as the most fun, the other steps are easier (usually :-))

We’re a family of 5 taking a gap year from normal life to travel.  For blog posts, locations, and more information on how we did it and how you can to click here.  

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