Lodgings, Part 2

So cheap hotels were out, along with hostels and the convents were either way too expensive or so far out of town that I might as well stay home.

I’d heard about a company called airbandb.com that allows people to rent out everything ranging from couch space to complete apartments and started shopping their listings, but started running into the inexpensive = sketchy and/or remote vs. clean and neat and good location = crazy expensive. Even worse were the sketchy or remote places that were still expensive.

My hopes were beginning to fade. Then a web search pointed me at rentalsinrome.com. Better. More of a selection and all independent rentals, not shared spaces. Some of them appeared to have reasonable rates per night and then there was a little note about discounts for longer stays. Note, if you’ve never been to Italy, the “fixed price” is often the exception rather than the rule outside of big stores or chains. The ‘sconto or discount, is a big deal. Sometimes it doesn’t come in the form of actual cash but in some other little lagniappe. One lady describes her favorite “verdure” vendor as not haggling, but that her bag always contains the garlic and celery and carrot and herbs and other items needed to compliment the rest of her purchases. RentalinRome’s site said they offered a 5% discount which would help, along with the low season rates. Traveling solo and using less power and water offered another bargaining point as well.

But when I started looking carefully at RIR’s quoted prices, something was wrong. If you are renting for 10 days, this ‘sconto should then be half of one day’s rental. Wrong. In RiR math, the discount came out to be slightly less than 3%. Try as I might I could not figure out what they were basing the discount on. It wasn't the days over a week or any other combination of days and percent that I could figure.

Then I checked some other sites offering short term rentals in Roma and discovered that while they were pricier, their ‘sconto was a straight 10 percent on rentals of more than a full week. Plus, RiR’s properties required a cash deposit of up to €300 that was returned (or not) at checkout. Not a hold on a credit card, but cash. In Euros. I don’t know about you, but having close to $500 in holiday money tied up in a deposit is no fun. Then there’s the matter of having a whopping sum in foreign currency that has to be spent or changed in a short period between the time you check out and the time your plane leaves, plus the lack of leverage you have in getting the deposit back if there’s a disputa because you HAVE to be at the airport. Well, along with the rather questionable math skill set evidenced by the incorrect discounts, I concluded that RiR was o-u-t.

So I went back to the books and bought a later guidebook to convent and monastery hospitality in Europe a pair of books called "Good Night and God Bless". And bingo, I started seeing a few places that combined reasonable location with reasonable price. One thing about the convent hotels - cleanliness and safety just are not issues. So I started to work on letters of inquiry that I could fax via Internet or email.