Vacation Home Rentals and Traveling with Lara Dunston

Vacation home rentals are a smart way to save money and live comfortably while traveling. The Vacation Gals are huge fans of vacation homes rentals like those of HomeAway, and so is Lara Dunston.  She’s as afflicted by the travel bug as anyone we’ve met, and wrote many Rough Guides and Lonely Planet travel guides. She and her husband (who took these photos) have a partnership with HomeAwayUK, and are blogging about it over at Grantourismo Travels. They’re taking the time to travel slowly and really experience each vacation destination. Lara described her experiences with vacation home rentals during her Grantourismo year of slow travel.

1. Tell us about your relationship with HomeAway Holiday-Rentals (AKA HomeAwayUK)
We had this idea for a project – a contemporary grand tour of the world where we’d experience 12 places over 12 months, settling in and learning and doing things, enrolling in language classes and cooking courses and so on, and we’d chronicle the whole thing on our own website. Our mission was to promote slow and sustainable travel, experiential travel, and local travel. It grew out of our frustrations as travel writers, specifically with the tediousness of guidebook research, as well as the brief periods we’d spend in places when working on stories. What we loved about our work was renting a place for a couple of months when we wrote guidebooks, and connecting with locals when we researched magazine/newspaper features. We wanted to combine the best of both those worlds in our Grantourismo project, but couldn’t figure out how the heck we’d fund it.

HomeAway Holiday-Rentals had a similar idea and advertised for writers, and we went to them with Grantourismo, and they loved it! We have a yearlong contract (a rarity in this business), they pay us a monthly fee, they provide our accommodation and flights, plus some expenses, and yet we maintain creative freedom and editorial control. We write one review of the property we’re staying in and the rest of our stories are about the destination we’re in and the experiences we’re having, most of which wouldn’t be possible from a hotel.

2. What are some tips you’d give to travel planners thinking about renting a vacation home?
Use a trusted site such as HomeAway Holiday-Rentals, HomeAway, Owners Direct, VRBO, etc. As we saw when we visited the Austin HQ of HomeAway (the parent company of HomeAway Holiday-Rentals), those companies have huge teams of people who are devoted to investigating fraudulent claims and complaints. That’s not to say that if you book with them every stay is going to be a perfect one, but you probably won’t turn up to an address and knock on a door to discover that it’s not a vacation rental at all but some little old lady’s home, and the person you’ve been emailing has taken off with your $2000 deposit!

I like to think about vacation rental planning in two stages. Firstly, approach the way in which you plan a stay in a vacation rental as you would a hotel. Think about what your budget is, what kind of comforts and facilities you want for your money, the size of the place and how much space it has, and the location. Do you want a property that’s the equivalent of a five-star hotel in terms of amenities, but the location is not central so you’re going to have to drive everywhere? If location more important to you, prepare to possibly sacrifice space to be in the city.

Next, once those decisions are made, think of the place as your ‘home away from home’ – which is a very different way to how you’d think about a hotel. Because you’ve chosen to stay in a vacation rental, I’m guessing you want to settle in for a while. What kinds of things do you value in your home? A big kitchen with a large fridge, a good oven so you can bake, or just a stovetop so you can whip up a quick breakfast? And if you’re planning a family reunion, a girls getaway, or a holiday with friends, do you need a big dining table, spacious entertaining areas, and separate living areas so people can get away and read or nap when they want some privacy, and will you be needing bathrooms for each bedroom?

3. What was one of the best experiences you’ve had with a vacation rental?
We’ve had so many! This year, we’ve stayed in 28 of HomeAway Holiday-Rentals’ vacation rental properties for our Grantourismo project, and before this project, we rented about a dozen properties through various companies, including HomeAway Holiday-Rentals – everything from a penthouse with birds-eye-views over Brussels to a canal house in Amsterdam where we could wave at boats cruising by with locals picnicking on them. But the most memorable properties and the most special experiences have definitely been during our Grantourismo project. In Costa Rica we stayed in two beautiful houses for a week each, one was open (i.e. no walls!) and looked over the jungle and we had monkeys trooping through every day. The other was right on the beach at Manuel Antonio, so my husband Terence could check the surf conditions from the dining room table, walk out the door with his surfboard under his arm, and in a minute he’d be paddling out for a surf!

4. Has anything ever gone wrong or been unexpectedly bad for you during a stay in a vacation home rental?
Absolutely!  At our traditional, conical-shaped trullo in Puglia the internet was lousy in the house so we had to go out into our olive grove to get the best reception (here’s the evidence), but the fact the setting was so bucolic and the place so charmingly rustic – we even had our own pizza oven! – went some way for making up for the lack of internet access, despite the fact we were working. One of our most recent stays at Diani Beach in Kenya was fraught with problems – the promised internet didn’t work, the ceiling fan moved at the speed of a snail and it was sweltering, the mosquito net had a big hole in it (I have the scars to prove it!) – but the gardens were gorgeous, the swimming pool stunning, the staff lovely, and once again, we were lucky to have monkeys visiting us most days.

5. Where do you plan to travel in the near future?
We’re 10 months into our yearlong Grantourismo project now, and we’ve just arrived in Budapest. Next we’re heading to Vienna and Zell am See in Austria for some winter-sports, Krakov in Poland for Christmas, Berlin for New Year’s Eve, Edinburgh in the second half of January, and back to London at the end of the project. We’ve then been invited to speak about Grantourismo and what we’ve done to promote local wines at an International Wine Tourism Conference in Porto, Portugal, where we’ll celebrate our successful year drinking wine for a week! Then we’re going to hole up with our family in Australia for a bit and write a book about Grantourismo. And after that? We have projects we’re developing in the Middle East and Asia, but I’d also like to take a holiday. A real one! Destinations on our wish list are New Zealand (to visit a friend); Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos; Ethiopia; and Korea for the food! There’s so much we haven’t done and visiting new destinations this year has really fueled our desire to keep exploring!

Thank you, Lara. Your enthusiasm for vacation home rentals and slow travel is evident; we look forward to reading about your future exploits.