A Room to Call Your Own in Europe

These days it seems everybody's renting rooms and hanging out B&B shingles in the Irish town of Galway. (Photo by Reid Bramblett)

That time in Prague when I bunked in a Czech student's spare bedroom, he spent all evening detailing, in broken English, exactly what was wrong with modern capitalism while the two of us slowly drained his fridge of beer.

But the cultural adventure of feeling like you've been adopted by a European family for a few days isn't the only reason to rent a room in a private home. It also costs about half what you would pay at the impersonal hotel down the street.

The Rental Room Hunt
The three most effective ways to find a private room in Europe are:

	You don't need to know that "sobe" is Croatian for "room" because signs like this one in Split are usually in a variety of tongues. (Photo by Reid Bramblett)

• The Web. Some, but not all, national tourist board Web sites list rental rooms. Each also provides links to local and city tourism Web sites, which tend to be far more useful. Rarely, however, are these lists more than a string of addresses and phone numbers—Web links if you're very lucky. There are also plenty of private booking and B&B agencies, though their fees add 10% to 30% to your bill. You can find links to national and local tourism offices and private agencies at www.beyondhotels.net.
• Touts. These annoying guys descend on bag-laden tourists at train stations and ferry docks hawking their "Verry boo-tee-ful room! Very central! You come see, yes?" I find touts in cities to be a crapshoot at best, scams at worst, and I avoid them unless I'm truly desperate. On Mediterranean islands, though, the ferry dock touts are generally honest, and their rooms are as good as you'd find on your own. Ask to see photographs first, and get them to write the price down on a piece of paper—proof against sudden "inflation" at check-out time.
• Shoe leather. The old-fashioned way often works best: Start pounding the cobblestones, looking for polyglot signs in the windows that read "Chambres, Zimmer, Rooms." Like cheap hotels, rental rooms tend to congregate near the train stations. Even better, grab the printed list of private rooms and B&Bs from the local tourist office and use it as a guide. In small towns especially, head for the busiest pub or café and simply ask if they know of any rooms; that's how I found my view of the Italian Riviera coastline in the Cinque Terre village of Vernazza for $30. If the barkeep doesn't know, ask to borrow the yellow pages and look under the local term for "rental room," a trick that once landed me a frescoed apartment in the Apulian town of Trani for $40.

Becoming Part of the Family

The touts who meet incoming ferries are a world-wide phenomenon; these guys are drumming up business for inns on the Southern Thai isle of Koh Lanta. (Photo by Reid Bramblett)

There's no guarantee you'll be staying in that prototypical B&B: a huge Victorian mansion full of chintz and doilies. These days, just as many rental rooms are in modern city apartments or isolated farmhouses, but a friendly, homey atmosphere tends to prevail.

Sometimes they'll ask, "Why don't you join us for dinner?" Other times, they'll just hand you the keys and ask you to try to be home by midnight. Still, in most cases you'll have more interaction with the owner and her family than with the desk clerk at a hotel.

During a visit to Sicily's Egadi Islands, where the tuna industry is such an integral and ancient part of the culture that there are 10,000-year-old cave paintings of men hunting tuna, I rented a room from the widow of the man who had once managed the processing plant.

My hostess regaled me with surprisingly interesting tuna-related facts that turned out to be relevant to the current state of affairs on the island, the ecology of the surrounding seas, and the future of Italy's economy.

I also got a lesson in practical Italian economics: I was instructed to tell anyone I met that I was a friend of hers, just visiting, not a guest. Guests, you see, pay money while friends stay for free—at least as far as the tax man knows.

I stayed two nights with my new friend. I never paid a bill, but to thank her for her "hospitality," I gave her a gift—which happened to be the local equivalent of about $25.

Reid Bramblett is the founder of ReidsGuides.com

Copyright © 2006 by Reid Bramblett

This article was originally published in February of 2006. All information was accurate at the time.