5 Tips For Booking A Long Term Stay In A Short Term Rental

My family and I live in short term rentals (mostly Airbnb’s) right now. We sold our home in Nashville and we currently live on the road for 1-2 months per city in rentals around the country.

If you want to see a new place and really get the chance to experience it, there’s nothing like a short-term rental. We have loved it. There are days it’s hard living in someone else’s home (and not having our stuff), but we have come a long way in knowing how to book the best places.

One of the things I get asked often is, how do you pick the places you stay?

Here are my top 5 tips for booking your short-term rentals:

1.     Narrow places down by your wish list – I would recommend putting your ‘wishes’ in priority order. Here are the ones we consider:

a.     Location – We have a wish list of cities that we’d like to travel to, and I start by searching in those cities

b.     Working space – we HAVE to have working space, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a desk. A desk is on our ‘nice to have list’, we now travel with a small table we can use if needed.

c.     In big cities, we like to check for a washer/dryer and dishwasher. They don’t always have them and this weighs into our decision-making process

d.     Pool/gym/amenities – these are nice to have and can sometimes sway a decision.

2.     Make a list of what you need in a rental and use the filters. Otherwise, you’ll be overwhelmed with amazing options that don’t fit your needs/price range! Here are the top ones I use as deal breakers:

a.     Budget

b.     Whether you want the entire place to yourself or you’re open to a shared space

c.     Number of bedrooms you need (the longer the stay, the more strict you need to be about this)

d.     Wifi – if you’re working from home, you will want to read for their wifi information. If it’s not listed, ask!

3.     READ THE REVIEWS

I cannot stress this enough. If you are staying for a long time, you want to rent places that have at least several reviews (and, of course, you want them to be good reviews). We have rented places without reviews but for long-term stays we ONLY do that if the owner has reviews on other places to help us know they’re a great host.

You can also learn a ton about the safety of the area, cleanliness and host response time from reading through the reviews. For our one to two month stays, I read ALL of them.

4.     Create a ‘save’ list in the app and save the places you like as you go. There’s nothing worse than searching for a while and coming back to your planning later but forgetting which places you liked. They all run together!

5.     Be willing to change areas for the sake of a better place to fit your needs. Unless you have to be in an exact neighborhood for work or some other reason, I recommend staying open-minded. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve set out to book a place in a specific spot, only to find a gem nearby that was well worth the flexibility!

Those are my top 5. I’m right in the middle of this process right now as we’re working to book the rest of 2023! I won’t lie to you – it takes some time. But I find the searching to be fun, especially when I have the right filters in place.

Any other questions about how we book our travel?