In late October, 17,000 data geeks (myself included) descended upon New Orleans for an annual tech conference of outlandish proportions. The city’s three-story, mile-long conference center was a sea of eager learners adorned with blue lanyards moving in slow currents that formed eddies around each conference room door. In anticipation of the sheer number of attendees, I had scrambled onto the Airbnb site four months earlier with uncharacteristically lenient search parameters. I just needed to

Whenever we’re searching for an Airbnb in a city and coming up short, one of our favorite strategies is to zoom out just a touch. Airbnb gems tend to cluster within an hour of our initial parameters. This is how we found the fabulous carriage house on the Sunshine Coast across the bay from Vancouver. It’s how we stumbled upon this serene farm an hour outside of Nashville. And it’s how we discovered the incredible

This is the second time we’ve made our way to a farmstay in the dark. And unlike most Airbnb arrivals, farms are usually tucked far away from street lamps, which meant that as we approached the Cottage at Oak & Hare Farms in Cannon County, Tennessee, our headlights were slicing through pitch black forest as we bumbled down a shoulderless road the same width as our car. In the name of full disclosure, these are

Perched between the idyllic towns of Bethlehem and Littleton, we discovered Cherry Valley Farm in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. In our starkest Airbnb transition to date, we departed from Brooklyn on a Saturday morning after a month of New York City overdrive and arrived that afternoon to the soft serenity of this mountain farm. We couldn’t get enough of it: the crisp air, the remarkable view, the slow summer sunsets, the singsong bird calls with

Nestled in a quiet corner of Cape Cod, the Summer Pines Cottage epitomizes the relaxing Airbnb getaway we perpetually seek. With views of a serene pond and the beach just a mile away, our week-long trip to this famous destination exceeded all the expectations we had built up in our heads. Situated in West Dennis, the Summer Pines Cottage boasts an ideal mid-Cape location perfect for exploring the area: endless beaches, incredible restaurants, and neighborhoods

The Beckmann was an Airbnb that took us by surprise. Our booking strategy usually zeros in on places with bunch of reviews and, broadly speaking, we’ve seen a positive correlation between the overall cost and the quality of the experience. So here was an Airbnb with only a handful of reviews that clocked in at the lowest nightly rate of the four Airbnbs we’d booked for our month-long stay in St. Louis. We were trying