I have a long list of questions that I send to potential Airbnb hosts before we book a stay. A past blog post, Finding the Perfect Airbnb, from almost a year and a half ago first referenced it. But it has grown considerably since then!

Over many years of using Airbnb we’ve learned that reviews can be the most important part of choosing where to stay. A picture is worth a thousand words—and pictures on Airbnb are very important—but if you travel enough you learn that there are ways to mislead with pictures just as easily as with words. Previous visitors are where the real gold lies in figuring out what it will really be like when you stay someplace.

If you’re someone who likes to stay active and be at least a little fit, traveling can throw a big kink into your plans. When you travel full-time, especially if you’re moving to a new place every month or two, it’s challenging to build and maintain a fitness routine…

The logistics of travel planning take up more time than you would expect. On the one hand, the stakes for choosing your Airbnb as a perpetual nomad are low, because it's temporary and you’ll only be there for a few weeks to a couple of months. On the other hand, the stakes are high because this is where you’ll be living! When you're learning a new city, dealing with language and cultural barriers, finding new gyms, grocery stores, and more, you really want a place that is comfortable and well suited to your needs. So how do we choose a place to stay?

Our original itinerary had us leaving Barcelona for Istanbul on April 22nd. However, our flight was canceled and Turkey announced that no one who has been in Spain in the prior fourteen days will even be allowed into the country. Our Airbnb host in Istanbul was kind enough to give us a full refund but our plans were screwed up because we were booked to fly on United from Istanbul to Denver on May 24th. But it's not a problem, because United has generously offered to allow us to change our flight with no change fee, right?

Most of the time when we travel overseas we don’t rent a car. Cape Town, though, is one of those places where we know there’s enough stuff not easily accessible by public transportation, so we are renting a car there. Of course, we've done a lot of travel in the US, where you almost always need to rent a car, and much of that travel is to Denver, where rental cars are notoriously expensive. Sometimes the car rental is the most expensive part of a trip—more than the airfare or Airbnb! So I thought I would share some of the techniques that I use to try to get the best deal on car rentals.

Safety and security is something that we think about as we plan our destinations and our travel logistics. Although, it’s probably not as big of a factor as one might think. In our experience, most places are about as safe as any other (there are definitely exceptions) and we take the same precautions we would take if we were just heading to Denver or Tampa or any other major city we’ve lived near. Of course, some cities require better pickpocket awareness and there are scams in touristy areas you have to be aware of (in Hanoi, a scammer tried to pull a shoe repair scam on me).