Choose a good area: What do you value the most?
When searching for a rental home to spend your summer, you should take into consideration where the home is located. Why? Let’s take an example of holiday homes by the beach. There are hundreds of options when it comes to finding a home to rent and they are well distributed along the coastline, but… what interests you above all? Do you go to the beach and spend all your time there? Are you more interested in going to bars? Do you prefer to walk? Or are you going to spend your holidays visiting surrounding towns to discover the area’s culture? The perfect location of your rental home may change based on how you answer these questions.
If you enjoy spending your days at the beach, you should try to get as close to it as possible. If your intention is to go to bars, then you should focus on an area where there is more nightlife. This will ensure your interests are close at hand and your holiday is exactly how you imagined it to be.
The number of rooms matters
This is especially true if you are going on holiday for more than three days. It may be that during a short period of time you can put up with sharing a room with others in your group. Any longer than this and chaos can break out. If you are travelling in a group of over two people, you should consider having more than one bedroom in the property.
Many holiday homes offer a sofa bed as a place to sleep. Although it’s an option to consider, this offers no privacy to the person who has to sleep on it. They will be unable to sleep earlier than the rest of the group, they may be disturbed at night by others going to the bathroom or the kitchen and, in the end, they will end up in a bad mood and ruining your holiday.
To keep everyone happy, it is better that each member of the group has their own private area to rest.
Stick to your budget
There is one simple reason why you can’t go on holiday without having a budget: because you will always overspend. What does this mean? Even with a budget you will spend more than planned, but without it you may go home in debt. That’s why it’s essential that before you start looking for a place to stay, you consider how much money you want to spend. This is important because sometimes the destination we had planned to visit is beyond our budget.
Instead of staying in one of the more crowded beach resorts on the Costa del Sol (where cheap accommodation is booked early), try looking at neighbouring towns that also have access to the beach. Here, as discussed in point one, you should also take into account your motivation for the trip.
If you are planning on a cultural trip to a big city, staying in a nearby town may not be as cheap as it first seems, because what you don’t spend on accommodation you will spend on transportation. Luckily, many accommodation websites have a filter that allows you to stipulate your minimum and maximum budget. Life has never been so easy!
Type of accommodation
On many holiday accommodation search engines you will find shared and private rooms for rent. This tends to be where someone is living in their property and renting one of their rooms for visitors to stay for a period of time. If the room has space for two beds, you could even find yourself sharing the room with a stranger.
Bear in mind that if you want to rent an entire home, you should stipulate it in the search filters. This will avoid unnecessary disappointment when you find an accommodation that has a low price and is in your ideal location but turns out to be just a room.
Available services
A holiday rental home gives you access to a range of free services that you would not have in a hotel. These include: washing machine, dryer, kitchen, iron, appliances, Wi-Fi, coffee maker, swimming pool, barbecue, gym, etc., as well as a free parking space on many occasions.
You should bear in mind that the more services offered by a rental property is often reflected in the price. But if a swimming pool is important for you to cool off because you are going to an inland town in the middle of August, don’t let anyone talk you out of it!
Reservation options
You can choose which booking options you want your accommodation to have, although this is only available on a few holiday rental platforms. Here, you can choose to make an immediate reservation. That is, the host does not have to accept your booking for you to stay in the property.
You can also choose an autonomous arrival, which means that you don’t have to meet the host to get the keys. On many occasions you can retrieve the keys from a password protected postbox outside the property or access the home using a password protected lock.
Finally, you can choose to search for accommodation with free cancellation.
These small details can make your experience of renting a home for the summer very different.
