7 ms·

Hotels are usually easier and cheaper EXCEPT if you actually want a whole house. Traveling with kids and a babysitter requires like 3 rooms and having a kitche

Hotels are usually easier and cheaper EXCEPT if you actually want a whole house. Traveling with kids and a babysitter requires like 3 rooms and having a kitchen is a huge plus. So for that, its really good.

msh 5y ago
Travel with a baby sitter?!?!? How big can that market be?
- staticautomatic 5y ago
  Probably bigger than you’d think. My family occasionally traveled with a babysitter when I was a kid and at the time we were thoroughly middle class.
  - Judgmentality 5y ago
    What is your definition of middle class?
    - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
      Probably not American middle class ;-) . In Asia it is (was?) common to have a driver, servant and yes even a dedicated babysitter for the kids. To respond to the people who are going to say that's just exploitation of the poor, well, your Uber driver and your food delivery person would like to talk you, as well as the people who were poorly paid to mine the rare minerals found on your fancy phone.
  - aaomidi 5y ago
    Surprise! You were not middle class.
    - lupire 5y ago
      Eh, an au pair from overseas provides childcare in exchange for rent and food, and comes on vacations. If you aren't a stay at home parent, you can use some of the money you earn at your job to pay for child care.
      - sidlls 5y ago
        Having an au pair puts one firmly above the middle-class. Not necessarily rich, but certainly flirting with "affluent."
        ghaff 5y ago
        Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people in the US consider middle class to be anything between barely putting food on the table and flying around in private jets. It's probably fair that people hiring au pairs/nannies are on at least the upper range of middle class income but that doesn't make them "rich" in typical American parlance.
        nec4b 5y ago
        Au pair can be cheaper that the day care. Middle class people from much poorer countries than the USA have au pairs.
    - staticautomatic 5y ago
      What’s really surprising is that a stranger on the internet is an authority on my childhood and family. What else can you tell me?
      - bad_good_guy 5y ago
        You have to be in some serious denial or have complete lack of perspective to think having the means to bring a babysitter on your holidays is "solidly middle class"
        pc86 5y ago
        There are literally dozens of comments elsewhere in this thread about how an au pair can be extremely affordable, borderline cheap. Feel free to read some of them, it's actually pretty enlightening if you're able to get over your unwarranted knee-jerk anger :)
        aaomidi 5y ago
        Don't think anyone expressed "anger" so I'm not sure why you had the knee jerk reaction to assume that.
        staticautomatic 5y ago
        You're entitled to believe that bringing a cheap babysitter on a family road trip a few times means we couldn't possibly have been middle class, but the assertion that I'm in denial or have a complete lack of perspective is uncalled for.
- rhacker 5y ago
  Not as big as the market of traveling with maid. edit also sounds like the title of a xhampster video.
- rhino369 5y ago
  Doesn't have to be a 100k/year governess. Lot of families bring grandma/grandpa or a niece along to help with the kids.
  - cannabis_sam 5y ago
    Who would describe their parents (the kid’s grandparents) as “babysitters” in this context? (It’s a genuine question, might be some cultural differences at play, but in my family this would be a family trip with a grandparent, not a family trip with a “babysitter”.)
    - rhino369 5y ago
      I was trying to speak generically to cover all options. Friends of mine travel with an au pair AND grandparents.
      - cannabis_sam 5y ago
        > Friends of mine travel with an au pair AND grandparents. Sounds absolutely reasonable! Do they differentiate in any way between the grandparents and the au pairs, or do they, for instance, also share accommodations? Also how do you separate the grandparents from the au pairs in the family photos???
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        > Friends of mine travel with an au pair AND grandparents. Surely you understand this is completely out the reach of almost everyone in society?
        jnwatson 5y ago
        Except for the target demo of this website.
        chrisseaton 5y ago
        Even a line Googler doesn't normally have domestic staff do they? Or am I completely out of touch with how most of tech live?
- foobiekr 5y ago
  In the bay area, I actually know a very surprising (shocking, to me) number of people with au pairs. It would never even have occurred to me that people would do this. But it’s common at least as far as I can tell, among people in their late 40s who’ve made a modest amount of money. I still can’t get my head around it. These are people who have a relatively low asset base (owned house, 401ks, maybe modest taxable brokerage account), high combined salaries and high burn rate. Also an unusual frequency of divorces, some of them explicitly tied to the presence of an attractive young woman in the home.
  - gpapilion 5y ago
