One of my favorite ways to holiday is to rent a house or an apartment – it’s a great way of really getting under the skin of the place we’re visiting, and we usually find that you can rent a luxurious self-catering place for a lot cheaper than you can stay in a luxury hotel. Plus, you get the benefit of having a lot more space than you could usually hope for in a hotel (unless you’re flush enough to splurge on the penthouse suite, of course). This is a great option for honeymoons, whether you’re staying in just one place or traveling around a lot, visiting a city or heading into the depths of the countryside. On our honeymoon, we finished our trip by renting an apartment in Cape Town – after three weeks of traveling around the country, it was blissful to have our own space, and to not feel any pressure to get out before a certain time. And just because you’re self-catering doesn’t mean that you have to cook – you can still eat out every night if you fancy, but it’s good to have the option of staying in (or ordering a takeaway) if you want, especially if you’re on an extended honeymoon, or want to save a bit of money.
I’ve used a number of sites in the past to book these self-catering stays, but lately, the only place we’ve been using is Airbnb. Since joining in 2010, we’ve stayed in an old tenement apartment on New York City’s Lower East Side (sadly no longer available), and three different flats in Montmartre, Paris, of which our absolute favorite was this gorgeous flat (see picture below).
Airbnb‘s properties fall into three categories – shared rooms, private rooms, and entire home/flat – obviously, of the three, it’s the latter that’s most suitable for honeymooners, allowing you to have optimum privacy on your trip. The great thing is that you have to have a profile to use Airbnb, so you are able to check out a few details about the person you’re hiring from, and people who have stayed in their home already are the only people allowed (or rather, invited) to give review, so you can be sure that they’ll be an accurate reflection of what it’s actually like to stay there. As a rule, we only stay places that have already been reviewed, largely because it always feels a bit more secure that way, but Airbnb do provide emergency numbers should your booking not work out, and purposefully withhold paying the person you’re renting from until you’ve been there for 24 hours, to ensure that everything is okay on both sides.
Here’s a few of my favorite properties for honeymooners:
Loft apartment, Hackney, from £120 a night
House on Lake Annecy, France, from £84 a night
Clifftop house, Santorini, Greece, from £113 a night
All images © Airbnb
