on the road less travelled in Ireland and france

Are you having trouble finding a place to stay in France? This is how we solved the situation.

By Conal Healy

Okay, you’ve found a great place to stay in France. It ticks all the boxes. The next job is to contact the host and make the booking. (Some hosts allow for automatic booking. Other hosts want to vet who they want to stay at the accommodation.)

A few times – while trying to book places in France – our application to stay was rejected. There are many reasons why an Airbnb host would turn down potential guests.

It is within their rights to refuse. There might have been another booking from another holiday website, they might have check your Airbnb profile and decided they don’t like you.

Another reason could be that you used English to introduce yourself. Some Airbnb hosts don’t speak, or understand, English so a booking could be too much hassle for them. They might have had trouble with English-speaking guests before … so again, too much hassle.

This happened to us a few times. It was frustrating to see the accommodation still being Available … despite the fact that the owners telling us the rooms had been booked already.

So we tried a different approach.

We wrote a brief introductory message, it explained who we are (also mentioning how we had European Union/Australian passport holders), how long we were staying and what we hoped to see on our visit.

Then we ran the message through Google Translate and used the French version to send as an email to the Airbnb host on France.

We found using French helped reduce some of the cultural differences … and we got no refusals after adopting this measure.

Getting knocked back? Say it in French. Merci!