Hotels are expensive and often as a guest, you’re left feeling disappointed by a proprietors lack of being able to justify the exorbitant rates that are being charged. Or, at least this has been my experience.

Whilst there are awesome metasearch sites available to reduce your expenses like Booking.com offering up to the minute alerts on price drops and discounted rates,  when booking accomodation on sites and apps like HotWire you’re often like rolling the dice on whether or not the place will be a complete dive or an elegant experience.

My family and friends welcomed in the 2017 New Year together in a holiday home in Parua Bay, located in New Zealand’s gorgeous Northland.

My brother in law rented the home using the Airbnb app.

Affectionately named Rammed Earth by the owners, the house had recently been vacated by its previous tenants, and the owner decided to try his luck renting out the property as a holiday home.

It had recently been furnished with some pretty funky KMart appliances, but save for a fairly well stocked kitchen and beds and pillows without linens, there wasn’t much else going on.

Because we’d travelled to Northland for the specific purpose of sun, surf, sand, beers and laughter, the lack of a television or wifi wasn’t too much of a cause for concern for the majority of our group (shout out to my BFF Dave who was losing his damn mind because his mobile carrier has pretty lacklustre service in lower density areas).

Based on our NYE experience and after doing some research (read ‘googling’) on the most effective way to travel abroad, I figured that I would sign up for my own Airbnb account and do some sleuthing and cost/benefit analysis on whether staying in Motel 6’s or Holiday Inns was going to more financially viable…being on the road in a foreign country where your own local currency buys theirs at $0.70 to the dollar is an expensive exercise anyway!

Airbnb is an online marketplace and hospitality service, enabling people to list or rent short-term lodging including vacation rentals, apartment rentals, homestays, hostel beds, or hotel rooms.

Airbnb is a community built on a lot of trust; essentially as a guest you’re trusting that your host isn’t going to falsify their ads like some hoteliers are wont to do, leading you to rent a roach infested hovel. As a host, you’re entrusting a complete stranger with unadulterated access to your home with the hope that they don’t screw you by throwing a kegger and trashing the place.

When you apply to rent an Airbnb home, you are invited to tell the host a little about yourself, your accompanying guests if any and the reason you are travelling and wanting to rent their space. I figured because my husband Christian and I are working professionals travelling with our son, it would play in our favour. And in some ways, I think it did.

Our first attempt to book a home was in Waikiki. There are plenty of serviced apartments for you to choose from, however the majority of these places don’t have functional kitchens or are similarly priced or more expensive to the many of the resorts near Ala Moana Boulevard. I guess this is because the hosts roll their daily resort fee into the overall daily price of the rental.

A resort fee, also called a facility fee, a destination fee, an amenity fee, or a resort charge, is a separate mandatory fee that a guest must pay to receive the key to their room rental. The fee is charged in addition to the room rate. As far as I was able to tell, most of the resorts in Waikiki charge this amenity fee. In other US states, some Airbnbs have an occupancy tax that you will need to pay on top of your daily rental fee, however in some instances hosts offer 5-20% discounts on long term stays which sort of counters this charge.

There were very few Airbnb options in the area we wanted to stay while in Hawaii, so I ended up booking a twin room at the Aqua Palms Resort for the paltry sum of $139 USD per night. On top of this, we will be charged around about an additional $18USD per day, based on an average of 9.25%-13.25% of our overall room charges.

The Aqua Palms‘ hotel resort fee includes:

• Beach access
• Beach loungers
• Beach towels
• Fitness center access
• Shuttle service
• Internet access
• Newspaper
• Phone calls
• In-room safe
• In-room coffee
• Laundry service
• Outdoor pool
• Microwave

Regardless of what I kind of think is an egregious for a hotel to charge, as service is what you’re paying in most cases over $100 USD for, I still feel like we got a great deal on our room.

Both Los Angeles & New York also charge additional fees for tourists under the guise of ‘accomodation tax’. Whilst I think this is a great way for the cities to collect additional monies from visitors and capitalise on their statuses as ‘Must See Places Before You Die’, I do kind of think it could be also be a deterrent for some working to a budget and…well, it’s a bit mean.

Guests who occupy a hotel, motel, bed-and-breakfast, boarding house, or transient club, apartment or room pay the Hotel Room Occupancy Tax to the hotel operators or remarketers (when a room has been purchased from an intermediary like Airbnb). The hotel operators turn this money over to the City. The tax  varies, and is based on the cost of the room.

A private house in which a room is rented is not considered a hotel, therefore may not be liable to pay these taxes to the city. Unfortunately I cannot confirm this, as we elected to only stay in homes where we would be the sole occupants.

