- I spent a year traveling the world as Business Insider'sinternational correspondent.
- In that time, I stayed in nearly 100 hotels and Airbnbs that ran the range from ultra-budget to mid-tier to luxury.
- Some of the most important things I've learned include checking the electric kettle when you enter a hotel room, always asking for late check-out, and cross-checking prices between Booking.com and Airbnb.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Over the last year, I've spent 300 days or more on the road. That's a lot of nights in hotels, Airbnbs, guesthouses, and everything in between.
Still, every time I walk into a hotel room or an Airbnb in a strange city, I get excited. I love the feeling of trying to turn a strange city into home, even for a few days.
That being said, I've definitely made a couple mistakes along the way. In February, I assumed a luxury hotel I was staying in had a noon checkout, like nearly every other hotel I've stayed at in the world. I was wrong. In Tanzania, the standard checkout is 10 a.m.
Here are the hotel and Airbnb lessons I've learned and the tips I've picked up after a year of traveling around the world.
SEE ALSO: 15 things I learned about air travel after traveling the world for a year
1. It's not just you: The community and the listings on Airbnb are changing, for better or worse.
I've been an avid Airbnb user for nearly a decade, relying on the platform as I've traveled across 30 or more countries.
When I first began using Airbnb in 2011 — about three years after the company launched — most of the listings on the site were someone's actual apartment. Either you were renting the spare bedroom in the apartment or your host was temporarily staying somewhere else.
It was a communal vibe where you felt like a real exchange was taking place: You were helping them offset their rent, and they told you their favorite restaurants and bars in the neighborhood.
But somewhere over the last few years, the dynamic shifted. Now, in my experience, you are almost always renting from a host who manages Airbnb listings for a living or as a lucrative side-hustle.
From my perspective, the shift has meant that apartment listings are equipped with the basics, more so than with the comforts of someone's primary home. My chief complaint is that I've been encountering more places with cheap, low-quality pillows, beds, and furniture. Unless that trend turns around, I, for one, will be using Airbnb less in the future.
2. If you want to know how clean a hotel room is, check the electric kettle.
I am constantly staying in hotels that run the range from ultra-budget to mid-tier to luxury. Depending on the country and the hotel company, those categories could mean very different things in terms of amenities, quality, and cleanliness.
Every time I enter a hotel room or an Airbnb, I check the electric kettle or coffee maker— a standard item in nearly every hotel room — to see how clean it is. Poorly maintained or sloppily cleaned hotels will often have dirty, rusted, or outright moldy electric kettles.
3. When booking hotels, guesthouses, or apartments, check prices across Airbnb, Booking, and Expedia. They usually have the same listings at different prices.
Home-rental service Airbnb is now directly competing with travel booking sites like Booking.com and Expedia, as all of the sites have both traditional hotel listings and non-traditional apartment and home listings on their platforms.
What I've observed is that more and more rental listings can be found on multiple sites, often with wildly varied pricing due to different fee structures and pricing algorithms.
Read more: Airbnb is in a war with Booking.com, and taking advantage of that fact can save you a ton of money
Save yourself some money on your next vacation by cross-referencing listings across multiple sites. I often found discrepancies of $100 or more per night by checking listings between Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, and others.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider