Opening Lines

IT’S an unassuming little abbreviation: B&B. For some of you, it might be the first ampersand (&) you saw written down.

What does the word ‘B&B’ evoke? A mighty sleep after a day out walking the hills? Stumbling in after a wedding, fluthered, trying not to knock over a giant vase on the hall stand as you struggling to remember whether it is right or left at the top of the stairs? Woken up by the smell of someone cooking sausages? There was a time when the B&B was the only accommodation in some areas. Then we started building hotels, rather than pay tax, and soon people found you could have low-priced grandeur next to a roundabout. There were Jacuzzis everywhere and hydrotherapy and wellness spaces and every purple-painted room with a fern and a rolled-up towel was a spa. Even the word ‘B&B’ seemed outmoded.

Then, the internet intervened. The word ‘airbnb’ may be filtering through into your consciousness. You thought you had misheard a Cork or Kerry person saying “Yerra a B&B”. Then, someone arrived back from holidays telling all and sundry how they stayed in “a huge apartment, PRACTICALLY IN THE SAGRADA FAMILIA, BERNIE,” and your interest was piqued.

Airbnb is a website that matches supply and demand for accommodation. If you’ve a spare room, you can rent it out and there is bound to be someone who wants to stay in it. If you are looking to stay in a city where hotels are expensive, there is bound to be someone with a room. Although both parties are strangers, you are sort of protected by the testimonials on the site. Both renter and host want good reviews, so there seems to be a relatively small risk that your host sleeps in the wardrobe and keeps his mother’s teeth in the fridge 30 years after she passed away.

There are other providers of this type of service, but airbnb may be the one you hear of first. Just like there were other search engines and other social networks for snooping on strangers’ wedding photos, but Google and Facebook are ubiquitous now.

Unlike the original B&B, there is no ampersand and no compunction for the airbnb host to cook‘a few sausages, rashers, bitta puddin’, we can do beans too, no bother and as much toast as you want’. But airbnb does resemble its traditional relative in one way. You are in someone’s house. It’s like staying with a second-cousin you’ve never met. You know nothing about them, but you are bound by the code of conduct that if word gets back about your carry-on, you’ll never live it down.

Staying with a local adds flavour to the holiday and there is an awkward ballet as you try to make conversation on the first morning in the kitchen, while one of you is holding the Flora and the other is trying to get at the dishwasher. But more often than not, the host is just like the B&B owner — friendly and interested. But they don’t make you breakfast. If you want that, you need the ampersand.