Our first stop after Hawaii will be in LA and as my absolute favourite band in the whole world Concrete Blonde gained infamy and was formed in West Hollywood, I really wanted to stay here. Celebrity hair stylist Guy Tang also has a studio in West Hollywood, and I have on good authority that it’s Drag Queen City, so I feel like it will be a home away from home of sorts for me.

Our Hollywood Airbnb is pretty basic, a 2 bedroom apartment located 2 blocks from the WeHo Gateway Mall, 15mins from the Walk of Fame, Chinese & Dolby Theatres and most importantly to this self professed Fat Kid, around the corner from the world famous In-N-Out Burger.

I had decided up front that there were several amenities that our Airbnb selections would need to have; firstly and of the utmost importance, we all needed somewhere to sleep. You would think that by specifying that you have 3 guests, at least 2 beds would be necessary, but some hosts will advertise their homes stating ‘sleeps 4′, when the reality is that they have a fold out couch, an arm chair, a bean bag and a blow up bed. If anything, this is a con to Airbnb and definitely something to watch out for.

Secondly, it was pretty important that we have access to a washer and dryer, or at they very least a laundry service of some kind. The appartment building we are staying in in WeHo has coin operated machines in the basement which we can access, which means I can ensure I’m not dragging around a suitcase of rank clothes, stinking to high heaven with my sons’ prepubescent stench! Check.

Thirdly, the location of the apartment needed to be easily accessible from LAX and be close to public transport, a general market and city sights. This Airbnb fit all criteria.

Lastly, we wanted to make sure we were able to communicate, FaceTime, call or Skype our families while we were away. High speed Wifi access was a definite requirement, so that all of our devices could comfortably be connected. Check.

The end cost was fairly reasonable for a five day stint in Hollywood, and when compared to the cost of staying in any half way decent Hollywood hotel, was pretty cheap:

Airbnb does charge a service fee (as listed above) per reservation, but even when taking this fee into account, booking via the Airbnb app is still at least 35% cheaper than the hotels that I compared against. For example, in New York to stay in a half way decent boutique hotel with a shared bathroom, I was looking at budgeting $2,500-$3,000 NZD for an 8 day stay in Lower Manhattan.

We were lucky enough to find a Yoga Studio in Williamsburg on Airbnb, with a pretty cheap price tag of $1,524 NZD. When compared with the prices being charged by some of the hotels on Booking.com that looked as if they hadn’t been refurbished since Nancy Spungen was murdered (insert NY reference), this is a really great deal.

The amenities included in the studio are the same as those listed in the WeHo apartment, but this studio also has a huge roof deck overlooking Williamsburg in Brooklyn, a mini mall downstairs that includes a coffee shop, art gallery, clothing store as well as being right across the street from two of the biggest vintage clothing stores in Brooklyn.

The studio is located quite centrally, 2 blocks from the L train which will get us into Central Williamsburg in under five minutes. Lower Manhattan is 15 minutes away by train.

Some Airbnb hosts offer immediate booking options, which removes the uncertainty of reservations. I booked all of our stays using these types of listings and all were accepted without too much drama.

I did initially have some issues with a booking in LA, where the app flipped out on me and booked a stay during the same time we were scheduled to be in New Orleans. When trying to make multiple bookings based on wish lists, be vigilant that you are indeed booking the right dates!

I got lucky in this instance because Airbnb could see that the in-app conversations between the host and myself intimated that she would adjust my booking to suit the dates we were in LA. Unfortunately she didn’t uphold her end of our verbal agreement which resulted in someone else booking that period, potentially leaving me with a cancellation fee of $400 NZD (she had a very strict policy).

Once I contacted Airbnb to explain the situation, the customer service rep that I spoke to agreed that it would be unreasonable for the host to recoup a fee of that magnitude based on our initial agreement, and escalated my dispute to management who were kind enough to refund 100% of my $1,000+ NZD booking fees. Phew is all I can say.

Cancellation policies vary from host to host, and it’s at the hosts discretion as to whether they have a relaxed or strict policy. In this instance I got very lucky that the host had agreed to adjust the booking in-app, as all communication between us could be seen by the reps themselves.

Do not agree to exchange funds outside of Airbnb.

I’ve read nightmare stories of travellers being duped out of tonnes of cash because they attempted to circumvent Airbnb and transact privately to avoid paying the aforementioned taxes and platform fees. The risk outweighs the benefit here, because you’re relying on the honesty of a complete stranger, potentially on the other side of the world. Whilst I don’t believe that people are inherently bad and would go out of their way to scam another person, when dealing with sums of money this large, there needs to be an element of recourse that you can take in the event things go south.

And for me, that element is definitely Airbnb…oh, and travel insurance!

Charli x