The secret formula to booking Airbnb that never fails

Greg Sheridan shares his tips for using Airbnb. Pictured: A view of Prague from a bed and breakfast

I am a late adaptor to all technologies and trends. I tend to get a new idea just when it’s being phased out. Did I ever tell you how much I like blackberries? It’s the Irish disposition for lost causes, boarding the last train for an evacuating city.

I have recently discovered Airbnb. For years I was resolutely against this service. I preferred hotels, or regular B and Bs, where I could talk to the manager if something went wrong. But I’ve just completed three weeks holiday at successive Airbnb apartments in Dubrovnik, Prague and Vienna. Guess what I discovered? Airbnb is a lot cheaper than hotels. I’ve also worked out an infallible winning formula which has now passed rigorous field tests and double blind surveys 100 per cent of the time – that is to say, three times out of three.

I offer this formula with all care and no responsibility. If it doesn’t work for you, bad luck. It worked for me.

• Choose a Superhost. This has a lot of benefits. It narrows down the excessive choice you get online. Superhosts, so I believe, earn their status from good guest reviews so it’s likely they’ll be fair dealers who respond to queries or problems.

• Read the reviews very thoroughly. A property may be great overall but have some particular quality you’d find annoying, say a noisy tram that passes by all night. Most people don’t mind so it doesn’t lead to generally poor reviews, but someone will have mentioned it in a review and if it’s the sort of thing you don’t like, you can check the next option.

• Pay a fraction above the average for the area you’re looking at. A Superhost confident of charging a touch more is probably renting a pretty good property.

• Pay attention to location. If you’re young and hip and groovy, as I once pretended to think of myself several millennia ago, you want to be in the middle of the action. I prefer somewhere a kilometre or two away from the bright lights. It’s an invigorating walk every morning, it gives you an incentive to master local trams, and it’s quiet. And you’ll get more apartment for your money. You’ll also feel more like you’re living in a real community.

Airbnb hosts are poor at revealing the dimensions of their apartments online. Internet photos can be deceptive. You have to be cunning in working out the real size of a place.

In Dubrovnik we had the cutest possible apartment, small but with a lovely balcony with superb view where we breakfasted every day. We were just 1.5km from the old town but that meant we could take or leave the tourists. We also got the great exercise of walking up about a million steps every day. Our hosts, a couple our own age, became friends.

In Prague we had an impossibly glamorous apartment with river views. It was a wrench to leave. In Vienna, as you’d expect, everything was orderly and correct.

In three weeks we had only one misadventure. Coming home one night in Dubrovnik we found a strange man trying to open our front door. Yes, said my wife, can I help you? What are you doing mate, this is our apartment, I declaimed, full of Aussie swagger.

The poor old guy, about a hundred years old, was perplexed. We’d become so accustomed to walking upstairs that we’d unknowingly trudged up an extra floor and confronted this good and innocent citizen as he was trying to open his own front door.

Embarrassment. Apology. Forgiveness.

Such is life.