A Long-Term Airbnb Traveler Shares Her Top Tips for Nomadic Living

• Airbnb is seeing customers ebook longer stays, with 20% of nights booked for a month or extra.
• One long-term traveller advised Insider she has been dwelling on Airbnb for the previous six months.
• Though she’s funding the journey with an inheritance, her month-to-month prices are akin to her former hire.

The choice got here — as life-changing ones are inclined to do — in the course of the night time.

It was January of final yr and Denise Netzley stated she had been considering for a number of weeks about transferring out of her residence in Los Angeles and dwelling for the foreseeable future on Airbnb.

“I awoke,” she advised Insider, “and I used to be identical to, ‘Yeah, I am doing this, 100% I am doing this.'”

The next morning she began eliminating what belongings she might, moved the remainder into storage, and made reservations on Airbnb.

At 59 years previous, Netzley had some financial savings from a profession producing advertisements for Hollywood movies, adopted by a private assistant enterprise that was winding down. She additionally acquired an inheritance following the demise of her father three years in the past, which she stated made the entire plan attainable.

In turning into a full-time Airbnb visitor, Netzley was becoming a member of a rising set of energy customers who’re reserving longer and longer reservations on the platform.

Firm knowledge present that roughly a fifth of nights booked had been for stays longer than a month, CEO Brian Chesky stated in a latest Twitter thread by which he introduced that he too is now “living on Airbnb.“

The primary reservation Netzley made was the one the place she’s presently dwelling — in her father’s birthplace of Kansas Metropolis, Missouri. From there she labored backwards, filling within the months with stays in Mexico and South Africa.

In making the reservations, Netzley found accidentally that some hosts supply reductions starting from 15% to 50% when a reservation passes a sure size.

In Might of final yr, Netzley handed over the keys to her LA residence and departed for a six-week keep in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico.

“The primary few days there I used to be fully overwhelmed, a fish out of water,” she stated. “However after the primary week I bought the lay of the land and I bought comfy sufficient to hire a automotive and begin taking these day journeys to totally different locations, like Tulum.”

Netzley’s recommendation to equally out-of-water fish is straightforward: “Sit on the bar in any restaurant whenever you go, persons are going to be extra inclined to be conversational. The bartender goes to assist make connections. I simply at all times sit on the bar virtually wherever I am going.”

She spent August in a Kansas Metropolis neighborhood that she was contemplating to reside post-travel earlier than jetting off to Cape City the place a apartment in a ten-unit constructing turned her two-month base-camp for shorter jaunts round Africa.

“I discovered that I like having a house base,” she stated. “I simply love the concept that I did not must schlep every little thing. I might simply take a small bag and depart my stuff.”

Netzley added that she was capable of get by with bringing about half the quantity of stuff to Africa that she had introduced along with her to Mexico.

And though she wasn’t protecting an in depth eye on her finances, the buying energy of the US greenback abroad meant that she was successfully dwelling at an analogous or decrease month-to-month price to what she would have paid in hire and bills had she merely stayed in LA.

On her method again to the US in December, she handed by means of Uganda and went on a gorilla trek that she stated was the “absolute pinnacle” of the six-month journey.

Now again in Kansas Metropolis on the similar Airbnb host she stayed with in August, Netzley says she’s “at a crossroads” making an attempt to find out how she will proceed to assist her future travels, together with launching a brand new enterprise thought.

Earlier than she had set out within the first place, she had determined to not turn into connected to the inheritance cash from her father, and now she’s decided to not let this new enterprise take over an excessive amount of of her life.

“I’ve found on this journey — and on this yr — that there is a lot pleasure on the market,” Netzley stated.” I might by no means hand over that for cash, ever.”