FlipKey

“Forget hotels,” says AirBed & Breakfast, a company that helps people around the world network to find the next best affordable alternative to hotels (sans vacation rentals): inflatable air mattresses. If you’ve got a mattress, you’re in. Anyone can “post a room” on the company’s webpage, set a desired price for a guest’s night stay in their home (usually somewhere between $85- $100), sit back, inflate the mattress and let the guests roll in. While the rise of hotel prices has directly increased growth in the vacation rental industry, as a culture we are beginning to see a shift from the vacation norm to the vacation extreme, as these ‘alternative lodging’ options are entering the market.

Renting a room/air mattress is a simple concept, cheap alternative to a hotel and creates opportunity to meet and live with diverse people.  But lets be honest, we are a skeptical culture surrounded by legal and safety concerns. What about theft?  Or better yet, personal safety with the host you’re staying with? How can one be guaranteed a good experience when the mantra seems to be, “Just roll with it…”

Staying with a complete stranger no doubt requires a leap of faith on the traveler’s part, but AirBed & Breakfast does allow both hosts and guests to create profiles with photos, links to their own personal WebPages, as well as rates and guest reviews.  For those familiar with the long time successful, “couchsurfing” concept (www.couchsurfing.com), this should all ring a bell.

The “Couch Surfing Project,” launched in January 2003 by Casey Fenton and a number of other founders, after Fenton got a cheap ticket to Iceland for a long weekend with no hotel or hostel destination, and nothing other than his luggage, and well, his ticket.  Fenton ended up meeting students and young adults his age in Iceland and “crashed on their couch,” had the weekend of a lifetime, and thus the concept and later the company was born.

Ultimately, one thing in the current events of travel is clear: rising hotel costs is driving consumers to look for new alternatives, whether they be vacation rentals or air mattresses. Airbeds and used couches in strangers’ homes may not be for everyone, but for the traveler strong of heart, they certainly provide an interesting alternative to hotels.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Community, Food for Thought. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.