    My sister has an au pair in the bay area, and she pays less for child care than I do at a in-home daycare. The au-pair industry is a bit of a scam, bringing labor from low cost countries. They are not paid the same as a nanny or day care worker, often it is half of full time daycare. The idea is that you're providing room and board, and thats part of their comp. Also the quality of care you get from an au pair is mixed, often its a bit like having a teenager care for you child. One acquaintance had a indoor play place call the au pair provider since they were concerned with how the au pair treated the children.
    - dzhiurgis 5y ago
      Not much of a scam when there's millions in second or third world country dreaming of such work experience. We forget safe home + food security is far from given in many places. Let alone other perks of Bay Area.
      - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
        Honestly not even 2nd or 3rd world, I know a few Western European au-pairs who did a year in the US.
chrisseaton 5y ago
> Traveling with kids and a babysitter I'm pretty sure you already know that travelling with personal domestic staff is a vanishingly tiny niche requirement of the super-rich.
- runako 5y ago
  This is a strong statement. In much of the US, an au pair can cost less than full-time professional daycare. Similarly, many US households have access to a car. Most American vacations are road trips. Getting a 3 bedroom vacation rental instead of a 2 bedroom and driving the au pair up in the back seat is not solely the province of the super-rich. [For the record: I do not have an au pair, nor have I taken a babysitter on a trip.]
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
    I knew a girl on tinder who did that. It's really neat and definitely takes away the "very rich" thing. I mean 1 extra plane ticket is expensive, but not prohibitively so if you want a babysitter that also gets a free ride to a new place.
- rhino369 5y ago
  In my case, its just my father in law who lives with me and watches my daughter. But many upper middle class people have nannies, au-pairs, etc. Upper middle class isn't very large, but they are certainly the demo for an AirBnB in a tourist destination. Average people don't really travel much. Even if you don't have a babysitter, having a kitchen to feed your kids yourself is huge.
  - piva00 5y ago
    > Average people don't really travel much Maybe in the US, here in Europe I feel it's absurdly common for even the low middle class to travel around.
- _nalply 5y ago
  I don't have personal domestic staff but I have the same requirement: somewhere I really can live like at home and cook for myself and my family. In Switzerland this is called «Ferienwohnung», «résidence locative» and «appartemento per le vacanze». Even my parents rented holiday homes when I was a child.
danielyaa5 5y ago
This is true, I usually travel with friends and we’d rather be in the same house then the same hotel. Also there’s more options as far as locations and houses can be a lot more unique than a hotel
grillvogel 5y ago
>Traveling with kids and a babysitter what? i make what i thought was good money but this is absurd to me
- jjeaff 5y ago
  Have you ever priced it out? Probably not as expensive as you think. Like travelling with an extra kid, plus some extra overtime for the baby sitter you would have paid anyway.
  - dzhiurgis 5y ago
    Some random site here in NZ quotes $400-500 per week, say $25k per year which is quite ok. Thing is there's tons of people in their gap year who are willing to come to first world country and experience the rich life (you need to provide accomodation and food IIRC) even if it's pretty middle for us.
pentae 5y ago
I prefer Vrbo for this - unlike Airbnb it's for whole homes only (not rooms in someones house) so thats one less filter you need to select when searching. They also tend to be peoples vacation homes and not created-for-Airbnb investments with spartan cheap furniture and crappy pillows and you can't even find a pair of scissors in the kitchen drawer. The quality of the listings, management, cleaning seems to be much higher And to top it off, their Search function actually treats you like an adult - you can select SORT filters so you're not forced to wade through a bunch of crap listings because Airbnb's lead UX developer hates you and doesn't value your time.
- throwdbaaway 5y ago
  While we are piling on Airbnb, I just discovered like an hour ago that browsing image gallery of houses/apartments on Facebook Group/Marketplace is actually a lot pleasant and smoother than on Airbnb. This can't be possible. Good thing bchesky has stopped taking photographs of the listings, otherwise his skill would just be wasted on his platform.
ipython 5y ago
Sorry for all the hate you're getting from your comment. If you have even a slightly larger family - say five - good luck trying to find hotel rooms that have occupancy greater than four. Even LARGE hotel rooms inexplicably are limited to occupancy of four or below. Think rooms 800 sq ft and larger... it's ridiculous. I have had luck with booking.com, I always found airbnb to be a bit too 'trendy', whereas the apartments I've rented from booking.com have been solid, as represented rentals with a minimum of hassle and expense.

