Options for Booking Long Term Stay as a Guest

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Hi Everyone! Missed you guys! I know it’s been a while. There have been lots of twists and turns in my little world.

I could really use some advice about booking a longer-term stay. The situation is that I am away from home in another city for an emergency and I need to be here for at least an additional 3 months, maybe/even likely longer than that.

I have a place booked for a month until the middle of Oct but it is not available for months after that so I’m hunting a new place. I’ve found the place and it is available from the middle of Oct and ongoing forward (and the host only does monthly stays and guests seem to say for even 6 months, just as an FYI).

I’m trying to figure out how many months to book. For some reason, the long-term cancelation policy, although I could quote it, is really not clear to me how it works in practice.

For instance, I know that when you cancel during the stay you “lose the next 30 days”.

  1. Do you have to leave when you cancel? And not get to stay there for those last 30 days that you are “losing”? (do you literally pay for them but don’t get to stay??)

Or

  1. Is it more like giving 30-day notice for a monthly lease, e.g. you cancel and then you leave 30 days later?

Second question:

  1. Should a book what I honestly suspect I’ll really need and then cancel if I need a little less?

or

  1. Should I book 2-3 months and ask the host to let me know if someone else tries to book it so I can extend at that time (or not) if needed? Is that kosher to ask? I don’t even know.

Thank you in advance.

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Don’t know the answer to your first question, but I always assumed it would be your #2- the host gets 30 days notice paid whether the guest actually leaves or stays.

As for the second question, I don’t see anything “not kosher” about asking the host that, but don’t know how it would practically work from the host end. If the host uses IB, they wouldn’t have any warning of a booking, and if they got a RTB, they would have to decline the booking with a hit to their Acceptance rate. Which they may or may not be open to.

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Ask the host if they have an answer for you. And check Furnished Finder, they specialize in this sort of thing with better guest options, I think.

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I have had a couple of guests in similar situations. We did it in four week blocks. I was willing to block off the next month and they would tell me two weeks beforehand if the wanted it or not. I don’t usually get bookings very far in advance so it was worth it to me to block it off in the hope of getting a 4 week booking. Not sure how many hosts would be willing to do that but it would be worth an ask.

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The host is guaranteed 30 days rent from the time you say you are cutting short the stay, unless there are less than 30ndays left in your current reservation… in which the balance is non-refundable.

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[quote=“JJD, post:1, topic:58743”]
and ask the host to let me know if someone else tries to book
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This doesn’t work if host has Instant Booking.

The fewer changeovers the less work for a host, so host has an incentive to help you extend your stay

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I’ve been renting our places on FF for 4 or 5 years so I checked there first but there was nothing special and most of it came across as kind of shady. The bulk of FF listings are pretty shady and dirty and a pita from what I gather from people who use it a lot it - my tenants have told me some nightmares. All in all, it was really different being on the other side of it. I kind of uncovered a double standard within myself :upside_down_face:

As a landlord, I would never do monthly rentals on Airbnb because I cannot deal with Airbnb that much. And I want to be picky and hand-choose my tenants, I want a full deposit and a lease and I don’t want to share any profit with another company haha.

However, as someone who needs to rent monthly accommodations, I did not want to work any harder than I had to, e.g. I did not want to do (or pay for) a background or credit check (so many people on FF require those). It’s just not worth it because it just isn’t necessary to get a monthly rental anymore.

I also didn’t want to take any more chances than I had to, e.g. I didn’t want to rent something where I couldn’t read a lot of reviews and I was ultimately more than happy to pay that service fee to Airbnb for the feeling of security, e.g. so I had someone to call should things not go as planned. It’s totally worth it.

The one thing I did, though, was when I found an Airbnb listing I liked, I cross-referenced to see if they were on FF. None were so I’m not sure if I would’ve ended up booking there or on Airbnb anyway.

We are currently staying at a place that we booked directly through their hotel-like website that is also on Airbnb (they mention it in their very extensive House Manual which is so extensive that it was obvious that they’re on Airbnb :joy:). It’s only for one week so not a big deal but I do wish we had found it first on Airbnb because I have been writing the review in my head since the first night :rofl:

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Thank you! I appreciate you sharing this. This is the direction I ended up going. I booked through to the first week of next year and then just let the host know that we might likely want to extend. He said that was great and that he’d let me know before he let someone else book it. I also realize that perhaps I might even want a change by then anyway and that I’m in a location where both prices and bookings likely go down in January so it’s probably a good time to get something different anyway.

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