Online Apartment Rental for Vacation

The other day when I was browsing my regularly visited websites onestep4ward.com and solo traveler blog, I stumbled upon only-apartments website that offers service to book apartments online!

The premise is actually promising. Instead of being stuck in a small and less facility hotel room, we can rent a whole apartment/studio instead, complete with working kitchen (for some apartments), or we could just say, it's like having a fully-functional "home" overseas! And the user interface is simple and easy to use: enter the dates, choose the city, and voila! It will list down all available apartments to rent in the destination city.

This option might be good for travelers who intend to stay in one place for some time, so that they could immerse into the life of the local people, getting to know the city, or simply put, be part of the locals. This is actually something I dream to do, being in a new place and experience the life of the locals without actually "living" there. And so I tried to search my next destination for a vacation, which is Japan, but unfortunately, there aren't many available apartments in Tokyo.

I must say that only-apartments mostly caters the needs of travelers who are planning to go to Europe, seeing that there are a long list of cities/towns in Europe compared to other continents. So fret not, if you are planning to go to Europe, you might want to take a look at this website.

Then today, a friend of mine shared a link to another website that offer a similar service as only-apartments, only that this time, I manage to find more options for Asia cities - including Seoul (there's no option for Seoul in only-apartments). The website is airbnb, and how to use it is very similar to only-apartments, just enter the dates and the destination city, then the website will list down all available apartments.

One feature offered by airbnb that only-apartments doesn't have is that it allows to search without entering the dates - which is useful for travelers who are still in the planning stage and have not yet booked the tickets, or for the kind of people who always crave for traveling although the time and budget may not permit so all they can do is just browse around and search for the best deal even though there's no definite vacation plan in the future what-so-ever (read: me -_-).

So for anyone looking for apartments to rent in Asia, you may want to check airbnb, but if your next travel destination is Europe, you may want to take a look at only-apartments too.

I have no affiliation to neither of the websites, and I have never booked from them either (though I may in the future), so do check for any review of those website in the internet before you decide to book - this goes for any website where you are planning to spend money on actually.

Safe travel!