EVERY APARTMENT HAS SOMETHING
Here's How We Choose
We open Airbnb or Booking.com and start scrolling. Sometimes we find something in an afternoon. Other times we're back on the same listings a week later, then two weeks later, pulling up apartments we already looked at, wondering if we missed something or if something better is going to show up.
What we're looking for is specific. A real bed with decent pillows. A good-sized shower. A kitchen we can cook in. A decent sized TV. Natural light. Privacy. A secure building. Locked doors. Heat or AC depending on when we're arriving.
Finding all of it in one place is harder than it sounds. The photos are always slightly better than what you walk into.
We narrow it down to two or three. We look at the photos again. We go back and forth. Then we book one — not because it has everything but because it came closest and the search has gone on long enough.
What matters on a longer stay is different from a short trip. Bed comfort. Noise. Light. Layout. You feel all of it every single day. Décor doesn't matter. Charm doesn't matter. A short trip you can tolerate almost anything. Two or three months and everything compounds.
Within the first hour of arriving we know what we chose. The bed is comfortable or it isn't. The place is as bright as the photos suggested or it isn't. The shower works or it doesn't. The street noise is livable or it isn't. By then we've already committed.
Every place has something. A layout that doesn't quite work. A kitchen missing one thing we use every day. Pillows that are too flat. A mattress that's too soft. A window that faces the wrong direction. The search was never about finding a place without tradeoffs. It was about finding a place where the tradeoffs were ones we could live with for the length of the stay.
We use Airbnb and Booking.com knowing we're paying for simplicity and speed. Could we find something cheaper another way? Probably. But we're paying for a process that's straightforward and platforms we know how to navigate. We book it knowing we won't really know until we get there.
Getting from one apartment to the next is its own story — 78 days, a transatlantic crossing, six Christmas markets, three U.S. cities, and about $19,200 to get from Lyon to Sète.
Scott & Liza