msh 5y ago

Travel with a baby sitter?!?!? How big can that market be?

staticautomatic 5y ago
Probably bigger than you’d think. My family occasionally traveled with a babysitter when I was a kid and at the time we were thoroughly middle class.
- Judgmentality 5y ago
  What is your definition of middle class?
  - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
    Probably not American middle class ;-) . In Asia it is (was?) common to have a driver, servant and yes even a dedicated babysitter for the kids. To respond to the people who are going to say that's just exploitation of the poor, well, your Uber driver and your food delivery person would like to talk you, as well as the people who were poorly paid to mine the rare minerals found on your fancy phone.
- aaomidi 5y ago
  Surprise! You were not middle class.
  - lupire 5y ago
    Eh, an au pair from overseas provides childcare in exchange for rent and food, and comes on vacations. If you aren't a stay at home parent, you can use some of the money you earn at your job to pay for child care.
    - sidlls 5y ago
      Having an au pair puts one firmly above the middle-class. Not necessarily rich, but certainly flirting with "affluent."
      - ghaff 5y ago
        Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people in the US consider middle class to be anything between barely putting food on the table and flying around in private jets. It's probably fair that people hiring au pairs/nannies are on at least the upper range of middle class income but that doesn't make them "rich" in typical American parlance.
      - nec4b 5y ago
        Au pair can be cheaper that the day care. Middle class people from much poorer countries than the USA have au pairs.
  - staticautomatic 5y ago
    What’s really surprising is that a stranger on the internet is an authority on my childhood and family. What else can you tell me?
    - bad_good_guy 5y ago
      You have to be in some serious denial or have complete lack of perspective to think having the means to bring a babysitter on your holidays is "solidly middle class"
      - pc86 5y ago
        There are literally dozens of comments elsewhere in this thread about how an au pair can be extremely affordable, borderline cheap. Feel free to read some of them, it's actually pretty enlightening if you're able to get over your unwarranted knee-jerk anger :)
        aaomidi 5y ago
        Don't think anyone expressed "anger" so I'm not sure why you had the knee jerk reaction to assume that.
      - staticautomatic 5y ago
        You're entitled to believe that bringing a cheap babysitter on a family road trip a few times means we couldn't possibly have been middle class, but the assertion that I'm in denial or have a complete lack of perspective is uncalled for.
rhacker 5y ago
Not as big as the market of traveling with maid. edit also sounds like the title of a xhampster video.
rhino369 5y ago
Doesn't have to be a 100k/year governess. Lot of families bring grandma/grandpa or a niece along to help with the kids.
- cannabis_sam 5y ago
  Who would describe their parents (the kid’s grandparents) as “babysitters” in this context? (It’s a genuine question, might be some cultural differences at play, but in my family this would be a family trip with a grandparent, not a family trip with a “babysitter”.)
  - rhino369 5y ago
    I was trying to speak generically to cover all options. Friends of mine travel with an au pair AND grandparents.
    - cannabis_sam 5y ago
      > Friends of mine travel with an au pair AND grandparents. Sounds absolutely reasonable! Do they differentiate in any way between the grandparents and the au pairs, or do they, for instance, also share accommodations? Also how do you separate the grandparents from the au pairs in the family photos???
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      > Friends of mine travel with an au pair AND grandparents. Surely you understand this is completely out the reach of almost everyone in society?
      - jnwatson 5y ago
        Except for the target demo of this website.
        chrisseaton 5y ago
        Even a line Googler doesn't normally have domestic staff do they? Or am I completely out of touch with how most of tech live?
foobiekr 5y ago
In the bay area, I actually know a very surprising (shocking, to me) number of people with au pairs. It would never even have occurred to me that people would do this. But it’s common at least as far as I can tell, among people in their late 40s who’ve made a modest amount of money. I still can’t get my head around it. These are people who have a relatively low asset base (owned house, 401ks, maybe modest taxable brokerage account), high combined salaries and high burn rate. Also an unusual frequency of divorces, some of them explicitly tied to the presence of an attractive young woman in the home.
- gpapilion 5y ago
  My sister has an au pair in the bay area, and she pays less for child care than I do at a in-home daycare. The au-pair industry is a bit of a scam, bringing labor from low cost countries. They are not paid the same as a nanny or day care worker, often it is half of full time daycare. The idea is that you're providing room and board, and thats part of their comp. Also the quality of care you get from an au pair is mixed, often its a bit like having a teenager care for you child. One acquaintance had a indoor play place call the au pair provider since they were concerned with how the au pair treated the children.
  - dzhiurgis 5y ago
    Not much of a scam when there's millions in second or third world country dreaming of such work experience. We forget safe home + food security is far from given in many places. Let alone other perks of Bay Area.
    - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
      Honestly not even 2nd or 3rd world, I know a few Western European au-pairs who did a year in the US.

