Home Sweet Home


This is just a FYI to all the travelers out there. I’ve noticed that more and more apartments are being rented out on these hotel booking websites. Especially in the big cities. If you have an apartment and your not going to be home you can rent it out. If you are a traveler and you rent one of these apartments for your trip, here’s what you need to know. The good side is you will stay at a pretty big place compared to a Hotel. It will feel more like a home away from your home. You have to check all the amenities and look at the pictures carefully. If everything you want is on the amenities and pictures than you probably have a great place and will enjoy your stay. On the bad side, many of these apartments require stairs to be climbed. You will need to consider that if you have luggage.They don’t get serviced and there’s no room service. As well little things like keys might not work easily. If you want to stay in an apartment I would recommend using a service like Bridgestreet. They specialize in renting serviced apartments and run them like hotels. If you book with a private owner then you could have issues with cancelling and service. New York City is becoming an apartment rental capital. I’ve stayed at 2 of these apartments that were privately owned. The first one had no TV service and the keys didn’t always work. The owners were not helpful at all. The second I found out the same. There were no TV’s despite showing TV’s in the photos. I also noticed the photos had 3 different rooms and kitchens for the one bedroom apartment. I tried to cancel the reservation 3 months in advanced and they wanted $750 just to cancel. I disputed the charge due to the inaccurate description in the listing and the owner won. She got paid the full amount for the upcoming stay. It got close to the trip and I hadn’t heard anything from the apartment owner so I sent a message asking about the reservation. The owner responded 2 weeks before the trip that she wasn’t going to honor my reservation because I disputed the charge. So she got $1400 for the room and was going to wait till I showed up to say sorry we don’t have a room for you. Be very careful when renting apartments if things go bad they can be real bad.