Airbnb Addict

If you’re new to Airbnb be prepared to become addicted! In the past you were forced to stay in hotels when you traveled, and hotels can be great, if you’re going away for work that is. If you’re going away with family or a group of friends, there’s nothing more convenient and fun than being able to share a kitchen and a comfy living room couch together. Gone are the days where everyone gets their own room and has to call each other to coordinate what time to meet in the lobby!

Waseem and I used to stay in little boutique hotels when we traveled. The smaller the hotel the better in our opinion because we enjoyed feeling like actual people instead of just being numbers. When you stay at a small hotel you’re treated more like a friend or even family sometimes. Big hotels barely know you’re staying there. How many times did you walk into the lobby of the Marriott let’s say to use the bathroom and think, I wonder if anyone will notice I don’t have a room here haha (and of course that never happens)

 

(Airbnbs we stayed at in Long Island, NY – Achrafieh, Beirut and Bali, Indonesia)

Airbnb has been around since 2008 believe it or not. It took Waseem and I a few years to get comfortable with the idea (we stayed at our first Airbnb in 2014), but once we discovered how much we loved staying in someones home in a city we’d never visited before, we were hooked! Since our first apartment in Berlin, we’ve since stayed in places all over the world thanks to this amazing company! I believe Airbnb has given people the flexibility to see more of the world through the eyes of a local as well as offer lots more variety in the price you can pay per night while traveling.

 

(Airbnbs we stayed at in Canggu, Bali – Sanur, Bali and Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

One of the best parts of staying in an Airbnb is the fact that you can really find some unique homes to enjoy, which ultimately adds so much to your travel experience! You may not know this, but you will enjoy a city a lot more if you’re staying in a home that is loved and cared for, than if you were staying in a typical hotel room with a minibar and a bed. With the number of places to rent on Airbnb, it’s sometimes even hard to choose! It can take me weeks to decide where we want to spend our time, and we’ve almost always gone away and stayed in several homes in the same city just to be able to get a few nights in each!

Thanks to Airbnb we’ve stayed in several houseboats in Amsterdam, a tiny rooftop apartment in Beirut, a cozy little hideaway spot with a huge glass skylight in Berlin, an unbelievable house on a cliff overlooking the Indian ocean in Bali, a cute tiny renovated studio in Chicago, a very traditional apartment in Vietnam and a couple places high up in the high-rises of Dubai. It really is amazing!

 

(Airbnbs we stayed at in Nusa Dua, Bali – Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Long Island, NY)

If you’ve never stayed at an Airbnb before, we highly recommend giving it a try! And if you’re feeling intimidated by it, I’m more than happy to give you a hand finding the perfect place. Feel free to send me a DM on Instagram or a comment down below.

---

If you enjoyed this post and would like to know a bit more about why we decided to do a bunch of traveling as a family, click here.

Why Did We Decide to Travel?

Waseem and I have loved travel for pretty much forever. We each grew up in families that moved around a lot and enjoyed spending summers abroad. To us, it had become more normal to be on the move than it was to stay put in one place for more than about 3 months at a time.

Soon after we first got married in Upstate NY, we moved back home to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia with the mindset that settling down there and working for a few years would help us save up some money to start our lives together. After living and working in Saudi Arabia for three years, we decided it wasn’t really the best fit for us. As a labor and delivery nurse working in one of the biggest hospitals in the city, the large workload due to under-staffing, and the lack of appreciation for nurses slowly started to drain me. Waseem had also been working for a non-profit at the time that had stopped paying it’s staff for months, and didn’t look like it was going to anytime soon.

In the meantime we were at the beginning of starting our own little business in our kitchen making beard oil. Waseem started growing a beard at the time and was having a hard time finding the right oils to keep it moisturized and well kempt. When we did our research and found that there really was a gap in the market, and beard oil was hard to come by in one of the hairiest countries known to man, we decided to give it a try and make our own. We’re going on three years now, and we can’t imagine our life any other way. It’s not easy owning and operating our own business, but it sure does give us the flexibility we need to travel (and we loooove to travel!). We’re lucky enough that we can be pretty much anywhere and still be able to get things done for Diggn’ It as long as we have some internet.

Meanwhile we decided to start our family, and our little guy Zayd came along June 2017! He was really the one who gave us the push to do some traveling. No better time than the present to seize the moment and take Zayd on some adventures before having to be more attached to a single location when school starts one day. Bali it was! Since we’d visited Bali a couple years ago and loved it, we knew that was where we had to go. So we packed our bags and headed to the beautiful Island to enjoy more quality time together and just slow down our fast paced lives being in cities and what an adventure it was!

---

If you’re interested in our favorite family travel tips, click here.