chrisseaton 5y ago

> Traveling with kids and a babysitter I'm pretty sure you already know that travelling with personal domestic staff is a vanishingly tiny niche requirement of the super-rich.

runako 5y ago
This is a strong statement. In much of the US, an au pair can cost less than full-time professional daycare. Similarly, many US households have access to a car. Most American vacations are road trips. Getting a 3 bedroom vacation rental instead of a 2 bedroom and driving the au pair up in the back seat is not solely the province of the super-rich. [For the record: I do not have an au pair, nor have I taken a babysitter on a trip.]
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  I knew a girl on tinder who did that. It's really neat and definitely takes away the "very rich" thing. I mean 1 extra plane ticket is expensive, but not prohibitively so if you want a babysitter that also gets a free ride to a new place.
rhino369 5y ago
In my case, its just my father in law who lives with me and watches my daughter. But many upper middle class people have nannies, au-pairs, etc. Upper middle class isn't very large, but they are certainly the demo for an AirBnB in a tourist destination. Average people don't really travel much. Even if you don't have a babysitter, having a kitchen to feed your kids yourself is huge.
- piva00 5y ago
  > Average people don't really travel much Maybe in the US, here in Europe I feel it's absurdly common for even the low middle class to travel around.
_nalply 5y ago
I don't have personal domestic staff but I have the same requirement: somewhere I really can live like at home and cook for myself and my family. In Switzerland this is called «Ferienwohnung», «résidence locative» and «appartemento per le vacanze». Even my parents rented holiday homes when I was a child.

danielyaa5 5y ago

This is true, I usually travel with friends and we’d rather be in the same house then the same hotel. Also there’s more options as far as locations and houses can be a lot more unique than a hotel

grillvogel 5y ago

>Traveling with kids and a babysitter what? i make what i thought was good money but this is absurd to me

jjeaff 5y ago
Have you ever priced it out? Probably not as expensive as you think. Like travelling with an extra kid, plus some extra overtime for the baby sitter you would have paid anyway.
- dzhiurgis 5y ago
  Some random site here in NZ quotes $400-500 per week, say $25k per year which is quite ok. Thing is there's tons of people in their gap year who are willing to come to first world country and experience the rich life (you need to provide accomodation and food IIRC) even if it's pretty middle for us.

pentae 5y ago

I prefer Vrbo for this - unlike Airbnb it's for whole homes only (not rooms in someones house) so thats one less filter you need to select when searching. They also tend to be peoples vacation homes and not created-for-Airbnb investments with spartan cheap furniture and crappy pillows and you can't even find a pair of scissors in the kitchen drawer. The quality of the listings, management, cleaning seems to be much higher And to top it off, their Search function actually treats you like an adult - you can select SORT filters so you're not forced to wade through a bunch of crap listings because Airbnb's lead UX developer hates you and doesn't value your time.

throwdbaaway 5y ago
While we are piling on Airbnb, I just discovered like an hour ago that browsing image gallery of houses/apartments on Facebook Group/Marketplace is actually a lot pleasant and smoother than on Airbnb. This can't be possible. Good thing bchesky has stopped taking photographs of the listings, otherwise his skill would just be wasted on his platform.

ipython 5y ago

Sorry for all the hate you're getting from your comment. If you have even a slightly larger family - say five - good luck trying to find hotel rooms that have occupancy greater than four. Even LARGE hotel rooms inexplicably are limited to occupancy of four or below. Think rooms 800 sq ft and larger... it's ridiculous. I have had luck with booking.com, I always found airbnb to be a bit too 'trendy', whereas the apartments I've rented from booking.com have been solid, as represented rentals with a minimum of hassle and expense.