I am in DC this weekend for work, the weather is horrendous (its rained/snowed 100% of the time I have been here). To top that off my friend who I was planning on staying with randomly canceled (no reason given) and said we could not stay with him…. this obviously sent us into scramble mode to try and find food/shelter/clothing (wait we had clothes but it felt like we were at the very bottom of the pyramid)
We ended up finding a hotel to stay at for the first night, but we didn’t feel like paying 250/night and being forced to go out to dinner for each meal so we tried AirB&B (my older sister loves it and has been trying to get me to use it for a while). First impression its super sketchy. Second impression, I love it.
We found a great place (I’m writing this blog post from Emily’s, a very small but nice apartment with a great stove, great counter tops and a great set of knives). The process of finding a place is pretty easy, my buddy Brian and I were marooned at a local pizza place drying our clothes, charging our phones and trying to find shelter for the night when we started our search. Once we downloaded the app, we started rifling through profiles. There was an abnormally amount of gay people offering rooms to stay, and also “shared” rooms which we thought sounded terrifying….. or at the very least super sketchy. Then we found a cache of hot girls who were also offering shared rooms. This quickly degraded into us messaging probably 20 good looking chicks asking if they had availability while at the same time not believing life could possibly work like this. These women would surely murder us and take our laptops in our sleep… but they were hot so we figured it would be worth it.
In the end we opted for a more normal arrangement with a private room from a seemingly nice women named Emily. In general I am somewhat surprised that the system works so well. It seems to have a lot of “trust” in the users. In our case it certainly was correct. Brian and I are good people, Emily seems to be normal and is very pleasant. Our space is much nicer/bigger than a normal hotel room and only $98/night. The next time I travel I’m definitely going to look for places on AirB&B before looking for a hotel.