Booking Hotels in Private Homes

Of course, I have been crashing on friends' couches (and overstaying my welcome) for most of my adulthood. So when I heard that there was a formalized way to achieve this, I thought our travels to The Hague would be the perfect time to try out some of these new ways to lodge and to connect with people. We used AirBnB.com, found a great place, paid half as much as we would have with an equivalent hotel. Best of all, we got to meet a great Dutchman.

The frugal traveler had talked about using couchsurfer, but that did not seem like an option for Maggie and I, unless the couch was a sleeper or sectional (she takes an awful amount of space for being so small!). Instead, we found a place through airbnb.com. Besides being half the price of a three star hotel (priced in dollars to boot), the arrangement included a delicious dutch breakfast (cheese, muselix, yogurt, etc.)  every morning.The guest room was in a beautiful old house with a "garret" on the third floor (American 4th floor). The room had a nice view of the tip-top of the Peace Palace (http://goo.gl/Wz0m) and was near the downtown area where we were looking for an apartment. Our host even provided the use of his house phone for making calls to real-estate agents. Given we did not want to use our mobiles (calls on European mobiles pay on outbound but not inbound), that was a huge money saver as well. The owner even provided some insights into the forming of the Dutch government, advice on bike-buying, and permitted the use of his well-equipped kitchen.

The downside of this place was that, while we had a private bath, the toilette (separate from most *bath*  rooms in Holland) was on the floor below. Going up and down a steep, Dutch staircases in the middle of the night is a perilous trek. The other problem is that while our host was great, we did not exactly feel as if we had the privacy/anonymity you would have in a hotel. Purely in our heads of course.

I would definitely try it again and would even consider placing a spare room of mine on there as a way to open my own home and make a little extra bread. Friends can breathe a sigh of relief that I will be taking advantage of their hospitality a little less often.