Airbnb’s rise
Jane Bradley laments the loss of adventure as the original idea of sleeping on a host’s floor has given way to slick business
In the old days, before the internet and before organised room letting sites, renting casual budget accommodation was simpler.
You rocked up to a train station somewhere in eastern Europe or south-east Asia and were miraculously met by a random native who may or may not have been named in your Lonely Planet as a “local gem”.
Dominica – or Aran, or Bogdan – then took you back to their apartment and presented you with their spare room, which may or may not have had the right number of beds and which may or may not have had access to hot water. You thanked them profusely and agreed to pay a fiver a night, before dumping your rucksack and disappearing for the rest of the day until it was time for bed. You didn’t want to disturb your host too much, or get in their way. It was their home, after all.
We were all less fussy back then. You took what you were given. You didn’t spend hours perusing photographs on websites, trying to work out if the bathroom in that rental was just a tiny bit more pleasant than the one there or if you liked the colour of the living room sofa just a little more in that one. You didn’t care what colour the bed sheets were – you were just delighted that they were there at all.
Of course, there were disasters – I like to call them adventures – but that was part of the charm.
I’ll never forget the trip when, aged 19 or so, my friends and I returned to the home of our host in Bratislava, Slovakia, to find a strange man fast asleep in our bed (yes, there was just one between all of us, but it was round, which somehow made that acceptable). He turned out to be a lorry-driving friend of the owner who was catching 40 winks before an overnight job – but we only discovered that after raising the alarm with a group of neighbours, who loudly awakened him with a lot of Slovakian shouting and kicked him out of the apartment.
Or then there was the time that a 90-year-old Romanian grandmother was turfed out of her own bed and into the kitchen so that her mattress could be moved to a lean-to at the bottom of the garden where we were staying, despite our protests and insistance that