The Association of Scotland’s Self Caterers (ASSC) has launched a well-designed website, Embrace Scotland, to link travellers with more than 2,500 vacation rental properties. You can search by region, number of people, property type (apartment, lodge, cottage and so on) and star rating (currently assigned by VisitScotland). Check boxes allow you to specify that you’re […]

The vacation home rental industry must be coming of age: it’s poised to get its own reality show. PineRidge Film and Television (producers of Samantha Brown’s show “Passport to Europe,” among other programs) and Discover Vacation Homes have created a promo video for a proposed new show, “Living Large on Vacation.” According to Discover Vacation Homes […]

Amsterdam-based Like-a-Local has added an insider’s tour of New York’s indie music scene. It doesn’t come at a typical indie price–42 euros per person, plus a 15-euro reservation fee–but Manhattan isn’t cheap. Also, if the quality matches that of a design tour I took with Like-a-Local in Amsterdam this spring, it will be well worth […]

Maybe it’s the floundering economy. Perhaps it’s Australians’ famous gregariousness. Whatever the reason, it seems Aussies are getting more interested in house swapping. At least one Down Under swapping organization is seeing a spike in registrations. Homelink Australia, one of the country’s oldest swapping networks, posted a 14-percent rise in registrations in September and is […]

Manhattan is much more than the Empire State Building and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, fun as those are. It’s also home, as it has been for centuries, to a miniature United Nations of immigrants. If you have a sweet tooth and a curiosity about NYC off the tourist trail, check out the desserts at […]

If you’ve rented a self-catering holiday home before, you may realize that not all villas are right for all travelling parties. Some homes simply aren’t large enough to accommodate groups of a dozen or more. In other cases, you want a bit more privacy than one home can provide. Perhaps you’d like to separate the […]

I recently stumbled across a charming blog written by an American college student spending this semester studying at the University of Ghana. Designed mainly to keep her family and friends abreast of her adventures, it’s an unvarnished glimpse of a country few North Americans have the chance to visit. She has a good eye for […]

Tourism market research company PhoCusWright has released some preliminary figures from its forthcoming report, Vacation Rental Marketplace: Poised for Change. According to the study, vacation rentals are a US$24.3-billion industry worldwide, with online rentals accounting for about 12 percent of those revenues. Given the plethora of online vacation rental sites, I’m surprised the figure for […]

Moments after posting my blurb about the Wall Street Journal‘s recent article on home swapping, I learned that Budget Travel and CNN had beaten the WSJ to the punch with a chatty article by Joanna Goddard on her experiences swapping her Manhattan apartment for digs in Paris, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The details of […]

In a recent posting, blogger Michele Morris lovingly describes–with yummy photos–her experience at a cooking school called The Awaiting Table in Lecce, Italy. The most intriguing aspect of the school, from my perspective, is that the students get to share their cooking efforts with the school’s neighbours. The Awaiting Table even touts its “meet the […]