Slow Travel in Europe with Vacation Rentals

By Pauline Kenny

Renting a vacation house in Italy enables travelers to experience everyday pleasures, such as shopping at local markets and dining, at their own pace.

Slow travelers go to Europe, stay in apartments, cottages, or houses that they rent by the week. Staying in one place, even if just for a week or two, lets you experience a place more intensely because you get involved in the community. You shop for groceries and supplies in the local shops, stop at the same café every morning, see the people in your village or neighborhood each day. My husband and I used to stay in hotels when we traveled to Europe, but once we tried vacation rentals in Switzerland in 1988, we were hooked. Now this is the only way we travel.

Vacation Rentals in Europe

In most European countries, you can rent apartments in towns and on farms and houses in the countryside through agencies or directly from the local owner. The Italians call them “agriturismos”; the Brits call them “self catering apartments”; the French call them “gites”; the Swiss and Germans call them “ferienwohnungen.”

Vacation rentals come equipped with everything you need to live comfortably: sheets, towels, pots and pans, dishes, and cutlery. The house or apartment is cleaned before you arrive. Food is generally not provided, so you will need to shop for basic groceries when you arrive.

Rentals range from very simple apartments on working farms that rent for $500 or less per week to luxury villas that sleep 12 or more and rent for $5,000 or more per week.

Someone checks you in and out and is there for emergencies, but they expect you to be independent. This person may not speak English, so a basic knowledge of the language of the country you are visiting is necessary.

We plan our trips on a Saturday-afternoon to Saturday-morning schedule. From the U.S., we fly into a major city and spend a few days in a hotel, then pick up a rental car and drive to our first vacation rental. Typically we spend a week in southern Tuscany, a week in central Umbria, and a week in Rome, booking a different vacation rental for each week. If you have time, stay more than a week in one place.

Book Well Ahead

Europeans routinely book vacation rentals a year ahead, so some of the best places fill up quickly. Start planning six months to a year before your trip. Most places require a 50 percent deposit at the time of booking with final payment when you arrive or a month or two before.

Use the Web

Before the Web, I found ads for vacation rental agencies in travel magazines and then called the agencies to get their catalogs. Or I contacted the tourist office for the region I was interested in and booked through them. But the Web has changed all this. Now I go to Google, search on “vacation rentals Tuscany” and get pages of listings for agencies representing many places, or I have the option to rent directly from the owner.

A Temporary Home

With your own home, you can spread out and settle in, take a day off and relax in your house, and do some cooking with local ingredients. Instead of long day trips to see the “highlights,” you get to know one area very well.

Slow travelers assume that there will be other trips, that they will return to Europe again and again.

PAULINE KENNY and her husband Steve Cohen, a software developer, live in Santa Fe, NM. Pauline is a web designer and runs www.sloweurope.com.