Editors’ Airbnb Wish List

As a travel editor, a big part of my job is scouting out a destination’s best restaurants, boutiques, dive bars, antique stores, accommodations… you-name-its. Work of this kind, inevitably, leads to a fair amount of wanderlust and—I readily admit—daydreaming.

I’ll start my project with good intentions, but as my research leads me from one website to a book to a phone call and then back to another website, my thoughts start to shift from the professional “Oh, this would be great for the article!” to the more personal “I need to go there right now!”

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In the past few months, house- and apartment-rental sites, like HomeAway, FlipKey, and Airbnb were the main culprits of my distraction—so much so that I was inspired to write a story about such travel options for our May 2014 issue. (It’ll be on newsstands April 18.)

But for better or worse, writing that article did nothing to abate my fascination with these sites; I continue to peruse each on a regular basis, for work purposes, yes, but also to plan my own adventures—or just dream about them!

With that in mind, we at Sunset teamed up with Airbnb to create a “Wish List” of rentals, in destinations across the West, from the quirky (a restored 1920s sheep wagon on a ranch in Wyoming) to the classically cool (an exposed-brick-wall loft in downtown Denver). To see more editors’ picks, check out our Wish List here.

If some of the apartment- and house-rentals on Airbnb look familiar, it might be because you’ve seen those very homes featured in the pages of Sunset! To find a collection of those, head here.

Happy armchair traveling!